Kyle Lohse is a free-agent starting pitcher, and the Texas Rangers are a good baseball team, so off and on there’s been talk about the Rangers potentially making an effort to sign Kyle Lohse. This has picked up in light of the recent Martin Perez injury, as Perez was the favorite to be the Rangers’ fifth starter. Lohse, though, remains unsigned, and it looks like the Rangers might be on the verge of going elsewhere for help:

Source: Rangers on verge of signing RHP Derek Lowe to minor league deal, but he will make club, probably in swing role. Story coming.

— Evan Grant (@Evan_P_Grant) March 6, 2013

It’s not done, but it’s probably close, if this is the report. It makes a certain degree of sense, too — Lowe could offer short-term services to the rotation, and then get bumped upon the return of Perez or Colby Lewis. Lowe pitched out of the rotation and bullpen a year ago, and he’ll be a cheap investment for a team scared off by Lohse’s price tag. Lowe would cost the Rangers something in the low seven figures, most probably, with some incentives, most probably.

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Not a whole lot of players were extended a qualifying offer at the end of last season. Those who were extended such offers were good baseball players, and Kyle Lohse was among them. Lohse is a good baseball player, and he turned down the offer, and he remains to this date a free agent. We’re at the point now where Lohse is waiting on a significant injury, because for months he’s been unable to find a new home. This despite the fact that Lohse is good at what he does, and is capable of helping a contender.

There was an injury to a contender over the weekend, when a player you might not have ever heard of broke Martin Perez’s arm with a line-drive comebacker. Perez was in the running to be the Rangers’ fifth starter, and many felt like he was out in the lead. Now the team hopes he’s back and ready to pitch in the majors around the beginning of May. That is, in other words, at least a lost month, and people are wondering whether the Rangers are now more likely to give in to what Lohse demands might exist.

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Part four. Live free or veto hard. You can find parts one, two and three here, here and here.

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We have had to deal with a lot of speculation about the Rangers’ infield this off-season. It is not as if the Rangers are in trouble, they have the “problem” of a looming logjam. Shortstop super-prospect Jurickson Profar is knocking on the door. The Rangers also have Ian Kinsler at second and under contract through 2017, and Elvis Andrus, who is only 24, at shortstop and under contract through 2014. Most teams would love to have this sort of problem. This is not going to be another post about what the Rangers should do with these players. Instead, prompted by Evan Grant’s discussion of how the Rangers might want to think about a long-term extension for Andrus depending on how he plays this year, I want to look at how Andrus’ bat might develop over the next few years by looking at similar players. They are actually rather scarce, as Andrus has a rather unusual combination of skills.

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This is, as you may have surmised from the title, the third in a series on trades that players have vetoed, as is sometimes their right. You can find the first two parts here and here.

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On Monday, we looked at three vetoed trades, and I thought today we’d look at three more.

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For at least three franchises, this offseason could have taken a very different path. When Justin Upton vetoed a trade to the Mariners, he altered the direction of Seattle, Arizona and Atlanta, at the very least. Such negated transactions make for fascinating what-if’s, and now that we are edging into the time of year when all we will read is “best shape of my career” posts, I thought we could step back and take a look at some of these.

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You’re familiar with the story of Adam Greenberg, even if you’d completely forgotten about it until just now. Greenberg made his major-league debut in 2005, and he was hit in the head by the very first pitch that he saw. Greenberg sustained a concussion, and until 2012, that represented the entirety of his big-league career. Eventually, there was a petition to get Greenberg another major-league at bat. The Marlins signed Greenberg to a contract toward the end of 2012, because if there’s one baseball organization that badly wants people to like it, it’s the Miami Marlins. The friendly, lovable, PR-conscious Miami Marlins.

With the Marlins, Greenberg doubled his career playing time. On the one hand, it was a great gesture on the Marlins’ part, as they signed Greenberg and allowed him to pinch-hit in a home game on October 2. On the other hand, it was an awful gesture on the Marlins’ part, as they forced a cold and unprepared Greenberg to pinch-hit against the eventual NL Cy Young winner before thousands upon thousands of viewers in person and on TV. In his second big-league plate appearance, Adam Greenberg faced one of baseball’s best-ever knuckleballs. The results were predictable.

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When MLB.com released its top-100 prospect list, I was excited to see shortstop Luis Sardinas included at number 84. As my eyes scrolled from left-to-right across the page, a second Hickory Crawdads player ranked 88th. His name? Jorge Alfaro. The 19-year old ranked fifth on my list of best catchers scouted in 2012 behind a quartet of current and former top-100 players.

Video after the jump

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All baseball managers have strategies, and all manager strategies are supposed to function to maximize a team’s chances of winning. They don’t all work out that way, of course, and one need only explore the world of sacrifice bunts, but the managers’ hearts are in the right place. When managers get involved, they do so because they believe their involvement will bump the chances of winning the game. And managers don’t like to concede a game before it’s over, and one could never be critical of a manager for not giving up. There always exists some chance of victory, before the conclusion, and there’s something noble about pursuing long odds. But the necessity of managerial involvement follows a spectrum. In close games, in high-leverage situations, it makes the most sense to try something strategic. In not-close games, there’s hardly any benefit, so while such strategizing isn’t pointless, it is the most pointless.

As a sort-of example, the Giants closed out the Cardinals in the NLCS in Game 7. The Giants were up 1-0 after one, 2-0 after two, and 7-0 after three. It was still 7-0 at the seventh-inning stretch, with the Giants at home. They’d add two more runs, just for the hell of it. In the top of the eighth, Bruce Bochy replaced Santiago Casilla with specialist Javier Lopez. In the top of the ninth, with two outs, Bochy replaced Lopez with closer Sergio Romo. Bochy managed as if the game were close when it wasn’t, and there wasn’t much in the way of benefit. But Bochy gets a pass, because (A) whatever, and (B) it was Game 7 of the NLCS and those are high stakes. This was essentially pointless strategizing in a very important baseball game.

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