In order to understand Jordan Lyles’ two-year, $17 million contract with the Kansas City Royals, you need to understand this: Baseball, unlike other sports, is not governed by a clock.

A rosy, romantic articulation of this fact has been a cliché within the sport for generations. Other, newer, cruder sports are bound by the oppressive temporal strictures that make our lives into a brutal struggle, but not baseball. Baseball proceeds at whatever pace the game requires, aloof from the petty concerns of time. This distance allows grown men to revert to gleeful childhood. The crack of the bat, the smell of fresh-cut grass, and so on.

The truth is somewhat more sinister. Because baseball operates outside the bounds of time, there is no escape unless the game is completed. Mere desultory attendance will not suffice — progress must be made or the game will not allow you to leave. You cannot take a knee, or rag the puck, or kick the ball really high to kill the clock. There is no clock. Baseball is like Jumanji. Complete the objective or you will be trapped within the game until you die. Read the rest of this entry »

They say murderers always return to the scene of the crime. Joseph Nicholas Gallo, murderer of baseballs, is the latest. Gallo’s one-year, $11 million deal with the Minnesota Twins brings the longtime Rangers slugger back to Target Field, site of the event that brought him to national baseball consciousness.

The weekend of the 2014 Futures Game, with the national scouting and media glitterati in attendance, Gallo put on a positively pyrotechnic batting practice display. For a good time, try Googling “Joey Gallo Truck Futures Game.” Gallo hit 15 home runs in BP that afternoon, the most of all the prospects on show. Six of those dingers went to the upper deck in right center field, and the gigantic 20-year-old put another through the windshield of a pickup truck Chevrolet had parked on the right field concourse as part of a marketing display.

Then he backed it up in the game, taking Astros prospect Michael Feliz deep — at least 419 feet — for the eventual game-winning home run. Gallo took home MVP honors for himself.

Read the rest of this entry »

Masataka Yoshida is an extremely cool ballplayer. The 29-year-old has hit .300/.400/.500 six seasons in a row, and despite 20-homer power and plenty of walks, he never strikes out. I’m serious: in 508 Pacific League plate appearances in 2022, Yoshida walked 80 times and struck out just 41 times. That’s a BB% and K% of 15.7% and 8.1%, respectively. He makes Alejandro Kirk look like Dave Kingman. Now, will a 5-foot-8 left fielder be able to keep hitting 20 homers a year on this side of the Pacific? I don’t know, but I’m excited to find out.

Yoshida is, so far, the crown jewel of the offseason for the Red Sox. Between his five-year contract and posting fee, he cost Boston $105.4 million, a significant outlay for any team. If you roll in the posting fee, that’s within rounding distance of the AAV Brandon Nimmo and Kyle Schwarber got in free agency; that indicates Boston views Yoshida as an impact player at his position.

On Thursday, the Red Sox officially announced Yoshida’s signing and added him to the 40-man roster. In order to make room, they designated Jeter Downs for assignment. And suddenly what should have been a joyous day was dampened by the weight of reflection. Read the rest of this entry »

J.P. Feyereisen did not have to wait in DFA limbo for very long.

Just one day after being designated for assignment in order to make way for Zach Eflin on Tampa Bay’s 40-man roster, Feyereisen was traded to the Dodgers. The return is a 25-year-old left-hander named Jeff Belge, who is separated from Greg Holland by Zeeland and North Brabant. (While waiting for Eric Longenhagen’s précis on Belge, I amused myself by thinking of other former Dodgers players whose names are well-suited to puns about Belgium: Brussels Martin, Wallonia Moon, Charleroi Hough, and so on. Jim Ghentile made his major league debut with the Dodgers before being traded to Baltimore.)

Belge stands 6-foot-5, which fits the Rays’ affinity for tall pitchers. (Tampa Bay’s World Series-bound pitching staff in 2020 was taller, on average, than that year’s Houston Rockets.) Longenhagen also pointed out that Belge’s fastball, which sits 93 to 94 mph, has the natural cut/rise action that Tampa Bay tends to seek out. And over the past two seasons, he’s struck out 113 in 75 1/3 minor league innings. Read the rest of this entry »

What’s your dream car? Probably something fast and attention-grabbing, like a Ferrari. Or maybe you want some unusual but beautiful Italian or Japanese classic, so people know you know your stuff. Or maybe a Rolls-Royce, so you can drive around in isolated opulence like the god of luxury millionaires pray to.

Of course, you don’t actually want any of those cars in real life. You couldn’t afford to maintain them. You’d be too nervous to drive them in traffic or park them at the supermarket, lest the paint get damaged. To borrow a line from The Love Bug — which in addition to being one of the great sports films, is a classic San Francisco film — what you want is “cheap, honest transportation.”

The Giants know this. They’ve chased the odd Ferrari, and after losing out on Aaron Judge they’ve finally caught one in Carlos Correa. But their pursuit of pitchers has been more practical. They’ve watched Carlos Rodón walk away (at least for the time being). Instead, they’ve assembled a garage of useful starting pitchers, first by signing Sean Manaea on Sunday, then two days later inking right-hander Ross Stripling to the same contract: two years, $25 million, with an opt-out after this season. Read the rest of this entry »

The Oakland Athletics are in search of a new ballpark, either within Oakland or elsewhere — most likely Las Vegas. If and when that comes to pass, the aging Coliseum will probably be torn down. And here’s where the A’s lose me: They seem to be under the impression that their active players must all be evacuated in the form of being traded to other organizations before the ballpark is destroyed.

The Atlanta Braves were in no hurry to disabuse Oakland of this notion, as they pried catcher Sean Murphy from Oakland’s clutches Monday afternoon as part of a three-team deal with the Milwaukee Brewers. Four weeks ago I wrote about the trade market for Murphy, made expendable in Oakland by the emergence of Shea Langeliers, who came over from the Braves in the Matt Olson trade. Therein, I specifically noted the Braves as a team that should not trade for Murphy, owing to Atlanta’s surfeit of catchers: Travis d’Arnaud and William Contreras.

Sure enough, with Murphy coming in, not one but two catchers are heading out. Contreras is headed north, while third-stringer — and longtime Brewers backup — Manny Piña will go to Oakland. Speedster Esteury Ruiz is also headed down the John Jaha Highway from Milwaukee to Oakland, and no fewer than five pitchers fill out this salad bar of a trade: Freddy Tarnok, Kyle Muller and Royber Salinas from Atlanta to Oakland, Joel Payamps from Oakland to Milwaukee, and Justin Yeager from Atlanta to Milwaukee.

Here’s the entire three-team, nine-player deal in table form, for clarity’s sake.

Nine players makes for a big trade, but nevertheless, let’s go through each name in at least some detail before drawing conclusions. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mets, who had gone some three days since singing a top free agent, went shopping again on Thursday evening. Brandon Nimmo was a sort of Aaron Judge situation-in-miniature: a New York team flirted with losing its best outfielder before realizing it’d be more trouble than it was worth to replace him. Best just to bring him back, even if it meant making him rich beyond the wildest fantasies of avarice.

Nimmo, the no. 9 player overall on our top 50 free agent list and no. 2 outfielder behind Judge, got paid quite a bit more than our projections, which is emerging as something of a theme this offseason. The readers thought he’d make an even $100 million over five years; Ben Clemens had Nimmo penciled in for $110 million over the same time frame. Instead, Nimmo has signed for eight years and $162 million.

To put that number in context: for $162 million, Nimmo could buy this 15-foot-by-25-foot inflatable water slide for every single one of the 578,000-plus residents of his native Wyoming. (Wayfair says two-day shipping is free for a purchase of this size. We shall see.) He’d then have enough left over to pay the $10 million the Mets agreed to pay relief pitcher David Robertson in their second major signing of the evening. And even after that he’d have some $1.2 million left over. Maybe he could spend that on a new garden hose or swim trunks so as to get the most out of the water slide. Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe catching isn’t as demanding and difficult a profession as lumberjacking or deep sea fishing, but it’s hard, man. There aren’t many people out there who can live up to the position’s enormous physical and intellectual demands, fewer still can do all that and hit at a level that registers as more than “automatic out” to opposing pitchers.

Even in the latter reaches of this year’s postseason, guys like Austin Hedges, Yadier Molina, and Martín Maldonado kept getting starts because they were a safe pair of hands behind the plate, even as the outs piled up at a rate that would’ve been unacceptable at any other position. Surefire two-way stars like J.T. Realmuto, Will Smith, and Adley Rutschman are rarer than at any other position, and the ranks of first-division starters swell and wane as a Jose Trevino suddenly learns how to hit, or an Austin Nola’s throwing becomes problematic.

So when a catcher comes along who can hit — like, really hit — that’s a rare thing. Even if the defense isn’t ideal, a catcher with a dangerous bat is worth, well, let’s ask the St. Louis Cardinals. Turns out they think it’s worth the five years and $87.5 million they just gave Willson Contreras. Read the rest of this entry »

No team hates hitting for power as much as the Cleveland Guardians.

Roughly a league-average offense overall, the Guardians ranked near the bottom — and absolute rock bottom among offenses that were worth a damn — in home runs and ISO. You’d hope that such a team would also be particularly good at putting the ball in play, and you’d be right; Cleveland had the highest team contact rate and lowest strikeout rate in baseball. José Ramírez has been the Guardians’ franchise player for several years, and by 2022 the team had basically been built in his image: short guys with high contact rates.

Three Cleveland hitters — Ramírez, Steven Kwan, and Myles Straw — finished in the top 13 in strikeout rate among qualified hitters and were among the 21 hardest hitters to strike out. The team leader in strikeouts was Andrés Giménez, a 5-foot-11 middle infielder who hit .297 with a strikeout rate of just 20.1%. For comparison, the Braves, who won 101 games and scored the third-most runs in baseball, had nine hitters with 300 or more plate appearances last year; every single one of them had a higher strikeout rate than Giménez did.

This is the last team in baseball you’d expect to sink big money into a 260-pound first baseman with a 37-homer season in his recent past, particularly considering the franchise’s famous frugality. Cleveland ran a payroll of just $69 million last year, after all. But Josh Bell isn’t your garden variety big fella. If he were, the Guardians would not have signed him to a two-year, $33 million contract, as Jon Heyman reported Tuesday afternoon. Read the rest of this entry »

Just three days ago, there was gnashing of teeth and rending of garments in the blue-and-orange tinted sectors of the New York metropolitan area. Jacob deGrom, light of the world, oppressor of batters, had taken the money and run to Texas. This was a black eye for the conspicuously moneyed regime of hedge fund billionaire Steve Cohen, who’d promised to do for the Mets what Gulf state sovereign wealth funds are doing for European soccer teams. Instead, he’d been outbid for the best pitcher in baseball, a homegrown superstar the likes of which the Mets hadn’t produced since… is it sacrilegious to say Tom Seaver?

Fear not, because the Mets have secured a hell of a fallback option. On Sunday night, former Met Carlos Baerga announced on Instagram — because sure, why not? “Carlos Baerga’s Instagram” is my favorite Bo Burnham song — that Justin Verlander was signing with the Mets for two years and $86.8 million, with a mutual option for a third year. On Monday morning, ESPN’s leading scoop man, Jeff Passan, reported substantially similar news: Verlander to New York for two years and $86 million, with a vesting option for 2025.

Depending on how you feel about Carlos Rodón, there are either two or three legitimate difference-making no. 1 starters in this year’s free-agent class. (And even a Rodón superfan such as myself will acknowledge that deGrom and Verlander are a step above.) The Mets lost one but gained another. Read the rest of this entry »