The task of assembling a pitching staff is as much about quantity as quality. With injury rates over 50% for most pitchers in the age of the ten-day DL, you need more than the ten starters you used to need, in order to withstand the assault that is a full season of throwing baseballs hard. So, even though Drew Smyly won’t suit up for the Cubs until late next season at best, it makes sense to put him on the roster, slot him in the Disabled List, and hope he can contribute. Especially since the cost is low.

The Cubs will be on the hook only a little bit more than the Mariners would have owed Smyly had they retained his services through his last year of arbitration. The left-hander, despite being in the midst of rehab for Tommy John surgery, would have gotten around $7m in arbitration. Chicago is giving him a base salary of $10 million, with the potential for more.

Smyly deal with #Cubs is two years, $10M plus the potential to earn more than $7M in performance bonuses, source tells The Athletic. Pitched with #Rays for Maddon and Hickey.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) December 13, 2017

Return rates on Tommy John surgery are good enough that this could easily be a good contract for the Cubs. Perhaps Smyly wanted to lock in two years after his extended arm issue took from the World Baseball Classic until June last season to really nail down. Perhaps he understood that, after only topping 150 innings twice in his career, and being pegged as one of the biggest injury risks in baseball in a 2016 study by Bradley Woodrum, he needed to have a healthy 2019 before he would get a longer-term deal anyway.

This way, the lefty with the intriguing stuff — almost nothing he throws cuts towards his glove side, and his extreme over-the-top release point means that everything seems to fade away from righties — gets to take his rehab slowly. A 12-to-15 month timeline has him back mid season at best, though it does seem worth pointing out that pitchers that take longer to come back from Tommy John have better outcomes. Any longer, and he might miss most of the 2018 season.

When he does come back, the Cubs could use him as a lefty out of the pen, since Mike Montgomery is their second lefty behind Justin Wilson, and Montgomery may be headed to the rotation as it stands right now.

Or they can slot him into their 2019 rotation, at a low cost of a $3 million base salary. Sounds like a good way to maybe help the staff now and almost definitely help later on.

Just yesterday, the Rangers signed Chris Martin for two years and $4 million. Martin is a righty reliever who will turn 32 next June, and his major-league ERA is 6.19. If you try to Google him to examine his background, you have to be selective with your queries, because otherwise you just learn an awful lot about popular music. The Martin signing is a fairly easy one to ignore, all things considered.

I can’t make any promises. I don’t know what Martin might be capable of. But I feel almost obligated to try to talk him up. This seems like a forgettable deal, but Martin appears to have major upside. And the key to this is that, since Martin last pitched in the major leagues, he spent a couple of years in Japan.

Martin has been a teammate of Shohei Ohtani, with Hokkaido. Two years ago, he picked up 21 saves, reflecting the kind of trust he quickly earned. Because of an ankle injury, Martin has thrown just 88.1 innings over two seasons, but his performance was almost immaculate. I’ll tell you what I mean! Between 2016 – 2017, 190 different pitchers in the NPB threw at least 50 innings. Martin ranked first out of all of them in runs per nine, at 1.32. He ranked sixth in walk rate and seventh in strikeout rate, and he ranked second in K-BB%. The only pitcher ahead of him, in that final stat: Dennis Sarfate, who is outstanding. Martin hasn’t been quite on Sarfate’s level, but Sarfate seems like one of the best relievers in the world. Martin, meanwhile, seems just plain good.

If you’re curious about the stuff — when Martin last pitched in the majors, his fastball was 95, and he had a cutter at 90 and a slider at 83. This past season in Japan, Martin threw his fastball at 95, with a cutter at 91 and a slider at 84. He also started to show a splitter, at 87. This is all coming from a righty who stands 6’8. Martin just threw one of the better fastballs in Japan, and while the average fastball in the majors, of course, is harder, the stuff is good enough to play. Martin qualifies as a power reliever, with three or four pitches at his disposal. The numbers leave little reason for doubt.

The uncertainty is always the same. NPB isn’t the same as MLB, and so you can’t bring the same hitters over. Martin is going to face tougher competition, and the Rangers are hoping his overall command improvements are real. But, at the very least, Martin deserves this second shot. If a pitcher were this effective in Triple-A, you’d want to see him in a big-league bullpen, and Japanese baseball is better than that. The Rangers in 2016 got a good relief season out of Tony Barnette, who had also just pitched in Japan, and I’m sure that only encouraged them. In a market where everyone wants bullpen help, Martin is a potential bargain. Players from Japan have their prices driven down, perhaps unfairly. Finding inefficiencies is always the goal.

I don’t know if Martin will be good against the world’s best hitters. He was extremely good against the world’s second-best hitters. He’s going to cost a relative pittance. While this probably won’t win the Rangers a World Series, I could never look down on a move like this.

When the Angels landed Shohei Otani on Friday and the Yankees acquired Giancarlo Stanton over the weekend, I noted that the move might motivate the fringe contenders in the AL to shift gears. Rationally, the bar to make the postseason in the AL was just raised significantly, and teams like the Orioles saw their path to the playoffs get significantly slimmer.

This week, the Orioles appear to have gotten the memo.

#Orioles shopping Machado – and he wants to return to SS. Story: https://t.co/gnKcmW0dUh $

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) December 12, 2017

There’s no real reason for the Orioles to keep Manny Machado. We have the Orioles projected for 76 wins, right between the Braves and Marlins, and Machado is heading into his final year before reaching free agency. The Orioles can’t afford to let a guy with his value walk for draft pick compensation next year, so the question is whether they would trade him now or this summer.

By moving him now, they can take advantage of the desire of multiple teams to add an impact position player this winter, with the Cardinals as a potentially obvious suitor. While there aren’t that many contenders out there looking for a shortstop, Machado is a legitimately elite player, and teams that don’t see SS as a need might still get involved just to get that kind of impact player in the fold. And if some team wants to take a 10 month run at trying to re-sign him before he hits free agency, then there’s value in acquiring him ahead of time to get those exclusive negotiating rights.

The Orioles should do pretty well in a Machado deal, even though he’s just a rental. A +6 WAR guy who can provide his level of offense from SS is not something that comes available every day. Let the bidding begin!

This morning, I started working on a post about why perhaps the Cardinals should think twice before pursuing Marcell Ozuna too heavily. The premise of the post was, essentially, that while the team could afford to ignore handedness when targeting Giancarlo Stanton, Marcell Ozuna isn’t that same kind of impact hitter who crushes everyone, and the team should pause before adding yet another right-handed hitter to an already right-handed heavy line-up.

The Cardinals currently project to play two left-handed hitters (Matt Carpenter and Kolten Wong) on a regular basis. Switch-hitting Dexter Fowler bats from the left side against RHPs, but that’s also his weaker side offensively. Even including Fowler, though, that’s three lefties and six righties, and with one of those three being a weak-hitting middle infielder. The Cardinals line-up just doesn’t have much in the way of left-handed power.

So the post was going to suggest that the Cardinals turn away from Ozuna, and instead go for a good left-handed outfield slugger instead. And then I realized that those guys don’t really exist in MLB right now.

Here are the left-handed hitting outfielders who have accumulated at least 1,200 PAs over the last three years, and their wRC+ over that span.

22 left-handed OFs have posted a league-average or better batting line in regular playing time over the last three years, but Harper is the only one to crack the 130 wRC+ barrier, and only two others even get over 120 wRC+. A good chunk of the 22 guys on this list are no one’s idea of a slugger, as they got themselves to average offense with OBP, not SLG. No one is going to mistake Brett Gardner, Kole Calhoun, Jackie Bradley Jr., Nori Aoki, Melky Cabrera, Denard Span, Nick Markakis, or Ender Inciarte for a slugger.

Of course, the 1,200 PA minimum does exclude a few guys who haven’t been regulars for three straight years, such as Michael Conforto, Kyle Schwarber, and Cody Bellinger. So it’s not like there are no lefty outfield sluggers in baseball. But those guys are also basically unavailable, so for the Cardinals purposes, that trio doesn’t really matter.

So, yeah, where did all the lefty slugging outfielders go? The shift reducing the effectiveness of left-handed pull players could explain part of this evolution, but it feels overly sudden to have the shift already have changed the game this significantly. More likely it’s just a cyclical thing. Baseball does this sometimes.

But that does mean that, for right now, the Cardinals might have to run a pretty unbalanced line-up. It’s either that or trade for Joc Pederson.