Hot Stove 2023-2024

well yeah

mariners would be nuts to trade kirby. incredibly cool player.

Yes I wouldn’t either, but he would command a huge price in the trades and those cunts aren’t going to spend money. That kind of pinpoint control, I can’t see them paying for him in free agency.

He might eventually end up with your guys tbh, he’s from NY State and grew up a Yankees fan (though there’s a picture of him wearing a Red Sox shirt on his Instagram)

If I were trading for a Mariners SP and knowing Kirby and Castillo* aren’t going anywhere my priorities in order would be dependent on how much time I had to work with the guys. Here is a guide in case any of these guys get traded.

- Logan Gilbert
Pros: about ten feet tall, huge extension, 4 years of control, good breaking and offspeed mix, has that forever feeling of not being anywhere near his ceiling, healthy

Cons: his boyfriend** Cal Raleigh will come after you if you look at him, his 4-seamer has a BA of .280, from Florida.

-Bryan Woo
Pros: A BABY (he was called up from Double A last year due to Marco Gonzales being injured), great fastball, great ceiling if he can get a curveball or slider working for him. SEVEN years of team control.

Cons: he was on an innings limit last season due to being brought up early, needs some careful handling to stay in the big leagues, only really has two good pitches atm.

- Bryce Miller
Pros: also a BABY (he was called up from double A to fill a hole in the rotation when Robbie Ray got injured), has a great fastball, looks like Randy Johnson if he was hit with a shrinking device.

Cons: he has one pitch not even kidding, also fell apart as the season went on despite strong start due to needing more time to cook in the minors.

*Castillo is on a team friendly contract, if they trade him they might as well just fire everyone in charge of acquiring free agents
** they are the best of friends and lived together all through the minors and Cal made breakfast for him every day for YEARS until Logan got married and moved out

I hate seeing people talk shit about Toronto like they know it. If you live in Toronto you know how special of a place it is and how passionate the people are #GeauxCanada #GeauxBlueJays 🇨🇦🇨🇦

— Kevin Gausman (@KevinGausman) December 11, 2023

yeah all the people talking about toronto like it's some backwater instead of the fourth largest city in north america are making my blood boil. because they're not really talking about "markets" or whatever, they are talking about revenue for the u.s.-based tv networks. fans do not and should not care about that!

George Kirby is a guy who could be the new Maddux, if he's able to keep it together and get more consistency -- his bWAR was a little lower than i thought it might be, 3.9 over 190.2 IP. maybe some park factors there, he was more than a full run better at home vs the road. but he's a good one, they've gotta try to hang onto him.

fangraphs is much kinder to him, as they seem to favor underlying metrics more than on-field results. and he is a fip king, with less than one walk and approximately one homer per nine innings

I would kind of like to see the chaos rotation that features both George “never walks a guy” Kirby and Blake “walks ALL the guys” Snell.

Btw I also like Tarik Skubal, who has been improving for years and who really only needs a decent breaking pitch.

https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/savant-player/tarik-skubal-669373?stats=statcast-r-pitching-mlb

Doesn’t walk a ton of guys, doesn’t give up a ton of home runs. I doubt the Tigers part with him though.

Skubal was a top 3 pitcher in MLB the last month or so of the season.

Yeah! I wasn’t aware of him cos I don’t know many players on the Tigers besides Torkelson, Greene & Carpenter but I was first drawn to Skubal when I read this back about him in August:

Until that pitch on Friday, none of the 130 batters he’d faced this season — lefty or righty — had homered against Skubal, and in his three-plus seasons in the big leagues, only two lefties had ever taken him deep. He’d thrown more than 400 sliders to left-handed hitters in his career and only seven times had those hitters connected for an extra-base hit

i was aware of him on a vv deep level because he helped my fantasy team stay in the running for awhile there. i survived on my weekly skuby snacks.

Nice

i was gonna say he's the kinda pitcher who when you're deep in your fantasy league sorting all SPs by last 2 or 4 weeks of stats you're like "ok skubal is throwing like cy young again, i wish i had drafted him" and then another 4 weeks later he's gone a month w/ a 7.79 ERA and is back on the waiver wire

if you sort the 2023 LHP WAR leaderboard on fangraphs and set the IP total to 70, which allows skubal to qualify you get the following numbers

name/WAR/IP

1. justin steele / 4.9 / 173.1
2. framber valdez / 4.3 / 198.0
3. jordan montgomery / 4.3 / 188.2
4. blake snell / 4.1 / 180.0
5. jesus luzardo / 3.7 / 178.2
6. tarik skubal / 3.3 / 80.1
7. eduardo rodriguez / 3.0 / 152.2

he is the kinda pitcher fangraphs' version of WAR is generally biased towards but still pretty compelling. the list of very good LHP SPs is extremely short

his first few starts were pretty mediocre too, he was getting better as the season went on. it's a pretty small sample size obv but vv promising. he *might* be better than everyone else on that list.

Looking at the list of tigers above… they’ve got so much young talent, I’m kind of frustrated on behalf of their fans that they don’t want to start filling out the gaps with quality free agents. I know they got burned with Baez, but they seemed to give up after that.

They just got Miggy off the books as well

Meanwhile, in Seattle (Mariners twitter undefeated)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GBGOZuVaUAAHPnk?format=jpg&name=small

i think free agency is hard if you’re not a team big enough to just swallow the Ls like nothing happened

the e rod timeline — signed a good pitcher to an under market deal but was only able to do so by giving him an opt out that ended with him leaving for more money to a team in a warmer climate — is prob instructive in terms of the constraints some of these teams face in FA

e-rod didn't want to go to a warmer client when they tried to trade him to the dodgers at the deadline and he invoked his no-trade clause!

*climate, not client duh

ok fine, so just for more money

Great deal by the dbacks, vry strong top 3 in that rotation now

Exclusive @TheAthletic: Shohei Ohtani will defer $68 million per year of his $70 million annual salary over the course of his 10-year, $700 million deal with the Dodgers, allowing the team to keep spending, according to a person briefed on the terms.https://t.co/IsnWlsbTq9

— Fabian Ardaya (@FabianArdaya) December 11, 2023

they're insane if they think they'll be able to get away with this for the life of the contract (and the 10 years after)

Insanely bad for the game.

Loooooool that is ridiculous

Vry interested in what happens post 2033

I am massively confused by this. So, as far as the competitive balance equation is concerned that contact averages out to just $45m a year??
Does Ohtani know he’s basically earning 45m when you account for inflation?!
I’d also like to know if it’s calculated by todays rate of inflation and if that’s recalculated every year based on where the prime rates etc are at. This is all so baffling. Do they have to set up some kind of blind trust / savings account type thing to dump money into yearly so they can actually play the guy out in 10 years?!?!

Apparently ends up being around 46mil a year for the luxury tax

I think it’s amazing how he’s gone from being one of my favourite players to someone I wouldn’t cry about suffering a career ending injury, myself

Oh, i see now it pays out over 10 years after the contract is done and not all at once

I think ohtani knew lol. Though it’s a very funny scenario where no one in ohtani’s camp understands inflation till after reading all the articles post-signing

I also hope the best player in my favourite sport suffers a career ending injury??????????????????????

Literally 680 million deferred………

I guess with inflation rates being so high right now, it really diminishes the long term value… obv Ohtani must be banking - literally - on rates coming back down in a few years. But I do want to know if/when baseball recalculates the value of they have to factor in inflation

This makes the Pujols contract look like a model of sanity!

I would guess he knows the estimated value, but wanted the team he signed to to stay competitive. So maybe he thought “yeah I’m worth 500 mil for 10 years but I want the team I sign to to be able to sign more players so we’ll do this bonkers 700 mil deferred business”.

he did it so they could sign yamamoto

Seems like a cunt thing to do tbf, I’m sure I remember owners complaining about how much money Steve Cohen spent and he wasn’t dreaming up deals to cheat the luxury tax so he could keep spending

For anyone wondering if MLB will challenge or cancel Ohtani's contract: The answer is unequivocally no. There is a specific article in the collective-bargaining agreement that addresses this. And it's very clear: Deferred money is limitless -- even $680 million of $700 million. pic.twitter.com/DGNK0JulED

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) December 11, 2023

Teams have several different angles to weaponize this, such as "You're no Ohtani and he's only getting ~$45m per NPV!" and "You're no Ohtani and he agreed to huge deferments as a team player!" It basically takes away most labor gains of the AAV record going up by $25m-plus.

— Jarrett Seidler (@jaseidler) December 11, 2023

Yeah I figured there was no way they (dodgers, or ohtani’s party) would take it this far without knowing either 1. It was legal or 2. It was a grey area that they could fight and win

the owners put this exact scenario into the CBA, because deferred teals are incredibly team friendly. i’m sure every front office is losing its mind but the owners care more about staying rich collectively than they do about anything involving the games, so their reactions are probably more like elation that even more precedent has been set for top players to take contracts that are far cheaper in the long run than the stated dollar value

For anyone wondering if MLB will challenge or cancel Ohtani's contract: The answer is unequivocally no. There is a specific article in the collective-bargaining agreement that addresses this. And it's very clear: Deferred money is limitless -- even $680 million of $700 million. pic.twitter.com/DGNK0JulED

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) December 11, 2023

I guess there’s also tax implications depending where he’s living while collecting the deferred money?
I guess if the dodgers want to pay a ghost player $68M a season stating in 10 years they’ll have to live with that. I’m guessing this is a great way for a current GM to fuck over a future one

Yeah there’s going to be another lockout isn’t there.

yes the tax aspect makes the most sense to me — i hesitate to assume bob n. is passing on accurate information but

Shohei Ohtani’s decision to earn just $2 million a year certainly is a great benefit to the Dodgers’ payroll, but also a stroke of genius for tax repercussions.
If he’s not living in California once his deferred payments start, he will not be subjected to heavy California tax.

— Bob Nightengale (@BNightengale) December 11, 2023