Behind the ESPN paywall, Jeff Passan has a story about the flurry of megadeals that teams struck with key free agents in the last days before the looming lockout. Passan calls it "the wildest 24 hours in the history of baseball free agency," and he opens with the case of Marcus Semien.
Semien was a popular target among White Sox fans, but Passan says the same things that supposedly might make him more affordable -- being 31 years old, playing more second than shortstop as of late -- were the same elements that made him immensely appealing to the rest of baseball, giving Scott Boras the leverage to stage a feeding frenzy.
On the first night of the GM meetings, the Detroit Tigers told Boras that they were in. The next day, the Texas Rangers came to [Omni La Costa Resort and Spa Suite] 6048 to say the same. The Toronto Blue Jays wanted to re-sign him. The San Francisco Giants loved him. So did the Seattle Mariners. The interested parties figured the bidding for Semien would wind up somewhere in the neighborhood of what the Blue Jays had given George Springer -- another 31-year-old, up-the-middle, big-power, good-makeup player -- a year earlier: six years, $150 million. If a team added a year or bumped the average annual value, perhaps that would compel Semien to jump the lockout. [...]
After a few days off for Thanksgiving, Semien's market started to percolate, spurred by the Rangers, Blue Jays and Tigers. Determined to seal the deal, on the morning of Nov. 28, Texas played its trump card: a seventh year. The Rangers offered $175 million. At about 5 p.m., Semien accepted. It was the biggest deal handed out by the Rangers since Alex Rodriguez's historic 10-year, $252 million contract more than two decades earlier.
Passan then lines up the other free agent signings in quicker succession -- Kevin Gausman with Toronto, which led to Max Scherzer in New York, which led to Robbie Ray in Seattle, circling back to Corey Seager in Texas, all the way to Javier Báez with Detroit at six years and $140 million.
In the wee hours of the morning, on calls across four time zones, Javier Baez found a new team. Baez wasn't supposed to sign. His cutoff had been Friday, Saturday at the latest. But then the Detroit Tigers, who had been on Semien and Story and were monitoring Correa, came calling, and now they were getting their shortstop of the future. Baez was in Puerto Rico, Tigers GM Al Avila in Detroit, Tigers manager AJ Hinch in Houston and Nick Chanock, Baez's agent, in Los Angeles, where it was technically still Monday, not even half a day separated from the wild 24.
The disappointing news is that the White Sox weren't part of it, with Kendall Graveman the only thing to show for their pre-lockout work. The solace is that Detroit, with Báez and Eduardo Rodriguez, is the only AL Central team that stepped up.
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As for the four other Central squads, the Twins made the biggest symbolic gesture by extending Byron Buxton for seven years and $100 million, when Buxton's enigmatic combination of elite performance and gruesome durability made trading him away a reasonable outcome. Yet that only maintains a relationship with a player who was already in the fold for 2022.
When it comes to additions, the Twins only have Dylan Bundy and his 6.06 ERA in 2021 to show for it. He came to Minnesota for one year and $5 million, and the Twins lost the benefit of the doubt with journeymen pitchers after the high-profile flameouts of Matt Shoemaker and J.A. Happ last season.
With 13 of the 15 top free agent pitchers already under contract (Carlos Rodón and Clayton Kershaw are the others), the Twins' inactivity has The Athletic's Aaron Gleeman shaking his head.
It’s the Twins’ failure to sign any front-line starting pitchers from a strong and deep free-agent class that comes as much more of a surprise given their obvious need for significant rotation help. As currently constructed, the Twins’ rotation consists of Bundy and the inexperienced duo of Bailey Ober and Joe Ryan, who have 119 career big-league innings between them. And then two blank spaces.
They desperately need veteran rotation help, and with a projected 2022 payroll of around $90 million, the Twins would have to spend another $45 million just to equal their recent payrolls that fell near the MLB average. That seemingly made it safe to assume they’d try to add at least one free-agent starter to sit atop the rotation while the young arms like Ober, Ryan and various prospects developed further.
Yet here they are, with the entire sport at a standstill for what could be months, having watched other teams spend nearly $2 billion on free agents in the sprint to get deals done before the lockout, all but empty-handed and with a rotation still in very obvious need of reinforcements above the Bundy level. Except now, instead of having more than a dozen good starters available, the pool is drained.
Over in Cleveland, the team opened the Guardians era by watching their team store sign fall off the façade, and that's still the most action of the winter at Ontario and Carnegie.
Dan Szymborski posted the ZiPS projections for the 2022 Guardians at FanGraphs, and while Shane Bieber and José Ramírez continue being the real deals -- combining for 11 WAR between them -- it's a roster that's very well positioned for a key free agent of any kind. There are a lot of ways to mix and match the playing time at various positions, so any kind of addition could be accommodated.
But if you figure they aren't going to do that, you're left with a lot of finger-crossing for 70th-percentile outcomes.
As disappointing as the White Sox's meager appetite for big moves may be, there still isn't a reason to panic about the pre-lockout activity. The White Sox still should project comfortably ahead, and if Detroit was going to go after a big name at shortstop, I'd rather it be Báez than the other four, even if he represents a big upgrade in his own right. Basically, the White Sox have finally reached a position where they don't have to work that hard to stay ahead, so I guess you could say they're indulging that luxury.
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We'll need the remainder of the offseason to understand whether the White Sox hamstrung themselves due to the early inactivity, but it's also fair to say that the Graveman signing isn't enough to keep a Sox fan warm over the winter.
For alternative fuel, I might first suggest a handsome Sox Machine knit cap, now available for purchase on the Sox Machine store.
Beyond apparel, I'll point to this post about Luis Robert's post-injury improvements by Luke Hooper at FanGraphs. Robert started opening his stance in April, and kinda like continental plates, his feet slowly but surely drifted further apart. Because Robert kept enjoying sensational results, the league didn't present a reason to stop.
From here, the question is whether Robert will eventually pay a price for his extreme aggression. He improved his contract rate on pitches inside the zone, but he's still swinging at a lot of pitches that aren't strikes, making him an outlier when it comes to discipline versus production.
Robert hit .338/.378/.567 over 68 games last year and finished the season strong, which makes it hard to call his plate approach bad. That might be results-over-process thinking, but that's less of a shortcoming when the results are among the best imaginable.
(Photo by Peter Joneleit/Icon Sportswire)
