Two years ago, things looked to be headed in the right direction for San Diego. True, they were coming off a 91-loss 2011 season as they transitioned out of the Adrian Gonzalez / Heath Bell era, but the signs were at least pointing the right way. Keith Law ranked them as the #1 farm system in baseball, saying “in terms of total future value of players likely to play significant roles in the big leagues, they’re ahead of everyone else,” and “they are well-positioned to compete even with modest major league payrolls during the next five to six years,” thanks in no small part to the rewards reaped from the trades of Gonzalez and Mat Latos. Cameron Maybin had finally shown some of the promise that had made him a centerpiece of the Miguel Cabrera trade by putting up over 4 WAR, and so the Padres gave him a five-year extension. Nick Hundley took a big step forward with a .356 wOBA and 3.3 WAR, so San Diego bought out most of his remaining team control years too.

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Kansas City designated Emilio Bonifacio for assignment over the weekend in order to make room for the return of Bruce Chen, and that’s normally the kind of thing that would fall through the cracks of a baseball news cycle. In Bonifacio’s age-28 season, he put up a .295 OBP between the Blue Jays and the Royals, getting shipped to Kansas City in August for “cash considerations,” which is another way of saying “you deal with him now.” Now he’s been cut loose barely more than a week before camp starts, and when that happens in late January or February, that generally means player number 40 on the 40-man roster just got whacked to clear a spot for someone new. That’s Chaz Roe, or Everett Teaford, or Pedro Figueroa, the previous three guys who were DFA’d across the bigs. I’d wager less than a quarter of you can name all three teams who let them go. These kinds of moves just aren’t all that interesting.

Except that Bonifacio’s DFA is somewhat interesting, because the Royals signed him to a $3.5m deal to avoid arbitration not three weeks ago, and the fact that he’s suddenly gone now when they didn’t just non-tender him earlier this offseason strongly indicates that Chen is taking his budget slot, as well as his roster spot. (That the Royals appear to be calling it a day with a payroll of around $89m-90m, thus forcing them to go with the abysmal Pedro Ciriaco as a backup instead, is another matter entirely for a team with holes that hopes to contend.) Before the Royals signed Omar Infante, there were non-ludicrous discussions to be had about Bonifacio starting 2014 as the team’s starting second baseman, then moving to the super-sub role he’s best suited for if and when the team improved at the position.  Read the rest of this entry »

A year ago, pretty much everyone picked the Nationals to win the NL East. Why not? They’d won 98 games in 2012, and they’d done so without full seasons from Bryce Harper, Stephen Strasburg, or Jayson Werth. They’d done so without a real center fielder, since Rick Ankiel and Roger Bernadina had started 64 games there while Harper was still in the minors or otherwise unavailable, a problem that newcomer Denard Span was intended to fix. They’d also won 98 without Rafael Soriano, a seemingly luxurious addition who had been added to a bullpen that was already solid, and without Dan Haren, who was a risk but had many years of excellent performance behind him and wasn’t being counted on to be more than the fourth starter.

No one wanted to say that the Nationals were going to top 100 wins, but plenty of us thought it. In a division with only one other serious contender, they seemed like a lock. They seemed like the safest bet in the game. Read the rest of this entry »

Oliver Perez has had a pretty fascinating career path, and while I hardly need to bring you through his entire history, it’d be remiss to start an article about him without at least touching on his backstory briefly. Drafted by the Padres, he was shipped to Pittsburgh in the Brian Giles trade, where he put up one shining age-22 season — 4.4 WAR, 239 strikeouts in 2004 — before posting an ERA north of 5.00 in four of the next six seasons.  Most of that time was spent with the Mets, where he was so awful (other than a solid 2007) that they cut him just before camp ended in 2011, despite still owing him $12 million for the season. Perez spent some time in the minors for Washington that year, never appearing in the bigs, and considering how long it had been since that wonderful 2004, it wasn’t hard to think of his career as being over.

Except, it wasn’t. Perez resurfaced as a reliever in Seattle in 2012 and was good enough that it shocked our resident Mariners fans into writing posts titled “Oliver Perez Is Good Now. Seriously.” (Cameron, 2012) and “Oliver Perez. Pitcher You Want.” (Sullivan, 2013). His reputation was so terrible that the mere fact that he was in the bigs and adding any kind of value was seen as a jaw-dropping event. Read the rest of this entry »

By 5 p.m. Eastern time on Friday, if not sooner, we’ll know where Masahiro Tanaka is going to end up. For fans of the Cubs or Dodgers or Yankees or wherever it is he decides to spend the next five to seven years of his life, the reaction will be elation, wondering just how their shiny new toy will look slotted into their rotation for years to come. They’ll dream of pennants. They’ll marvel at his stat lines. They’ll do their best to ignore the assuredly absurd dollar amount it took to obtain him. (Update: Obviously written before word broke that the Yankees had agreed to terms with him.)

For everyone else, the reaction will simply be: Finally. Let’s get on with things already. Read the rest of this entry »

Minor-league contracts don’t really matter all that much in baseball, no matter how much some fans might think they do. Each year, teams sign dozens of guys to non-guaranteed deals that may or may not include an invite to major league camp, and much of the time you never hear those names ever mentioned again after March. It’s not an official FanGraphs rule that minor-league deals aren’t worth covering, but it might as well be; when Delmon Young got a guaranteed contract from Philadelphia last year, there was a post about it. When the Orioles made him an NRI last week, there wasn’t.

Yet here I am, talking about Milwaukee’s decision to add Mark Reynolds to the first base mix on a non-guaranteed contract, partially because it seems likely that he will have a real impact on the team this year, and partially because of what it says about the Brewers. Read the rest of this entry »

As we sit here in mid-January, there seems to be no more obvious free agent fit than the idea that Stephen Drew should sign with the Mets. It’s such an obvious pairing that the internet has been talking about it with such regularity that it almost seems like he already was a Met, and is now looking for his next new home.

It’s obvious because the Mets made some moves to improve this winter, importing Bartolo Colon, Curtis Granderson, and Chris Young, and still have a hole at shortstop. It’s obvious because their first-round pick is protected and they already gave up their second to add Granderson, so giving up a third-rounder seems to be a minor annoyance. It’s obvious because these are the guys who have started at least one game at short since Jose Reyes left following 2011 — Justin Turner, Omar Quintanilla, Ruben Tejada, Jordany Valdespin, Wilfredo Tovar, and Ronny Cedeno — and because that group has combined to contribute all of 2.8 WAR over two seasons. It’s obvious because a below-market return to Boston seems to be Drew’s only viable alternative at this point, his free agency waylaid by the qualifying offer.

Drew’s not a great player, but he is a good one, and almost certainly better than what the team currently has. So obvious! And yet just last week, GM Sandy Alderson reiterated his feeling that the team isn’t likely to sign Drew, instead intending to go into the season with Tejada and the .236 wOBA he put up last season. Merely media posturing, hoping to drag things out and get Scott Boras to lower his demands? Sure, possibly. Maybe even probably. Yet there’s also the not-small possibility that Alderson is just a bit smarter than the rest of us, and he really doesn’t have any intention of adding Drew. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, my esteemed colleague Jeff Sullivan took a look at major positional problem areas on contenders, and came up with several potential trouble spots. One of those ended up being second base for the Dodgers, and with good reason — they appear at the bottom of our second base projections, largely because no one has any idea what to make of Alexander Guerrero. As Jeff pointed out, Steamer has him down for only .220/.280/.330 and sees him as basically a replacement-level player, while ZiPS projects him at 2.5 WAR and .259/.324/.386. While Steamer and ZiPS are probably my two favorite projection systems, it’s so difficult to project incoming Cuban players that it’s probably not worth losing a lot of sleep over either line, and because of that questionable data Jeff says that this is a spot that “barely belongs” in his piece. He’s probably right, because we have no idea what Guerrero is going to turn out to be.

But while there’s obvious questions about how reliable the projections might be, the unavoidable truth is this: if Guerrero doesn’t work out or isn’t ready, the Dodgers have almost nowhere else they can turn, and so if this isn’t the worst situation for a contender in the bigs, it’s almost certainly the riskiest. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the next week or so, we’re going to learn who gets into the Hall of Fame and (likely) the results of Alex Rodriguez‘ suspension appeal. Those are the kinds of stories that tend to bring out a lot of ugliness around the game, so it’s important that we take the opportunity to focus on smaller stories that remind us why we spend so much time following this sport in the first place — things like Mark Mulder signing a contract with the Angels on New Year’s Day, attempting a comeback after not having appeared in the bigs in the previous five seasons.

It’s incredibly unlikely to work, for reasons we’ll get to in a second, but it’s pretty easy to see why the Angels are willing to give this a chance. Mulder’s deal reportedly has zero guaranteed money, making it entirely performance-based, so the risk is low, and despite the well-received additions of Hector Santiago and Tyler Skaggs in the Mark Trumbo trade, the Los Angeles rotation is still thin. Jered Weaver and his terrifying trends remain at the top along with C.J. Wilson, and Garrett Richards figures to slot in somewhere. Joe Blanton will likely be cut loose one way or another, and the Angels may yet be the most likely landing spot for Matt Garza, but for the moment, their improved rotation is one that could still use some help.

So, fine, it’s a chance worth taking. But can Mulder make this work? Has anyone, ever? Read the rest of this entry »

Jamey Wright turned 39 on December 24, and he celebrated by signing a one-year deal worth $1.8 million with the Dodgers. As far as offseason signings go, it’s a relatively minor one, and coming as it did in the midst of the holiday season and the far bigger stories of Shin-Soo Choo and Masahiro Tanaka, it — quite reasonably — went unmentioned here. In fact, as far as I can tell, the last time he was even mentioned on the regular FG site was way back in 2009, and even that was a Jeremy Affeldt article that barely referenced Wright.

That’s neither surprising nor unexpected, because Wright’s claim to fame — if he even has one — is that he’s been surviving on minor-league deals for longer than most current players have even been in the big leagues. After eight consecutive years making seven different teams as a non-roster invite, he’s finally managed to collect a big-league deal for the first time since 2005. That’s great for him, but is otherwise a minor piece of trivia in the larger baseball world.

Still, we’re talking about him today because — well, okay, because no one can stand to talk about the Hall of Fame any longer — his age 35-38 seasons have looked like this:  Read the rest of this entry »