At the contractual rate of roughly $1.1 million per start, Gerrit Cole is in line to make $20 million by August, if baseball has a full season at full pay this year. So it says a lot about how slow this offseason has been that two-and-half months into this winter, there has been exactly one free-agent signing of an MLB veteran worth $20 million.
James McCann signed a four-year, $40.6 million deal with the Mets. Additionally, infielder Ha-Seong Kim reached an agreement on a four-year, $28 million deal after seven seasons in the KBO.
But think about this: There is an industrywide suspicion that the slow and cold free-agent market is about to go subzero -- even slower -- because of who has been involved in the biggest deals so far and the choices that were made in those trades.
There are at least five veterans expected to get big money relative to their many unsigned peers: pitchers Trevor Bauer and Jake Odorizzi, outfielder George Springer, catcher J.T. Realmuto, infielder DJ LeMahieu. To date, however, there haven't been many teams viewed as aggressively looking to improve for 2021.
The Padres are all-in for the upcoming season, upgrading their rotation significantly. But rather than targeting Bauer, San Diego swapped prospects for Blake Snell, who is already under contract at a rate significantly lower than what Bauer made in his arbitration years. Snell is owed $40.8 million for the next three seasons. San Diego also took advantage of the Cubs' effort to reduce their payroll and took Yu Darvish on a salary dump -- with Chicago agreeing to pitch in some of the $59 million owed to Darvish over the next three years.
In short, while the Padres were aggressive, they filled their rotation needs through some buy opportunities in a soft market.
The Mets took the same approach with the Francisco Lindor deal, giving up prospect assets to trade for the shortstop and starting pitcher Carlos Carrasco. The All-Star right-hander has two years remaining on his current contract, and like Snell, his is a relatively modest salary of $12 million annually.
The Cleveland Indians and Chicago Cubs have two of the most thorough front offices in the industry, and the fact that the Cubs had to give away Darvish for some very young prospects while eating money, and the Indians had to unload Carrasco's money, is more evidence of how few teams are willing to spend right now.
It's possible that could change, if the coronavirus vaccine rollout accelerates, if there are concrete indications there will be fans in the stands, if owner confidence in a revived revenue stream grows.
But so far, there are precious few buyers in the market -- the Padres, Mets and Blue Jays are seen by agents and rival execs as being the most active -- and two of those teams have already made significant moves.
So who is going to step up and pay Bauer what he's looking for? Maybe his best chance for the most money could be to ingratiate himself with Angels owner Arte Moreno, a strategy that worked well for Albert Pujols a decade ago.
Who is going to seriously compete with the Yankees for LeMahieu?
Which teams are going to dive headlong into the ocean of unsigned veterans and spend?
There is concern that a lot of teams -- and a lot of players -- will be waiting a long time for a market thaw that is far less than a certainty.
Baseball's sticky situation
For anyone under the umbrella of baseball, the revelation this week of a Cole text to a former Angels employee seemingly asking about the acquisition of a foreign substance might have felt like the famous scene from "Casablanca," in which captain Louis Renault says he's "shocked, shocked" that there is gambling occurring.
Cole allegedly wrote, "Hey Bubba, it's Gerrit Cole, I was wondering if you could help me out with this sticky situation ... We don't see you until May, but we have some road games in April that are in cold weather places. The stuff I had last year seizes up when it gets cold."
That pitchers use foreign substances is well-known to everyone in the sport -- hitters, pitchers, executives, umpires. It happens in just about every game, in a way that everyone on the field or watching television can see. Last spring, Major League Baseball worked to take a step toward tamping down on the use of the substances, but anybody with an experienced eye who watched the postseason could see that many pitchers continued the practice, usually by rubbing their pitching hand on the wrist area of their glove hand, the spot where most pitchers apply pine tar or sunscreen or some mix.
A year ago, MLB conversation was dominated by the Houston Astros' scandal, with many opposing players chiming in with criticism of the Astros because they believed Houston went above and beyond typical sign-stealing practices by using technology for real-time conveyance of pitch identity. When it comes to foreign substances, you won't hear a broad outcry -- Bauer has complained intermittently -- because so many pitchers do the same thing, and out in the open, in the middle of the diamond. Everybody sees it; nobody does anything.
But it would behoove MLB to address the situation in earnest, for a couple of reasons:
1. If the rule isn't going to be enforced, it should come off the books. Baseball officials have been waiting for the development of a baseball with a tacky surface, so that foreign substances would theoretically be unnecessary. To date, the prototypes that MLB has tried have not passed muster.
2. Spin rate has become such a focal point for pitchers and teams, helping to define who excels at throwing breaking balls and who doesn't, and who has a fastball with late life through the top of the strike zone. But a lot of that data can be enhanced by an improved grip -- and some pitchers are probably better at using foreign substances than others. There has always been concern that taking away the artificial means to help control would put hitters more in jeopardy, and some batters have said that they'd prefer that the pitchers have improved command.
But with offense down and the use of breaking pitches rocketing upward with the advent of more and more bullpen specialists, this particular competitive advantage -- the performance-enhancing sticky stuff -- could be difference-making on the field, and not necessarily just about maintaining control of slick baseballs.
News from around the majors
• Tommy Lasorda was probably about 66 or 67 years old when I saw him throwing batting practice to some young hitters one afternoon at Dodger Stadium, and it's safe to say that for the players, the experience was -- how should we say this? -- challenging. Even in his athletic prime, throwing strikes was an elusive proposition for Lasorda, who walked 56 in 58⅓ innings. On this afternoon at Dodger Stadium, Lasorda was spinning breaking balls to the hitters, shouting to them and cajoling the whole time. Sometimes he'd throw strikes and sometimes he'd throw the ball behind hitters -- and sometimes he'd hit them.
But he wasn't throwing very hard and there was no way a young batter was going to walk out on the Dodgers royalty that Lasorda was, or truncate his fun. Hatless, his forehead shined with sweat under the Southern California sun, and while I can't recall with certainty what he yelled at the batters, I can say for sure his words were profane and garrulous and fun. Nobody had more fun than Tommy Lasorda, who died Friday at age 93. But he could snap with the best of them.
After Lasorda retired as the Dodgers manager, he was at ESPN for some kind of a baseball roundtable, and before the show began, we talked informally about Babe Ruth. Tommy spoke with enormous reverence for an all-time great player who completely redefined the sport with his power. He talked about the incredibly heavy bat that Ruth used -- 36 inches and 38 ounces, seemingly as wide as a fully developed ash tree. The roundtable was devoted to ranking all-time great players, and as I listened to Tommy, I decided I was going to have some fun with him on air, to spark a reaction. When the discussion to turned to closer Mariano Rivera and his preeminence, I turned to Tommy sitting nearby and declared that Rivera's devastating hard-veering cutter would have shattered Ruth's bat. Tommy's smile immediately disappeared, supplanted instantly by rage, and he began to sputter angrily about how ridiculous my statement was. The thought occurred to me that this was exactly how some umpires must've felt when Tommy aimed his temper at them for any transgression.
• The Nationals need power in the middle of their lineup, so the addition of Kyle Schwarber makes sense. But oddly, their one-year deal with him, for $10 million, is more than Schwarber would have made through arbitration if the Cubs had kept him. The Nationals could have probably traded for Schwarber -- without giving up anything of real substance, because the industry was well aware of the possibility Chicago might not tender him a contract -- and paid him less through arbitration. MLB Trade Rumors projected Schwarber's possible range of salary, through the arbitration process, at somewhere between $7 million and $9.3 million. Some of the speculation around the industry is that at the time those decisions were made, in the first week of December, the Nationals might not have set their budget.