As I reported on twitter moments ago, MLB sent a memo to clubs detailing the new process for Cuban players to go from leaving the country to signing with an MLB team. The short version is that super prospect Yoan Moncada is eligible to sign now, after a maddening long delay.

For those new to this topic or if you just want a refresher, here’s a recap of my coverage of this Moncada saga from the start:

– October 3, 2014: Moncada is confirmed out of Cuba, but no one knows where he is.  We assume his whereabouts will become clear soon as he’s the most hyped prospect to leave the island in years. Here I first quote the common “teenage Puig that can play the infield and switch hit” comp and break down all the implications about who can sign him, who is likely to pony up the big bucks, game theory implications and more.

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Toward the end of the day on Tuesday, the Boston Red Sox and Texas Rangers swapped Anthony Ranaudo and Robbie Ross. It doesn’t immediately seem like a trade of much consequence: Ranaudo’s a prospect with diminishing sheen, and Ross is coming off a pretty ugly experience as an attempted big-league starter. And, probably, it won’t be a trade of much consequence. Ranaudo seems like, if he’ll be anything, he’ll be a decent reliever. And Ross has looked like a lefty reliever who doesn’t do a great job of getting lefties out.

But — well, let me start with this. I’m about to focus on one side of this trade. I’ve heard all you guys complaining that we post too much content about the Red Sox. I understand where you’re coming from, and this isn’t going to make things better. But this isn’t about fitting into a pattern; I just find Ross to be more interesting, statistically, than I do Ranaudo. Ranaudo’s all scouting. Visual learners are going to like to talk about him. Me? I want to share something about Ross’ 2014 — something that might make him better than he seems.

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I lived through the 2008 Seattle Mariners. I’m not sure quite how I did it, but I paid attention to that damn team on a daily basis, and I wrote about that damn team on a daily basis, and while I’m sure there were lots of things I cared about and thought were significant in the moment, one of the only things I truly remember about the year, and especially the second half of the year, is Roy Corcoran. Corcoran was a nobody, a journeyman reliever, but he became one of the rare positive stories on a team that went right down the crapper. One of the few upsides of following a team through a disaster year is you uncover these little surprises who otherwise never would’ve gotten a chance. You get to stop caring about a team and start caring about individual players and individual stories, and 2008 put Roy Corcoran on my radar.

And then he fell off my radar the next year, but, anyway. Last year’s Rangers had their own disaster season. It was a disastrous season for different reasons from why the 2008 Mariners had a disastrous season, but it was a catastrophe almost from the start. And as a result, in time, unfamiliar players started to show up in the bigs. I never knew anything about Jake Smolinski. The same goes for Dan Robertson and Tomas Telis and Spencer Patton and Lisalverto Bonilla. And the Rangers also introduced one Ben Rowen. Now, the Rangers are no longer in possession of said Ben Rowen:

In addition to veteran LHPs Erik Bedard & David Huff, #Dodgers also sign 3B Jarek Cunningham and RHP Ben Rowen to minor league deals.

— Matt Eddy (@MattEddyBA) January 23, 2015

…and maybe that’s meaningful. They had him, and didn’t think enough of him to keep him. But I’d like to show you why you should be rooting for Ben Rowen. Daniel Brim already did, having beaten me in a race, but Rowen came up in my morning chat, and had it not been for the Rangers’ 2014 nightmare, Rowen wouldn’t have won me over with his unconventional…ness. They don’t make many like this guy.

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At first glance, Monday’s Yovani Gallardo trade probably seems more significant than it really is. Gallardo is a recognizable name, someone who’s pitched important innings, but he is no longer what he once looked like, and he’s a year away from free agency. Luis Sardinas is a real prospect, recently ranked No. 7 in the Rangers’ system by Baseball America, and he has big-league experience, yet his offensive ceiling is very low. Corey Knebel is another real prospect, with his own big-league experience, yet he’s a reliever with control issues and an elbow injury. And while Marcos Diplan has what they call a live arm, he almost couldn’t possibly be further from the bigs, for a baseball-ing professional. This feels like the Rangers just made a major upgrade to a middling staff, but in reality, Gallardo is something around league-average, and he could be gone by November.

So in that sense, it’s a bit underwhelming. The Rangers did need rotation help, and they got it, but they presumably still aren’t going to the playoffs. And the Brewers have made room in the rotation for Jimmy Nelson, but now they have weaker depth, unless they turn around and make a play for, say, James Shields or Jordan Zimmermann. But there is one part of this that I find particularly fascinating. Yovani Gallardo is changing teams, and Yovani Gallardo is changing leagues, but maybe most importantly, Yovani Gallardo is changing catchers.

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International baseball has been in the news often lately with the ongoing saga of Yoan Moncada (he’s in America now), the signing of Yasmany Tomas and yesterday’s news that Cuba-U.S. relations could be getting much better.  In recent news, at the yearly international scouting directors’ meeting at the Winter Meetings last week, sources tell me there was no talk about the recent controversial rule change and no talk about an international draft, as expected.

So much has been happening lately that you may have temporarily forgotten about last summer, when the Yankees obliterated the international amateur spending record (and recently added another prospect). If the early rumors and innuendo are any indication, the rest of baseball isn’t going to let the Yankees have the last word.

I already mentioned the Cubs as one of multiple teams expected to spend well past their bonus pool starting on July 2nd, 2015.  I had heard rumors of other clubs planning to get in the act when I wrote that, but the group keeps growing with each call I make, so I decided to survey the industry and see where we stand.  After surveying about a dozen international sources, here are the dozen clubs that scouts either are sure, pretty sure or at least very suspicious will be spending past their bonus pool, ranked in order of likelihood:

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The Winter Meetings revelry has passed. We’re still waiting on a few big trades to finally ‘consummate,’ but the list of free agents is less attractive by day. Before you turn down a chance at glory with the guys left waiting for a team, it’s probably a good idea to look at how badly you need them. This is not dating advice, but it sort of feels like it.

To that end, I’ve taking our depth charts and calculated a quick stat for ‘neediness.’ By averaging team WAR over 13 roster spots — the portion of the 25-man roster usually used for offense — and then looking at the difference between that average WAR and each position WAR, I’ve found a way to show where the biggest remaining lineup holes are.

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Everybody remembers the movie Inception, right? Nice visuals, convoluted premise, and that killer score – a more than sufficient popcorn delivery system. Fun fact: the main plot point of inception, that an idea can be planted in someone’s subconscious without them realizing, is real!

At some point this summer, exasperated Texas Rangers writer/blogger/fanalyst Jamey Newberg tweeted something to the effect of “Alex Rios is one of those players whose production will never line up with his numbers.” At first, I was offended. A player produces what he produces, his numbers reflect his….production. But the thought, the idea that a player is less than his final stat line, it stayed with me. I couldn’t shake it.

Then the offseason rolled around. The crop of available outfielders is charitably described as “very much ungood” and then a bunch of guys signed. One of those signees, Nick Markakis got four years and an AAV north of $11 million, to the surprise of many. And then, piling shock on top of shock, Rios himself signed a one-year deal with the Royals for $11 million.

There are plenty of reasons to scoff at the big outfielders contract. Entering his age-34 season, Rios comes off a rough season in Texas. He produced right at replacement level in 2014, displaying a worrisome lack of power (just four home runs and a career-low .118 ISO) and he missed time with injury, as older players are wont to do.

But more than most players, Rios’ problems are matters of perception. There are many reasons to not like Rios as a player or this signing in a vacuum, all factors that I believe contribute to the shrugs and disbelief when news of his Kansas City contract broke.

Most pressing, the concern expressed by the Rangers fan above: does his production lag behind his numbers?

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The list of non-tenders is out. Time to dream!

It’s actually a very tough place to shop, even if there are a few names that seem attractive this year. Only about one in twelve non-tenders manages to put up a win of value the year after they were let loose. Generally, teams know best which players to keep, and which to jettison.

You’re not going to get 12 non-tenders in your camp in any given year, but there is a way to improve your odds. It’s simple, really: pick up a player that was actually above replacement the year before. If you do that, you double your chance of picking up a productive major leaguer. So let’s look at this year’s market through that lens first.

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The most obvious park-effect variable in baseball is Colorado’s altitude. Okay, nothing to be done about that. No way to pitch around it. The second-most obvious park-effect variable would have to be the Green Monster in Fenway. Boston’s got something no other place has, and it’s right there in left field looming over everything, and last week I took a look at how pitchers attempt to compensate for having that thing in play right behind them. In short, righties get pitched away more often, and lefties get pitched inside more often. It was all very intuitive, but toward the end, I threw in a note about an opposite effect I observed in Texas. Now seemed like as good an opportunity as any to turn that into a post of its own.

Globe Life Park doesn’t have a Green Monster. It doesn’t have any kind of monster, but it does have a justified reputation of being hitter-friendly. There are many culprits, but among them is a frequent gust that’s caused some fly balls to continue to carry out to right and right-center. It’s been referred to as the jetstream effect, and just as Boston is particularly hitter-friendly to left, Texas has historically been more hitter-friendly to right. How have pitchers dealt with that? Well, I guess I already told you.

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Over the summer at ESPN and FG+, I wrote a piece that investigated just how terribly the recent trend of long-term extensions for players at least two years away from free agency had gone. While Ryan Howard was the obvious poster boy for “Wow, that was a bad idea,” the future deals given to Ryan Zimmerman, Ryan Braun, Joey Votto, Justin Verlander, Evan Longoria and others all look a little questionable now, either because of unexpected decline/injury in the period between the signing and the actual start date, or because of how much payroll space it’s taking up. Not all have gone badly — Felix Hernandez and Troy Tulowitzki have been worthwhile investments — but many have, and that’s without even knowing what’s going to happen when Miguel Cabrera’s eight-year extension kicks off in 2016.

Teams can’t exactly always wait until precisely one minute before free agency to give extensions to valuable players, but giving out these deals so far ahead of time is such a hugely risky proposition, because so much can go wrong, both on and off the field. Organizations may be buying the security of knowing that their player can’t walk away in the near future, but they’re trading off the very valuable ability to gain an extra year or two of information on that player, and it’s easy to see that some of these deals never would have been signed if the teams knew at the time what they knew when the original contract would have ended.

It’s with all that in mind that today I’m interested in looking at a youthful and valuable shortstop who is just about to start an eight-year extension he agreed to with his team two seasons ago. Texas’ Elvis Andrus is only 26, but he’s also coming off the two worst wOBA years of his career, years that came after ink hit paper. Is this contract doomed to sink the Rangers? Or is he still a valuable asset? Read the rest of this entry »