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Not everyone has the season they want to have. Some guys underperform, some guys get hurt and others simply don’t get the opportunities to shine in ways they had hoped. It’s a new year, though, and many of these same guys will enter spring training with a good dash of the olde hope and faith. Some will be looking at fresh starts; others will be looking at new opportunities. A few others may be staring down their final opportunity.

And that’s where we’ll begin.

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Last week, Grant Brisbee made the very salient point that the Atlanta Braves are essentially akin to a small-market team these days. Since the ballclub has stacked their team with homegrown talent, this has not been a glaring problem in years past, but this offseason we have seen them lose both Brian McCann and Tim Hudson. Which was bad, in a sense — the team has replacements at the ready, even if they might not be as good.

The real problem though — and it is no doubt a good problem — will come two-to-three years down the road. Justin Upton, Jason Heyward and Kris Medlen are set to become free agents following the 2015 season, and the next season, Freddie Freeman and Craig Kimbrel (and Brandon Beachy) are also due to become free agents. It’s pretty unlikely that the ballclub will be able to keep all five (or six, if you count Beachy). So, who should they keep?
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Last weekend, I saw an interesting article in colleague Mike Petriello’s Twitter timeline. It was from retired Detroit News sportswriter/columnist Jerry Green, who was — for the 15th and final time — advocating for Jack Morris‘ Hall of Fame candidacy. Without getting into a line-by-line critique of the article, there were several things in the article that I did not agree with, but one thing did catch my attention:

I think it is quite sad that Morris will be left out. That the best baseball team I ever covered —the 1984 Tigers — will have not a single player in the Cooperstown Hall of Fame. Only Sparky Anderson, the manager, has been elected to the Hall of Fame. And forced to choose, Sparky opted to go into the Hall as the once-manager of the Cincinnati Reds.

Now, Green didn’t out and out declare that every World Series winner should have a member of its team in the Hall of Fame, but that was certainly the tangent that I led myself on in thinking about that passage. So, I decided to investigate — does every team have a Hall of Famer on it?

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Until this afternoon, the Rangers had a fairly complete team, save for left field, which was a mixture of never-was’ and might-be’s. For a team that was struggling to keep up this offseason with its counterparts in the Bay Area and Orange County, that simply wasn’t going to cut it. A move needed to be made, and today Texas made their move by signing Shin-Soo Choo.

Currently, the starting left fielder on the Rangers’ depth chart is Jim Adduci. Last season, Adduci made his major league debut, and tallied eight hits in 34 plate appearances. Not bad, except when you consider the fact that it was Adduci’s age-28 season. With him fronting the group, the Rangers’ left field options ranked just 28th on our depth charts entering today.

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In the past 24 hours, we have learned that the Indians are open to at least listening to offers for both Asdrubal Cabrera and Justin Masterson. We can debate the merits of trading Masterson, but moving Cabrera is a slam dunk decision. On the whole though, the willingness to listen on two players who are nearing free agency and may fetch something juicy on the trade market shows that Cleveland is very much conducting their offseason properly.

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