By the time the Jeff Samardzija trade became official Tuesday at baseball’s winter meetings in San Diego, Chicago White Sox general manager Rick Hahn was fielding secondary questions about the chances of extending Samardzija’s contract beyond 2015. Most — if not all — of the questions reporters asked Hahn pertained (fairly) in some way to Samardzija, who gives the White Sox a formidable top of the rotation with left-handers Chris Sale and Jose Quintana. It’s possible, however, that another player the White Sox received in the deal with the Oakland Athletics will get a chance to help his new team long after the coming season.

Billed in 2008 as a generational talent who had the signing bonus to prove it, 6-foot-7 right-hander Michael Ynoa is getting a fresh start with the White Sox after struggling with serious injuries, reaching bloated expectations and getting frustrating results since turning pro. In a secondary scrum with reporters that came after the TV cameras shut off, Hahn was excited to talk about Ynoa after trying to explain — for a third or fourth time or 20th time — that the matter of Samardzija’s contract wouldn’t be resolved that day.

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The story of the week was all about the Dodgers, whose new front office pulled off a trading frenzy that dramatically re-shaped the look of one of baseball’s strongest rosters. Before the Dodgers took over, though, all the conversations had to do with the Cubs, who added Jon Lester, Miguel Montero, and Jason Hammel within a matter of a couple days. The Cubs moved to open their contention window early, and one of the possible side effects involved the plan of the Reds. There was thought that, with the Cubs loading up, the Reds would be more motivated to sell pieces off and build for the future.

Indeed, with the winter meetings wrapping up, the Reds made a couple of trades that dealt away members of the starting rotation. Though they might’ve gotten lost in the insanity, Cincinnati sent Mat Latos to Miami, and it sent Alfredo Simon to Detroit. Both are due to become free agents in a year, and the moves signaled to some that the Reds are ready to tear down. But in reality, the Reds are preparing to give contention one more go in 2015. With the two quiet trades, the Reds trimmed payroll and added to the long-term outlook, and the roster didn’t actually lose much of anything.

The Reds have occupied one of the most difficult positions in the game. It’s been pretty clear their window is closing. Yet, the roster contains a number of high-impact, quality players. There’s been too much talent to tear it all down, but the team hasn’t had the money to supplement the talent already in house. So they’ve been stuck in between, with almost an entire rotation looking at one final year of team control. The Reds had difficult waters to navigate.

And if you examine the team projections we have at FanGraphs, the Reds look like they might be the worst team in the NL Central. They’re projected for as many wins as the Twins, barely surpassing the Padres and Diamondbacks, so on that basis the Reds don’t appear like a team that should be focusing still on the one season ahead. But there are reasons for optimism here. Legitimate, short-term optimism. And the moves they made added longer-term pieces at the same time, helping the Reds stay relevant while improving 2016 and the seasons beyond.

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It probably won’t happen this way, but when Dick Enberg is introduced at the Hall of Fame as the 39th winner of the Ford C. Frick Award, the deejay should replay Curt Gowdy’s opening line from the baseball portion of “The Naked Gun”:

“Hello! l’m Curt Gowdy, along with Jim Palmer, Tim McCarver, Dick Vitale, Mel Allen, Dick Enberg and Dr. Joyce Brothers.”

After all, being part of a seven-person broadcast booth must have been one of the more challenging moments in Enberg’s career, which will be celebrated at Cooperstown on July 25. The 20-person panel of voters, which made its announcement at baseball’s winter meetings Wednesday, probably didn’t take too seriously Enberg’s supporting role in “Naked Gun” into account. And that’s OK. Enberg also has spent nearly 20 seasons combined as a play-by-play lead for the San Diego Padres and Los Angeles Angels, along with having an exhaustive career calling baseball (and football, and tennis, and golf) on network TV. Cooperstown will be Enberg’s fifth Hall of Fame.

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The White Sox are going for it. With the additions of Jeff Samardzija and David Robertson — in addition to prior signings Adam LaRoche and Zach Duke — the Pale Hose have signaled to the rest of the American League Central that they’re not content to rebuild anymore. They might have only won 73 games a year ago, but with Chris Sale and Jose Abreu in the prime of their careers, the White Sox don’t want to sit around and dream about the future anymore. They want to win while their stars are still stars, so they’ve decided to make a run at the postseason next year.

There’s only one small problem; almost everyone everyone else in the American League has apparently made the same decision. No one is rebuilding anymore, especially not in the American League. Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration; the Astros and Twins still seem to realize that they’re probably not going to the World Series next year. They’re spending money in free agency, but they’re not sacrificing significant parts of their futures in order to make short-term upgrades. The 13 other AL teams? They have no problems trading the future to upgrade their 2015 chances.

And this race for the now is creating unprecedented parody across the league. Take a look at the current WAR forecasts — via the Steamer projections found on FanGraphs — for the 15 teams in the American League.

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The Red Sox have tried to erase the painful feelings of their botched Jon Lester negotiations by completing a flurry of pitcher transactions. While that’s unlikely to fool people who still just want Lester back, the pitchers acquired (or reportedly acquired) — Wade Miley, Rick Porcello and Justin Masterson — all have one thing in common in that they generate a lot of ground balls. Before that, they acquired Joe Kelly, who also generates a great deal of ground balls. Are ground balls the hip new thing on Yawkey Way?

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As was made evident by the Giancarlo Stanton extension, the Marlins are trying to build up to win. On Wednesday, they added Dee Gordon, a player who has been good in one year. On Thursday, they added Mat Latos, a player who has been good in several. There’s another difference, though — in 2014, Gordon was at his best. Latos, meanwhile, missed half the season due to a variety of injuries. The Marlins are betting on him to be successful in his last year of team control before free agency. To Cincinnati go Chad Wallach and Anthony DeSclafani.

Latos is a player of particular interest. Previously in his career, he was moved from San Diego in a blockbuster. Twice, he’s hit 4 WAR, and two other times, he’s come in around 3 WAR. He’s now coming off a half season in which he was worth 1.5 WAR. In a full season in 2015, Steamer projects Latos to be worth 1.2 WAR. It’s a surprisingly pessimistic figure, for a pitcher who just turned 27, so it’s worth explaining why Steamer thinks the way it thinks. Why is Steamer so down on a front-of-the-rotation starter?

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Scooter Gennett of the Milwaukee Brewers is among those players participating in an innovative cancer charity drive that ends Thursday night and benefits LUNGevity, “the largest national lung cancer-focused nonprofit.” An online auction, coordinated by Major League Baseball media and public relations offices, is awarding scores of unusual prizes to winning bidders. Pitching lessons with CC Sabathia or Dwight Gooden, for example. Rather than a game-used jersey or an autographed baseball, Gennett is donating his time and his noteworthy skills with ceramics, giving a pottery lesson to the winner of his auction.

MLB took this initiative in part to celebrate the life of Monica Barlow, who died earlier this year at age 36 because of lung cancer. Like a majority of people who get lung cancer, Barlow did not smoke. Gennett has gotten involved in part because his father is a cancer survivor. He discussed all of that and more in a phone conversation with FanGraphs during baseball’s winter meetings. In addition to the charity work, he also discussed how he’s preparing for the upcoming season, and further explained how Ryan Joseph Gennett became — sometimes — “Scooter.”

David Brown: Were you into Play-Doh as a kid?

Scooter Gennett: Yeah, when I was younger, I liked those kind of toys where you’d make something. I wasn’t the type of kid to play with action figures. I guess I was a Play-Doh type of kid. But once I turned 8 years old, until high-school age, there really wasn’t much for me other than playing baseball. So I didn’t take many art classes, certainly ceramics, until high school. It was all baseball.

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Everyone knew heading into the offseason that the Red Sox starting rotation was going to need some help, and so the first thing they went and did was sign Hanley Ramirez and Pablo Sandoval. Those guys are not pitchers, so while it gave the Red Sox perhaps the best lineup in the MLB, they still needed pitching.

The Red Sox rotation essentially consisted of a bunch of question marks — plus Clay Buchholz and Joe Kelly, who are question marks themselves. Buchholz is 30 years old, has never thrown 110 innings in consecutive seasons and had a 5.34 ERA last year. Kelly’s numbers as a starter aren’t particularly impressive. Some clubs entered the offseason looking for a frontline starter. Some clubs needed depth to fill out their rotation. The Red Sox needed both.

A Cole Hamels trade or James Shields signing are still possibilities for the Red Sox, as they’re still in the market for that frontline starter after whiffing on Jon Lester, who was the crowd favorite to return to Boston and fill the void at the top of their rotation.

The depth, on the other hand, appears to be shored up. As I was writing this post, the Sox dealt Yoenis Cespedes to the Tigers in exchange for Rick Porcello. (By the time I was done, they’d inked Justin Masterson). A full analysis of the Porcello deal will come in a different post, but for now we’re going to focus on Wade Miley, who the Sox are expected to acquire in the very near future for starting pitchers Rubby de la Rosa and Allen Webster. de la Rosa and Webster are both guys who had higher stock a couple years ago. Both have electric stuff, both have serious command issues, and both may be destined for the bullpen. Dave Cameron wrote up a quick InstaGraphs post on the deal last night, which you can read here.
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The Rule 5 draft began today (Thursday) at Noon ET, signifying the end of this year’s Winter Meetings in San Diego. Designed to facilitate opportunities for talented minor leaguers otherwise blocked within their own organization’s depth chart, the draft has created opportunities for (among others) Jose Bautista, George Bell, Roberto Clemente, Shane Victorino, and Johan Santana.

The complexion of the draft has changed since 2006, when an extra year of protection was added under the new CBA. That said, both an MVP (Josh Hamilton) and Cy Young (R.A. Dickey) winner have been selected in the meantime.

Players are eligible for selection in the Rule 5 draft if they’ve been excluded from their respectively club’s 40-man roster and were:

• Signed at age 19 or older and have played in professional baseball for four years; or
• Signed at age 18 and young and have played for five years.

A club, once selecting a player by means of the draft, must retain that player on its active roster for the duration of the following season, with exceptions for injury that are too tedious to reprint here. If such stipulations aren’t met, the player in question must be returned to his original club. Sometimes the original club declines to accept the player. Sometimes a small trade is worked out. There are other realistic scenarios, as well. As many as one can imagine.

There are surely other details I’m omitting. My concern here, however, isn’t to provide a flawless recapitulation of the current CBA’s Rule 5, but rather to examine facts about the players whom the rule has affected.

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This isn’t one of those deals that came out of nowhere. The Padres have been rumored to be the most aggressive Matt Kemp suitor for a couple of weeks now, and all other interested parties seemingly dropped out as the asking price kept getting higher and higher. Over the last few days, this deal felt somewhat inevitable, so we’ve had plenty of time to process the trade and figure out what to say about it. And yet, I’m still kind of stumped.

The 2015 Padres are going to be bad. We currently project them at around a 75 win level, putting them in the same group as the Astros, Twins, Diamondbacks, and Braves. The only team demonstrably worse is the Phillies; you could reasonably argue that the Padres are something like the second worst team in baseball. And they could very well make themselves worse on purpose before the offseason ends, as they’ve reportedly been shopping their veteran starting pitchers, including walk-year guy Ian Kennedy.

It makes plenty of sense for the Padres to trade Kennedy, and if they’re worried that Tyson Ross‘ elbow will blow up from all the sliders he throws, there’s a good case to be made for trading him too. Non-contenders should generally be incentivized to move their short-term assets, especially ones with a significant chance of losing value, in exchange for players who will stick around longer and might increase in value in the future. Given the state of the Padres talent base, they should probably be focusing more on the future than the present.

Which is why I have a hard time understanding why they prioritized adding Matt Kemp. Yes, it’s clear that the team wanted to add a “big bat” to their line-up this winter, and Kemp is legitimately one of the best right-handed hitters in baseball. He gives them something they didn’t have before. I just don’t see how adding Kemp makes them a significantly better baseball team.

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