Yesterday, news broke that right-handed starting pitcher Jeremy Hellickson had surgery to remove loose bodies from his elbow and will be out until mid-to-late May. The childish part of me wants to make a quip about the loose bodies teaming up with those ever antagonistic free radicals, forcing a counter-insurgency executed with surgical precision. It would seem the childish part of me has succeeded.

The less childish part of me wonders how this setback affects the Tampa Bay Rays in 2014. The short answer is, not much, but there are a number of trickle down effects that are worth exploring.

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Here are a couple things that we know:

• The Rays and the A’s are lower-budget baseball teams
• The Rays and the A’s have good ideas of what they’re doing

I suppose we can’t really prove the second one, but to the extent that results can serve as indicators, it’s hard to argue with how successful the teams have been despite their considerable financial disadvantages. Both front offices are thought of as intelligent, forward-thinking, analytical, and efficient, and they’re efficient out of necessity, because neither team can afford to flush money down the toilet. They need to try to get the most out of every dollar they spend.

Here’s another thing that we know: over the offseason, the Rays and the A’s have poured some millions into building up their bullpens. Relievers are often thought of as being lousy investments, and it seems easy enough to cobble a bullpen together on the cheap, so when the Rays and the A’s invest in late-inning vets, it gets attention. The temptation is to believe they’re exploiting some kind of inefficiency. The temptation is to believe we’ve been wrong about relievers for a while. Basically, the temptation is to believe that they’re on to something. And, you know, maybe that’s true. Maybe they’ve figured something out. Or maybe people are just looking for patterns in the sand. Maybe there’s nothing weird going on at all.

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It both makes a lot of sense and it doesn’t. Grant Balfour is good, and the Rays have signed him for two years and $12 million. You’ll recall that’s $3 million less than it looked like he would be getting earlier in the offseason. That’s the sensible bit. This is the more confusing bit:

There’s also a price to pay with that, as Friedman acknowledged their payroll is projected to be higher than the franchise-record of $72.8 million in 2010.

“I think it’s an unaffordable figure for our franchise,” Friedman said.
[…]
“But it’s certainly not a sustainable number in terms of where we are revenue-wise, but we felt like we had a really good chance to be great next year, that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing.”

That’s from the beginning of January. That’s when the guy in charge of the Rays’ roster referred to the payroll as “unaffordable” and not sustainable. You wouldn’t expect that team to add another eight-figure player, especially with that player being a relief pitcher. But, let’s just assume the Rays have a better idea what they can afford than I do. Let’s assume they’re prepared to move ahead with David Price in the rotation, salary and all. If you grant that the Rays can afford this, then it would appear like the Orioles gave them a gift.

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If you had told me at the start of this week that Logan Forsythe was going to headline a seven-player trade, I’d have said that you just must be bored because nothing has been going on. After all, how often do seven-player trades happen? I mean, that’s just crazy talk. That it did actually happen, and that the headliner has compiled a grand total of 1.7 WAR is cool, in an odd sort of way. The trade is also rare in the sense that it both fills distinct needs for both clubs, but also is a bit of a challenge trade.

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The Braves are going to arbitration with Jason Heyward over $300 thousand dollars. It’s a wonderful sentence, full of so many words that could set you off in a million different directions. And so I followed those strings, talking to as many people involved in arbitration as I could. Many of those directions did lead me to denigrations of arbitration, and of the file-to-trial arbitration policy that the Braves employ. There’s another side to that sort of analysis though. Arbitration is not horrid. File-to-trial policies have their use. This is not all the Braves’ fault.

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Earlier today, polite and Canadian and polite Marc Hulet published his 2014 organizational prospect list for the Tampa Bay Rays.

It goes without saying that, in composing such a list, Hulet has considered the overall future value those prospects might be expected to provide either to the Rays or whatever other organizations to which they might someday belong.

What this brief post concerns isn’t overall future value, at all, but rather such value as the prospects from Hulet’s list might provide were they to play, more or less, a full major-league season in 2014.

Other prospect projections: Arizona / Baltimore / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Houston / Los Angeles AL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York NL / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Toronto.

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As we’ve talked about a whole bunch of times, the pitching market is at a standstill right now, as teams await a Masahiro Tanaka resolution. Free agents are waiting to maximize the size of their markets, and teams are waiting because they’d prefer not to be reduced to chasing one of the free agents instead of Tanaka. Tanaka, baseball has decided, is much better. Additionally, the trade market is quiet, especially the one for David Price, because while teams do of course see Price as an ace, getting him would require giving up players, and teams are more comfortable just giving up money. So Tanaka is the primary focus.

It stands to reason there could be one more run at Price after Tanaka makes a decision. Every team but one will be left without a new Tanaka on it, and there just aren’t many starters like that available. But where once a Price trade seemed like a foregone conclusion, here’s Buster Olney on Tuesday:

Increasingly, rival executives are convinced that David Price will remain with the Rays for the 2014 season. “Ninety percent chance he stays,” said one rival official. “The [trade] market hasn’t materialized.”

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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 Tampa Bay Rays. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Cleveland / Los Angeles NL / Miami / Minnesota / New York AL / Philadelphia / San Diego / Seattle / St. Louis.

Batters
Certain clubs over the past 20 or so years have featured celebrated pairs of teammates: Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire*, for example, who played together on the late-80s Oakland clubs or David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez on the mid-aught Boston ones or, more recently, Miguel Cabrera and Prince Fielder with Detroit. It’s entirely possible, however, that the combination of Evan Longoria and Ben Zobrist is more formidable than any of those in terms of all-around production. Defensively, based on their ZiPS projections, each is at least as valuable afield as a league-average shortstop (and a bit more than that, in Longoria’s case).

With regard to the precise location of certain players on the depth-chart graphic below, one is compelled to acknowledge that, as in recent seasons, manager Joe Maddon is likely both to utilize platoons more than is suggested by that same graphic and also probably to use the DH slot for the sake of flexibility rather than as a lineup spot merely for, say, Matt Joyce alone. It would be interesting to see outfielder and right-handed-batting Brandon Guyer receive a substantive number of at-bats after several decent offensive seasons at Triple-A.

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Over the past three seasons, the modus operandi for the Tampa Bay Rays has been to find a one-year solution at first base in the clearance bin of the offseason market. In 2011, that came in the form of adding Casey Kotchman on a minor league deal and watching him produce a 2.4 win season. In 2012, the team upped the budget and spent $7.25M to bring back Carlos Pena a year after he left via free agency, but Pena struggled through a 0.7 win season. Last season, James Loney was brought in on a $2M deal, and turned a profit with a career-best 2.7 win season.

The first base situation has been as much as a revolving door as the closer role has been with the club. Until Fernando Rodney repeated as the team saves leader last season, the team had had a different pitcher leads the team in saves each year under Maddon. While they have had repeated success with the closer role, the situation at first base has been a bit different.  As Joe Maddon often says about these types of situations, the Rays meatloafed the first base situation.

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The thing we know is that David Price is going to be traded. That much is a virtual certainty, for all of the reasons you already understand. The things we don’t know are all of the details. We don’t know where he’s going to be traded to, and we don’t know what he’s going to bring back. We don’t know when the trade is going to happen, and we don’t know if there’ll even be a trade this offseason. Would the Rays be daring enough to move Price during a competitive regular season? Would they be daring enough to wait to move Price until the next winter? Who feels a greater sense of urgency — the team with Price, or the teams that would like to have him? Behind the scenes, there’s probably a lot of activity, but from the outside it feels like nothing has budged for a matter of weeks.

Oh, and there’s another thing we know. David Price has been outstanding. Truly outstanding, since he graduated into the majors. He’s posted four consecutive seasons of at least 180 innings and at least an average ERA, and the reality is that he’s mostly exceeded those marks with relative ease. Over the four seasons, he’s averaged 208 innings and a 78 ERA-. Price has been one of the game’s great workhorses, and that’s a big part of how the Rays are selling him. You get Price, and you can write his next season’s numbers in ink.

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