While the free-agent market remains largely in a state of gridlock, a few teams have begun to zag when others are zigging. The Cubs, of course, have invested somewhat heavily in pitching, signing Tyler Chatwood, Yu Darvish, and multiple relievers. The Brewers and Mets, meanwhile, have made some of the most significant signings of the New Year, agreeing to terms with Lorenzo Cain (Brewers), Jay Bruce (Mets), and Todd Frazier (Mets) between them.

While the Cubs have remained near the top of the projected standings all offseason, the Brewers and Mets entered the winter generally perceived as teams residing in something of a middle ground between the league’s Super Teams and rebuilding clubs. By investing in free agents, Milwaukee and New York are betting on themselves. It’s a refreshing approach in what has been objectively the slowest offseason ever.

Perhaps more of the bubble teams will be betting on themselves as spring training nears and anxiety amongst unsigned players reaches even higher levels. There is likely to be a lot of value out there. There is certainly a lot of inventory. The shopping season is winding down. This is an after-Christmas sale of sorts.

We’ve discussed the New Year’s Effect before at this website, and we perhaps have seen that in play with a player like Frazier, whom the FanGraphs crowd and Dave Cameron each projected for a three-year, $42-million deal. Frazier settled for a two years and just $17 million last Monday.

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Nick Gordon is one of the top prospects in the Twins system. Drafted fifth-overall by Minnesota in 2014, the lefty-swinging shortstop is coming off an age-21 season where he slashed .270/.341/.408 for Double-A Chattanooga. He’s also coming off the release of his first album, “I Do It All,” which dropped earlier this month.

“G-Cinco” started rapping when he was in middle school, but it was only recently that he began sharing his hip-hop stylings beyond his inner circle. Prompted by the urging of a close friend, the son of former all-star closer Tom “Flash” Gordon, and brother of 2015 NL batting champion Dee Gordon, decided the time had come to “let people hear this side of me.”

The multi-talented youngster is well aware that mixing music and sports can make for a tricky balance, particularly in terms of image. But he doesn’t anticipate any issues. Not only does Gordon consider himself “a baseball player first,” he’s “never been one to lead a lifestyle that isn’t appropriate,” nor does he feel a need to “go out there and rap about things I don’t do.”

What he does do — along with rapping base hits — is “sit down and listen to beats, and write.” As for which he considers more important when crafting a song, the beat or the lyrics, that’s largely a matter of inspiration within the creative process. Read the rest of this entry »

Carlos Gonzalez picked the worst of times to produce one of the worst seasons of his career in 2017, recording just an 84 wRC+ in his final season with Colorado and an overall value beneath replacement level (-0.2 WAR). Gonzalez slashed .262/.339/.423 as a right fielder who played his home games a mile above sea level. Not great.

That poor chapter complete, Gonzalez is now entering his age-32 season and experiencing first hand a historically cold free-agent market.

Once viewed as a franchise cornerstone with an aesthetically pleasing swing, Gonzalez’s poor season probably saved some team from making a multi-year mistake this winter, a point made by Dave Cameron when ranking Gonzalez as the game’s No. 33 free agent.

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The moderator, MLBNetwork’s Jon Morosi, suggested slyly at one point that if any of the panelists cared to consummate a trade, the event could be paused in order for them to do so. He then proposed that maybe “Miami could spin Christian Yelich to the Rockies.”

Amid appreciative laughter from the audience, the question “What would it take?” rang out. Marlins president of baseball operations Michael Hill, sitting immediately to Morosi’s left, responded with a smile: “Back up the truck.”

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Held this past Monday at the Harvard Club of Boston, the “MLB Executive Panel Q&A” was organized by the Friends of Harvard Baseball and the Harvard Varsity Club. Along with Hill, the panelists included Colorado Rockies VP/general manager Jeff Bridich, Oakland A’s general manager David Forst, Boston Red Sox VP of player development Ben Crockett, and Peter Woodfork, a senior VP of baseball operations in the commissioner’s office. All are former members of the Harvard baseball team, while Morosi, a self-described “slap-hitting second baseman on a team of slap-hitting second basemen” — played on the junior varsity.

Not everything said on Monday night was on the record, but several of the stories that were shared can be repeated to the population at large. Along with the aforementioned exchange, here are some of them.

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The Colorado Rockies are acting like a team with expectations for 2018. Before the start of the offseason, Cot’s Contracts projected a salary of $131 million for the team, an all-time high for the franchise. That was before they added $40 million in average annual value by signing Wade Davis, Chris Iannetta, Jake McGee, and Bryan Shaw. The players seem to expect big things as well, and have used this energy in their pursuit of free agents. McGee, according to Patrick Saunders, helped sell Wade Davis on the Rockies saying, “[T]his was a team that was going to win now.”

Now, many questions remain for the Rockies, and those questions have led some to doubt Colorado’s ability to contend. Can the pitching keep up its pace from last year? Can Charlie Blackmon repeat his MVP-type performance? Is Jonathan Lucroy back? While all three of those uncertainties can be addressed by playing the actual games, there’s another question that might have been answered recently.

#Rockies outfielder Dahl (rib/back) cleared to swing bat https://t.co/YEDOKU62RT via @MLB

— Thomas Harding (@harding_at_mlb) January 4, 2018

David Dahl saw only 82 plate appearances in 2017, all at the minor-league level. After a breakout 2016 rookie campaign in which he slashed .315/.359/.500 over 237 plate appearances while adding average defense in the outfield, Dahl was expected to be a key contributor to the Rockies going into the year. There were thoughts of a .300 hitter with 20-20 potential, enough to get most fanbases excited.

Unfortunately, those fantasies had to be postponed. On March 6th of 2017, the Rockies released a seemingly innocuous announcement that Dahl had suffered a stress reaction in his ribcage and would be reevaluated in two weeks. That injury would persist for basically the entire season.

Reports concerning Dahl’s return to health give the Rockies some hope of improving an outfield that was horrendous outside of the aforementioned Blackmon; however, the combination of Dahl’s profile as a hitter and the consequences of missing a full year suggest that enthusiasm ought to be curbed.

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Today, the Rockies agreed to sign Wade Davis to a three year, $52 million contract, capping an off-season of bullpen spending that also saw them give $27 million each to Jake McGee and Bryan Shaw. The Rockies’ plan couldn’t be more obvious, as they are loading up on relievers in the hopes of bullpenning their way through October. With their trio of free agent relievers pushing Adam Ottavino, Chris Rusin, and Mike Dunn to earlier-game situations, the Rockies now have one of the deepest bullpens in baseball. If they were able to roll out that group in the postseason, they could be dangerous.

The problem remains getting to October, however. We projected the Rockies for 79 wins before they signed Davis, so adding him will move the forecast up to 80 wins, most likely. And if you think that’s just Steamer being overly negative, it’s not just us.

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The Colorado Rockies have been rumored for a month-plus to be on the verge of signing a free-agent closer who used to pitch for the Kansas City Royals. Today, they did just that — but it’s not the reliever you might have thought. Instead of re-signing Greg Holland, they opted to add Wade Davis to the fold. Jeff Passan reports:

Source: Wade Davis has agreed to a deal with the Colorado Rockies.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) December 29, 2017

On its own, there’s a lot to consider here — and that’s without even accounting for the terms of the deal and what those terms mean for the Rockies. Once again, Passan:

Source: Wade Davis' deal with the Rockies is for three years and $52M. It's the highest per-year salary ever for a relief pitcher.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) December 29, 2017

Among Wade Davis, Jake McGee and Bryan Shaw, the Rockies now have guaranteed $106M to relief pitchers this winter. Add in Mike Dunn and Adam Ottavino, and they may have the most expensive bullpen in baseball history — upward of $50M this season.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) December 29, 2017

This can really only go one of two ways. The first possible outcome — and the one that’s more probable — is that it blows up in Colorado’s face, becoming a cautionary tale like the Mike Hampton–Denny Neagle signing spree of Dec. 2000. The second is that the Rockies are on to something here. Yes, they may have just assembled the most expensive bullpen in history — certainly it will be one of the most expensive — but they have the opportunity to ride with that for this year at least because of all the minimum-contract pitchers they have.

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Last season, the Colorado Rockies made the playoffs with a below-average offense, great defense, decent starting pitching, and a very good bullpen. It remains to be seen if the Rockies will completely double-down on that strategy for next season, but they certainly appear motivated to remain solid at the end of games. Last night, it looked like the team was close to a three-year deal for around $27 million with former Cleveland pitcher Bryan Shaw. It looks like they are also in the process of retaining Jake McGee to a three-year deal with a fourth-year option. Read the rest of this entry »

In the next few days, it’s expected that Giancarlo Stanton will decide whether he’s going to waive his no-trade clause to join the San Francisco Giants or, less likely, the St. Louis Cardinals. Those are the two teams that have struck deals with the Marlins, and both made their pitch to him in person last week. Stanton has appeared to be holding out hope that the Dodgers would get into the mix, though to this point, no public reports have suggested they’ve seriously engaged the Marlins in discussions.

The Dodgers’ reticence likely has to do with their CBT tax position. Acquiring Stanton would put them over the tax threshold again, and, as I laid out in my argument for why the Dodgers should be interested, acquiring Stanton would probably force the team to choose between re-signing Clayton Kershaw or making a big run at Bryce Harper in free agency next winter. And according to Ken Rosenthal, the Marlins aren’t interested in taking back any current payroll in a Stanton deal, as they try to trim their 2018 player expenses to under $90 million.

But despite the Marlins’ apparent tunnel vision here, there still might be a way for both sides to get what they’re looking for, and it’s one of Friedman’s go-to moves: the three-way trade.

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Riley Pint has a golden arm and a sky-high ceiling. The 20-year-old right-hander reaches triple digits, which helped prompt the Colorado Rockies to take him fourth overall in the 2016 draft. He’s the best pitching prospect in the system and a potential big-league ace.

The numbers don’t reflect that. Since signing out of an Overland Park, Kansas, high school, Pint is 3-16 with a 5.40 ERA and a 1.70 WHIP. This past season, he walked 59 batters in 93 innings at Low-A Asheville. To say he’s a work in progress would qualify as an understatement.

Are the Rockies concerned? I asked Zach Wilson, the club’s director of player development, for his appraisal of the youngster’s development.

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Zach Wilson on Pint: “Numbers are numbers, and in the development world, they don’t tell the whole story. As a matter of fact, they tell very little of the story. Walking [59] guys in fewer than 100 innings is going to raise a red flag to somebody staring at a stat line, but this was a 19-year-old in his first full season — and we were aggressive with him. The numbers weren’t a concern to us whatsoever. This was just a small part of the global developments scenario for Riley. He made strides.

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