Once upon a time, Tommy Hanson’s career seemed like it would be spun into legend. He was one of the best young pitchers in baseball, in one of the best organizations. Now, heading into his age-27 season, his story seems more like a particularly cruel choose-your-own-adventure story. Shoulder injuries will do that. On Monday, he agreed to a deal with the Rangers. There are conflicting reports as I write this as to whether it is a minor league or major league deal. Either way, this will be Hanson’s third team in three years, and if things don’t work out for him in Texas, this could be his last chance.

That is not to imply that Hanson has some sort of tragic career. Far from it. If you slice and dice enough data, you can find plenty of comparable cases to Hanson. By the end of his age-24 season, which was his third season in the majors, Hanson had crossed the 450-inning threshold in his career. Since the expansion era started in 1961, there have been 105 other pitchers who have accomplished such a feat. To wit:

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The last few weeks before pitchers and catchers report is mostly a time of great anticipation for players and fans. However, it is often serves as a time when veteran free agents without teams decide that the available offers are not attractive enough to be worth it and retire. This seems to have been the case with Michael Young, who announced his retirement last week. He retired as as a member of the Texas Rangers, and he and the team seem to have been able to put aside whatever differences they had over the last few years of Young’s time with Texas.

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After having typically appeared in the entirely venerable pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections were released at FanGraphs last year. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Texas Rangers. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / Los Angeles NL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / San Diego / Seattle / St. Louis / Tampa Bay / Toronto.

Batters
Adjudged purely by likely wins gained relative to actual dollars spent, the Rangers’ trade of Ian Kinsler to Detroit for Prince Fielder doesn’t probably qualify as an excellent move. Team context can’t be ignored, however, as the ZiPS projection for infielder Jurickson Profar illustrates. Profar is likely to approximate Ian Kinsler’s production in 2014, is what Dan Szymborski’s computer math suggests. Fielder, moreover, represents an upgrade over whomever would have played first base or DH’ed instead of him. Ergo, the Rangers are improved overall.

Indeed, even with the acquisition of Fielder, Texas remains a club that could benefit from offensive help. Mitch Moreland’s bat profiles as just a league-average one — which, unless complemented by quite a bit in the way of run-saving defensively, conspires to make him something less than average overall. Combining him with a right-handed bat in a platoon would help that. With whom?, is the question. Michael Choice is one possibility, but he would appear to have something to offer in terms of defense.

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In a sense, the pitching market is still at a standstill. Masahiro Tanaka has little reason to sign before his deadline, and other pitchers have little reason to sign before Tanaka does, so for about another week and a half, we could be dealing with a whole lot of nothing. And it’s not just free-agent pitchers. There could be renewed runs at David Price and Jeff Samardzija, but only after Tanaka goes. And free-agent position players might wait for financial clarity as well. The short-term result of all this is that we’re not seeing changes in the 2014 projected standings, because teams aren’t making moves. But something did happen to shake things up right before the weekend.

That something is that Derek Holland hurt himself on his own staircase. It sounds too absurd to take real seriously, but the fact of the matter is that Holland needed knee surgery and he’s projected to be out until midseason. To hear Holland talk, he’s determined to beat those projections back to the field, but medical timetables aren’t made up out of thin air. Holland is going to be out for a significant amount of time. Holland is good, and his replacement will be worse. The Rangers are in a fragile position, and this is a bigger deal than it might seem like.

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And now I will present to you some known facts about Shin-Soo Choo. Most recently, Choo became a member of the Texas Rangers, for $130 million and seven guaranteed years. It’s a big investment for a team that was looking to make a big investment, and now the Rangers are probably the favorites to win the American League West. They’d long been linked to Choo, they’d long had a need, and Choo’s probably a better investment than Nelson Cruz would’ve been. He’s a splash, big enough to take the Rangers out of the potential running for Masahiro Tanaka.

Choo draws a ton of walks. He’s got a career OBP of .389, and he can run and slug, too. At .350, he owns one of the highest career BABIPs in the history of baseball. Since 1950, 797 players have batted at least 3,000 times through age 30. Choo’s BABIP is tied for seventh among them, equal to Kenny Lofton and a point above Joe Mauer. When facing right-handed pitchers, Choo’s had an awful lot in common with former teammate Joey Votto. When facing left-handed pitchers, he’s been much much worse. Choo’s got a big platoon split. He really is a sort of higher-profile Andre Ethier.

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On Saturday, the Rangers agreed to sign Shin-Soo Choo to a seven year, $130 million contract. With Nelson Cruz and David Murphy departing via free agency and Craig Gentry traded to Oakland, they had a gaping hole in atheir outfield, and they signed the best outfielder left on the market. Given their position on the win curve, maximizing their 2014 roster potential is an understandable strategy, even though Choo is likely to be completely dead weight by the end of this deal. As I wrote at the beginning of the off-season, nearly every long term free agent contract will be a poor investment for the team by the end, as they are designed to be a value to the team in the first few years and a value to the player in the last few.

That said, even with the Rangers having ample revenues — thanks to their television contract — and being in a prime position on the win curve, this still looks like a pretty significant overpay to me, and a contract I think Texas will regret sooner than later. In fact, depending on how much money Nelson Cruz suckers someone into paying him, this might actually end up as my least favorite contract of the entire winter. And I think this deal looks particularly mediocre when you see what the Yankees did with the same resources.

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Until this afternoon, the Rangers had a fairly complete team, save for left field, which was a mixture of never-was’ and might-be’s. For a team that was struggling to keep up this offseason with its counterparts in the Bay Area and Orange County, that simply wasn’t going to cut it. A move needed to be made, and today Texas made their move by signing Shin-Soo Choo.

Currently, the starting left fielder on the Rangers’ depth chart is Jim Adduci. Last season, Adduci made his major league debut, and tallied eight hits in 34 plate appearances. Not bad, except when you consider the fact that it was Adduci’s age-28 season. With him fronting the group, the Rangers’ left field options ranked just 28th on our depth charts entering today.

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This off-season is nuts. Every day, there are interesting moves, including some pretty fun trades that just go beyond the normal prospects-for-rent-a-veteran template that we’re all accustomed to. Today, there have been a bunch of moves, but perhaps none is more interesting from a pure baseball perspective than a swap of non-household names between the Rangers and A’s.

The move shapes up like this: the A’s trade outfield prospect Michael Choice and infield prospect Chris Bostick to the Rangers for outfielder Craig Gentry and reliever Josh Lindblom. Bostick and Lindblom are secondary pieces of some potential value, but this deal is mostly about Choice and Gentry. And the differing skillsets from those two players makes this a pretty fun challenge trade.

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The Phillies re-signed Carlos Ruiz to a 3-year, $26 million deal. Also: Brayan Pena and Geovany Soto have locked down their 2014 teams (the Royals Reds and Rangers respectively). And now it appears Jose Molina is in the final stages of returning to St. Pete for another two years of expertly framed and eh, who cares about blocking? pitches.

So where does that leave the catching market? As far as I have seen, the Yankees, Red Sox, Rockies, Angels, Rangers (still), Blue Jays and Twins have all been connected with free agent catchers on MLBTR. Using their handy free agents leaderboards (with a few additions), we can examine the remaining free agent catchers and try our hand at predicting the right fits for each.
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The Rangers traded Ian Kinsler for Prince Fielder. You know this already. I’ve already written a post about this trade, in fact, detailing why I love this deal for the Tigers. If baseball trading were a zero sum game, this would mean that I hate this move for the Rangers, since a big win would have to be offset by a big loss on the other side. But baseball trades are not a zero sum game. There are mutually beneficial trades. The Rangers are now hoping this is one of those deals where both sides get better.

The Rangers had to move a middle infielder. They couldn’t go into 2014 with Jurickson Profar as a super utility guy behind Elvis Andrus and Ian Kinsler again. They had three starting middle infielders, and Kinsler wasn’t interested in becoming a starting first baseman, so shifting him over to make room for Profar probably wasn’t an option. Someone had to go.

So, in that sense, this deal is not quite as straight forward as it is from the Tigers perspective. Detroit turned a +3 WAR player into a +3 WAR player and saved a bunch of money in the process. For the Rangers, though, the context is the reason the deal got done, and simply comparing the value of the player going out with the value of the player coming in doesn’t work. This deal was made because of the other players on the roster, the ones not getting traded. So let’s try and sort this all out.

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