Hot Stove 2023-2024

soto home vs away in 2023:

home: .240/.398/.429 (12 HR)
away: .307/.422/.604 (23 HR)

xp they’ve got no money cos their tv deal collapsed, they decided to pay Xander Bogaerts a ton of money to play first base next year and their owner just died, I doubt they give a fuck about the opinions of the fans. The bigger fuckup was signing Bogaerts and not prioritising Soto.

The proposed return btw:

King, a SP the Yankees decided to use from being a reliever, good performance in a small sample size
Brito: potentially a SP, will be better than Rich Hill was for the Padres
Thorpe: iirc their best pitching prospect not too far off the major leagues
Vasquez: nfi
Higgy: lol at least he’s not Austin Nola????

The Yankees rotation before this was:

- Cole, Cortes, Rodón, King, Schmidt. I think? So they have probably at least two SP to fill given that Cortes and Rodón are both crocked. And I don’t think any other team was going to give them two putative SP for a rental.

Cashman is rumored to be in Japan courting Yoshinobu Yamamoto 👀👀👀

Seidler was a maniac, clearly. RIP to the Padres' spendiest owner ever, and good luck to Greupner and Kutsenda if they try to move Bogaerts or Tatis next.

xp you mean Steve Cohen

Yankees GM Brian Cashman and manager Aaron Boone just left the winter meetings hotel and are headed to the Nashville airport with no Soto deal finalized yet

— Bob Nightengale (@BNightengale) December 6, 2023

Juan Soto trade agreement is being finalized now, source confirms.

The deal, as @JackCurryYES and @Joelsherman1 reported, sends Soto and Trent Grisham to New York for Michael King, Drew Thorpe, Jhony Brito, Randy Vásquez, and Kyle Higashioka.

Thorpe and Vasquez are the Yankees 5th- and 13th-best prospects according to MLB.

Cashman en route to Japan! 👀👀👀

https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=yamamo004yos

I'm glad Soto is out of the NL West

very strange to see a player as statistically good as Soto being traded twice before he hits free agency. wonder if there is anything to that.

More to do with extending him. He wouldn’t extend with the Nationals even though they offered him $440m for 15 years so they traded him and went into rebuild rather than walk for free. The Padres don’t have the money to extend him so they traded him to get some money off the books as they wanted to bring payroll down to $200m and he hits free agency next year - all their other expensive contracts (Tatis Jr, Machado, Darvish, Bogaerts) are locked up for years.

Looking forward to the Yanks moving him at the trade deadline for a top Dodgers prospect

Ha, Soto may get traded again this year if the Yanks swoon before the trade deadline! It's all circumstantial.

he's my favorite player that i dread my favorite team facing. i don't usually watch baseball through my fingers, but i often do when soto is up!

I think there's this perception, maybe partially true as far as certain counting stats but vv unfair, that Soto has fallen shy of what people think he's capable of. Still frighteningly good, and he looks like a Hall of famer to me, *and* he's only 25.

yadier molina is back to the cardinals, this time as a special assistant to Mozeliak. but i would think it highly likely that if the cards disappoint again in 2024, oli marmol gets canned and yadi's in as manager

yankees taking a risk in trading for a boras client in the last year of his deal, but gotta think a lefty slugger like soto will be a great fit. idk if there's anything to trent grisham as a reclamation project, but he is better than a lot of the jamokes they were running out in the outfield last year.

as gyac said, they need pitching help fast (tho gyac, you forgot about frankie montas! to be fair, everybody does). they're gonna go all out for yamamoto, maybe trade another prospect for an available starter. and if they sense yamamoto isn't working out, they might re-sign their old friend jordan montgomery.

as for what they gave up, king has probably been the yankees best reliever over the past few years and showed a lot of promise as a starter. i am not mad at cashman for selling him when his value is highest though. thorpe is the other potential guy in that trade who the yankees might regret parting with (tho if soto re-signs, i doubt they'll regret it much). brito was overmatched as a big league starter last year, but could turn into a back of rotation arm. vasquez's under-the-hood stats belie some pretty good results from last year. neither vasquez nor brito get many strikeouts and in a stadium like that, you can't keep that kind of starter around for long.

i'm not sure there's much risk to this trade given that the best prospects they gave up are all pitchers. i guess there's some opportunity cost in terms of what else they have left to trade, but i doubt a better player than soto comes on the trade market this year

i'm pretty shocked that they got grisham as a throw in, too. even as is he's prob net equal w/ king from a WAR perspective & if his hitting ever returns he could be an all star

Real chance that the Padres will be much better this upcoming year than last, even subtracting soto. If Machado follows his pattern, he's going to be in the MVP conversation again. And Tatis will be back for a full year, assuming he doesn't do anything stupid.

the risk is that he doesn't re-sign, but yeah, chances are even one year of soto will be better for the team than keeping all those prospects (and king)

grisham will be good. judge doesn't have to play centerfield anymore and even if grisham is basically aaron hicks 2.0, at least he's a younger, healthier version of hicks

i don't think there's any way soto doesn't hit free agency. but maybe the yankees are hoping that a year of mystique, aura and a short RF porch will give them a leg up

otoh given what they're paying judge/cole/rodon/stanton, i'm not sure they can afford him (given hal's appetite)

"But I do think that there’s something about Soto’s particular greatness that makes it somewhat easier to deal him. He’s probably a below-average outfielder and probably a below-average baserunner, and a great deal of his value comes from his patience at the plate — he has led the league in walks three times. He doesn’t seem to me a conventionally EXCITING player like those young and untradeable players mentioned above. I’m sure Nationals fans loved him, and I’m sure Padres fans loved him, but how deep was that love? Was it Ken Griffey Jr. level love? No, certainly not. Was it Johnny Bench love? Was it Mickey Mantle love? Was it Al Kaline love?

You would think that the Yankees will go all the way with Soto now, that they will, in due course, spend the big money and sign him long-term and make Aaron Judge-Juan Soto the best righty-lefty hitting combination in baseball today, and one of the best in baseball history. We’ll see."

Posnanski, yes. Omar's post about counting stats makes more or less the same point.

I know Votto is loved in Cincinnati now, but didn't he go through a version of that for the first half of his career? With the Cincinnati media, anyway--not sure about the fans, and at least management didn't trade him away.

i can imagine him getting to miggy-level love if his teams stop trading him every 18 months

no one is getting to mantle-level, because baseball is no longer the dominant sport that it was in his time

That Verdugo Photoshop is a violation

Remember when Aaron judge/giancarlo Stanton was going to be the greatest power duo in history back in 2018? Stanton has relatively quickly gone from winning MVP to posting negative war last year.

(tho gyac, you forgot about frankie montas! to be fair, everybody does)

apologies to gyac and everyone else, frankie is a free agent after pitching about 40 innings for the yankees in a season and a half. good trade, cash.

xp soto and judge have better overlapping skill sets. judge and stanton are the same kind of hitter, big power and big swings leading to homers and strikeouts. soto and judge complement each other: one lefty, one righty, one an on-base merchant, one a isolated power god. soto + judge as 2 and 3 will instantly elevate the yanks offense in to very good territory, if not elite (since they still have a lot of lineup question marks)

experts are saying that over a bajillion runs could be scored

https://blogs.fangraphs.com/juan-soto-is-going-to-score-a-bajillion-runs-hitting-in-front-of-aaron-judge/

but yes, soto and judge have excellent overlapping skills. and also, inasmuch as staying healthy can be considered a skill, soto tends to play every single day, whereas stanton will likely miss the HOF just because he couldn't stay on the field

I guess it could be argued that Stanton, if healthy, might have wound up being the right-handed Jim Thome. He was truly fearsome when he was in FLA.

idk maybe I’m just sick of all the hype and think pieces that accompany these trades. when Soto was first traded it was a once in a lifetime thing that would never happen again and whoever got him would be the most feared lineup etc. And the Soto + Judge potential doesn’t feel that different from what was promised when you had Machado + Tatis + Soto all together

Judge and Stanton were supposed to hit 100-110 HR between them every single season.

to be fair they did get to 93 in 2022 but there was a slight imbalance

There seem to be toronto rumblings

Good, if its not the Giants then I'm happy it's not the Dodgers either.

Blue Jays calling a presser for 6pm est

I've been monitoring the Toronto and national 24-hour new stations the past hour, and the coverage isn't as intense as you might expect--maybe some reservations about it actually happening, and that we're just a smokescreen for the inevitable L.A. signing.

What the fuck is going on

Can confirm Shohei Ohtani is not en route to Toronto and is home in SoCal @BNightengale on it

— Jon Heyman (@JonHeyman) December 8, 2023

Exactly what I mean. I got sucked in today, but I generally try to stay clear of all this stuff.

He's such a drama queen, he just needs to make a decision so the rest of the league can get on with business.

Yeah it’s reminiscent of the Correa stuff from last year. Meanwhile…

Tyler O’Neill is being traded to Red Sox

— Jon Heyman (@JonHeyman) December 8, 2023

He's such a drama queen, he just needs to make a decision so the rest of the league can get on with business.

He's such a drama queen, he just needs to make a decision so the rest of the league can get on with business.

― Bee OK, Friday, December 8, 2023 5:38 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

sources close to him have said he's deciding this weekend. he literally hasn't said a word to the press. how is he being a drama queen?

Who is this guy
― mojo dojo casas house (gyac), Friday, December 8, 2023 5:38 PM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

post-hype outfielder, had a pretty great season in 2021. someone in st. louis had to get squeezed out, guess they decided to keep nootbar and carlson over him.

I've seen enough:

Ohtani signs with Oakland.

new face of the Oakland Ballers