Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter, as always, about Shohei Ohtani and Giancarlo Stanton, as well as the slow start to the offseason and baseball takeaways from news about basketball and football. Then they look for players who performed better in team losses, talk about two twins, and answer listener emails about the most valuable memo writer, robot bloggers, Stanton’s opt-out clause, two Ohtani hypotheticals, Mike Trout’s defensive position and spot in the batting order, Steve Matz’s future and starter-reliever conversions, Aaron Judge’s maximum contact rate, the best team superpower, and more, before wrapping up with a brief aside about Bitcoin.

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If there’s been one fairly easy prognostication this winter, it’s that the Red Sox are going to sign one of the expensive free agent hitters available in this class. Dave Dombrowski has historically not been shy about spending big to upgrade his roster, and has also shown a propensity for building rosters around power. The Red Sox ranked 27th in home runs last year. This is probably not something he wants to repeat.

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The other day, FanGraphs alum and MLB.com stalwart Mike Petriello looked at possible fits for Mike Moustakas. This author agrees with many of the potential landing spots.

Petriello boiled down the list to nine teams that could use Moustakas:

Giants
Pirates
Mets
Cardinals
Angels
Yankees
Royals
Phillies
Braves

Due either to payroll considerations (the Pirates) or their projected finish in 2018 (the Braves, Phillies, and Royals), a number of the clubs here might appear to be unlikely candidates to court Moustakas, although I argued on Monday that at least one of those teams ought to consider signing Moustakas.

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Peter Moylan is known for being from Australia as much as anything. That and the tattoos and the fun-loving personality. The fact that he’s a pretty decent relief pitcher tends to get lost in the shuffle. It shouldn’t. The 38-year-old side-winder has just four career saves, but he’s 24-9 with a 3.00 ERA since debuting with the Atlanta Braves in 2006. This past season, he made a league-leading 79 appearances with the Kansas City Royals.

Moylan originally came over in 1996 when the Minnesota Twins signed him at the age of 17. That didn’t pan out. After two tumultuous years of Rookie ball, Moylan found himself back in Australia working day jobs. Unable to cut the mustard as a pitching prospect, he became a laborer, a glass installer, a pharmaceutical salesman. Baseball became more or less a hobby.

He turned the hobby into a second chance. Moylan attracted the attention of Atlanta scouts while pitching in the 2006 World Baseball Classic and was inked to a make-good contract. He did just that. Despite a plethora of surgeries — back, elbow, shoulder — he’s still wearing a big-league uniform a decade later. Does that mean he’s a household name down under? Not so much.

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Moylan on making his mark in MLB: “Am I surprised I’m still playing? No, but I feel like I’m playing with house money. In everyone’s eyes, I was never going to be a guy who comes over here and goes very far. I was 27 when I was a rookie. I came out of the World Baseball Classic and it was more of ‘Let’s take a chance on this guy.’ The fact that I’ve turned that chance into an 11-year career… I’m really grateful.

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Pitch clocks are likely coming to an MLB stadium near you in 2018, according to a report by Buster Olney from earlier this month.

There’s a practical reason for the introduction of the clock and for the commissioner’s interest in it: the game keeps slowing down. In fact, in the pitch-tracking era — and likely in the history of the sport — the pace of game has never been slower than it was in 2017.

While pace of game and time of game aren’t entirely the same thing, they’re certainly connected, and the average length of game was a record three hours and five minutes last season. That’s up from three hours and 42 seconds in 2016.

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After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the New York Mets. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Batters
Mets position players actually put together a pretty strong campaign in 2017, recording the 11th-best WAR in the majors among their peers. That would normally represent some cause for optimism in terms of next season — would, that is, were the current roster to feature the same personnel as this past year’s. An inspection of that roster, however, reveals that four of the club’s top seven players by WAR from 2017 are no longer employed by the organization. Curtis Granderson (2.3 WAR for the Mets in 2017), Jay Bruce (2.0), Jose Reyes (2.0), and Neil Walker (1.4) have all departed either by way of trade or free agency.

The exodus of talent might pose some challenges to the 2018 edition of the Mets. According to Dan Szymborski’s computer, however, it also might not. ZiPS calls for over seven wins combined from Yoenis Cespedes (projected for 500 PA and 3.4 zWAR) and Michael Conforto (513, 3.7), which would go some distance towards mitigating the losses of the club’s departed outfielders. The projections here also suggest that young shortstop Amed Rosario (594, 2.2) and young first baseman Dominic Smith (652, 2.5) could produce nearly five wins as a pair — this, after recording -0.3 WAR collectively in 2017. Those sorts of return would likely place the Mets’ field-playing contingent among the league’s middle third again.

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The Rays need stars. It’s all well and good to come up with a bunch of league-average plugins, but without stars, a team is stuck. A team is trapped, being okay without being good, and there’s a reason people are beginning to wonder whether the Rays should tear it all down. Without enough stars, what chance do they have of getting over the top? What chance do they have of keeping up with the Red Sox and Yankees? There’s a certain amount of appeal in pressing the reset button. And no one could blame the Rays, given the reality of their circumstances.

I’m not sure if the Rays will throw in the towel. They understand the process better than most, and they’re forever thinking about the longer-term, but conceding the present is never easy. It’s a major decision that asks an awful lot of the roster and the fan base. So maybe the Rays will blow it up, or maybe the Rays will tinker. Should they opt to keep trying, that could reflect organizational confidence in the development of Blake Snell.

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