The hurdles remain, but the enthusiasm is there: The Cubs will be listening to offers on Alfonso Soriano at these winter meetings. The veteran will have to approve any trade, and has blocked moves to the San Francisco Giants in the past because of the cold weather and the West Coast location, so that’s no small obstacle. There’s also the matter of the $36 million left on his contract — Chicago will certainly have to swallow some of that in order to get a palatable return in a trade. How much they swallow will mostly depend on the receiving team’s opinion of Soriano’s defense.

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A couple of minor transactions have floated by mostly un-noticed on the wires recently, and probably for good reason. Mickey Storey was claimed by the Yankees from the Astros, and Cory Burns was traded to the Rangers from the Padres for a player to be named someday. Neither of these relievers cost much, nor will they end up closing for their new teams. They’re mostly just flotsam pieces of spaghetti to fling at the wall. There’s a link between these two relievers, and it’s a thread that will run through most fungible, cheaply acquired players in baseball — neither reliever has a fastball.

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There’s a fair amount of belief out there that the Marlins should finish the job they started with the Blue Jays and trade their biggest chip for a huge package now. And the 23-year-old masher now named Giancarlo Stanton is quite the chip. He enters his final seasons at the league minimum just seven home runs short of triple digits, and still has three years of team control remaining after the upcoming one. It’s those years of control that provide room for the most debate about his value.

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Just a couple years ago, it was Jason Heyward and Giancarlo Stanton that were tearing up baseball, looking like an unprecedented pair of rookie talents ready to continue on into the stratosphere together. Now, just two years later, we’ve got Mike Trout and Bryce Harper one-upping them. That’s just how it goes.

With an injury (and a team deflation) taking some of the wind out of Stanton’s sails, and Buster Posey blowing up the National League Most Valuable Player debate, the new toys got a lot more attention than the old new ones. Perhaps rightfully so. But a lot of the value Heyward accumulated last season he did in a fashion that might seem… Troutian.

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See you at noon!

It’s true, probably. If you remove emotion from the equation, the Marlins of the past two decades have been a successful corporation. Even under the newest ownership, they’ve satisfied all of the requirements you might put on a great franchise. Your appraisal of their work to date, and even their trade this week, includes emotion, but an honest eye towards the bottom line can put a different spin on all of it.

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The Brewers were talking an extension with Corey Hart, and then they weren’t. Either way, extension is a key word for the 6-foot-6 slugger with the long levers.

The sunglassed-one turns 31 next year, so he’s most likely either post-peak or he’s rapidly approaching his decline phase. At the very least, he’s lost some of the speed he had when he came up as a five-tool player: His speed scores are regularly below average now, and he hasn’t stolen double-digit bases since 2009. His batting profile also has begun to skew more towards power. As it goes with such a move, his strikeout rate has jumped along with his isolated power. How age affects those two talents would be most interesting to his current employer when considering a contract extension.

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The Indians might be shopping some of their players. The newest rumor has the Red Sox interested in Shin-Soo Choo, whom the Indians have under team control for one more year of arbitration. Assuming the team won’t be in contention for the division title next year — they haven’t had a winning season since 2007 and, in related news, their starting staff has the second-worst FIP in the American League since that year — he seems to be an ideal player to trade away. Except for the fact that he owns a spotty track record and his value has been all over the place.

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Adam Wainwright is fixing to get paid. He’s under contract for $12 million in 2013, but he likes St. Louis enough that he’ll give them a chance to sign him this offseason, according to Derrick Goold’s Monday piece in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Finding a comp for his contract talks depends heavily on how you weight his different defining characteristics. Is he just a great pitcher worthy of a contract that should fit in with the current top 25 highest-paid starters? Is he a 31-year-old starting pitcher — is his age most important? Is he a right-hander first and foremost? Is his ground-ball rate more relevant than his pitching mix? Or is it most important that he is signing an extension with his team and not hitting the open market?

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