With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, Major League Baseball's 2020 season was a pro sports version of "The Great Escape," with the whole plan constantly on the verge of being destroyed. At the outset of the summer camp, the National Leaguer who would go on to win the MVP award, Freddie Freeman, caught the coronavirus and his temperature spiked to 104.5 degrees. Nationals superstar Juan Soto tested positive on Opening Day. Major outbreaks shut down the Marlins and Cardinals, with some players limited to hotel-room workouts. In the very last innings of the very last game, Dodgers third baseman Justin Turner was pulled off the field because of COVID-19.
That the players and staffers executed a 60-game season, postseason games and crowned a champion seemed like a miracle, in retrospect. They had little margin for error within a very confined window of time and managed to get across the finish line.
But as executives privately note, the context this year will be very different due to the ongoing dispersal of coronavirus vaccines. One high-ranking team official suggested the other day that everyone -- everyone -- would be best served if the start of spring training was delayed by a month.
One player agent chimed in: "It makes too much sense not to seriously think about it."
Last fall, Major League Baseball flatly rejected the idea of extending a season into November given the warnings of infectious disease experts about the forthcoming virus spike. This year, however, an extension into November could be useful, as the vaccine is distributed throughout this winter, spring and summer.
With that in mind, the team executive outlined a revised timeline for MLB in 2021:
Spring training camps open on March 15
Opening Day on May 1
All-Star Game in the usual time slot in July
Trade deadline Aug. 15
End of a 162-game regular season by Oct. 15 (with some games folded into doubleheaders of seven-inning contests)
End of the World Series in mid-November
And he explained how all of the parties under baseball's umbrella would benefit:
1. The players
By waiting a month, the probability that individuals would be vaccinated would increase and the chances for infection decrease. With more folks vaccinated the chances of a spring training outbreak -- and subsequent shutdown -- would diminish, allowing the players to maintain consistent workout schedules.
There would be more time for the dozens and dozens of unsigned free agents to land with a team, and perhaps under better terms, if more and more potential patrons are vaccinated and the chances increase for fans to be in the stands -- which also then increases income.
2. The owners
A lot of teams have slashed payroll this winter, with the owners concerned about a recurrence of games played in empty ballparks. But it's possible that the ongoing vaccination programs will alleviate that worry as winter turns into spring and confidence about ticket sales might grow. For example, the Chicago Cubs' front office recently got an unexpected boost from ownership, which approved a deal for Joc Pederson and a pursuit of pitching.
3. The front offices
With a lot of the winter market playing out in these last frantic days of January, executives who've been uncertain if the camps would actually open on time -- What do you hear about spring training has been baseball's most asked question -- would have more time to plan, more time to weigh the addition of more free agents.
4. The fans
The longer this season plays out, the more likely it is that at least some potential ticket buyers will feel more comfortable sitting among big crowds, as the vaccinations take hold and the local health and safety protocols are loosened. If the administration's hopes are realized and the vast majority of U.S. residents get a needle in the arm by early in the fall, then some fans might actually be able to have the experiences they could not have in 2020 -- an afternoon or evening at a ballpark. If the postseason is pushed into November, baseball could again steer around cold-weather concerns by playing the last two rounds in neutral sites.
Major League Baseball has made it clear to the players that it would like to delay the start of camp, with the union reluctant to go along out of concern that the owners would be trying to truncate the season, as they did last year. But if MLB committed to using the whole calendar year to do everything possible to play a full 162-game season, with players paid at full salary, this might make the idea of a delay of spring training more attractive.
And who knows, maybe a delay would provide more time for commissioner Rob Manfred and union chief Tony Clark to continue discussions about negotiating points raised in their meeting the other day.
On to the next Story for Colorado
Now that the Colorado Rockies have traded Nolan Arenado in a deal that none of their peers can figure out, their next order of business is to determine a path with star shortstop Trevor Story. He will be eligible for free agency in the fall. There is no indication that Colorado has made an offer to him or, given the franchise's recent struggles, that he would even be open to a deal. In fact, it's been demonstrated over and over and over -- with Todd Helton, Troy Tulowitzki and Arenado -- that the whopper long-term deals don't work out for the franchise, either in how they restrict other spending or because of failures to build around the stars. If Story really wants a chance to win, then staying in Colorado for the immediate future won't be palatable.
If the Rockies aren't going to sign him, they should look to trade him as soon as possible, as Cleveland did with Francisco Lindor. Once the Rockies determine that Story is not inclined to sign, then they need to be devoted to recouping trade value for one of the best middle infielders in baseball before he walks out the door.
Front-office folks will tell you that the best time to market position players is in the winter, because you can have more teams in play. There is more time during the offseason for potential bidders to plan for a place in their roster and their payroll. In the summer, the list of possible landing spots is much more limited. Every team can use a reliever and even a starting pitcher, but far fewer clubs have a specific need at catcher or at shortstop.
The Rockies' front office -- which has been tasked with dumping payroll this winter -- has an easy excuse because of its NL West context. Colorado is not close to competing with either the Dodgers, who've won the division eight straight years, or the Padres; L.A. and San Diego might be the two best teams in baseball, and the Rockies might be among the five worst teams. It's not as if trading Story now will undercut a championship run.
The Rockies' confusing path on Arenado
Arenado's situation could have played out many different ways. Yet, somehow the Rockies picked the path costliest to them, greatly confusing rival evaluators.
"I don't know what the hell they were thinking," said one.
To review: Arenado has six years and $199 million on his current deal, with the opportunity to opt out of the contract at the end of the upcoming season. Arenado had made it clear he wanted out. His relationship with GM Jeff Bridich was perceived to be a problem. And Arenado also had a full no-trade clause.
Earlier this winter, executives in other organizations judged the conditions for making a decent Arenado trade to be awful for the Rockies. His contract suddenly looked very onerous in the face of the budget cutbacks around baseball. Plus, his brief showing in the 60-game 2020 season was not good.
As rival officials saw it, here are just a few lines from the menu of how the Rockies could've handled this:
1. They could have waited. They could have told Arenado that the conditions for a trade were bad and that they had no intention of giving him away. While there would have been inherent fear of the public specter of Arenado feuding publicly with the organization, the Rockies understand just how competitive he is and how, with the opt-out, he needed a big 2021 season. If the Rockies kept Arenado, then, at worst, the relationship would've been tense. At best, he might've played well and been a trade target in July. Perhaps he would have opted out of his deal altogether, saving the team the cost of the last five years of his contract.
Additionally: The public-relations impact of a spat with an unhappy Arenado would've been mitigated because the Rockies aren't expected to contend.
2. The Rockies could have approached Arenado earlier this month and told him: Would you like to opt out of your contract right now? This way, they would've put the weight of the fight back on his shoulders. If Arenado said yes, then the Rockies would've saved all that money that had been committed to him. If Arenado said no, then it would've made it easier for the Rockies to wait instead of making a bad deal.
But Colorado's front office didn't do any of that. In the end, the Rockies basically gave away their biggest star for little in return while eating a staggering $50 million of the money owed to him. The Rockies effectively funded what is believed to be a one-year, $15 million extension given to Arenado in order to get him to waive his no-trade clause.
Arenado basically had no hard leverage to force a deal. Yet he wound up being traded, at a staggering, lingering cost to the Rockies -- while getting even more money. For Arenado and his agent, Joel Wolfe, it's a staggering, shocking victory. For the Rockies, it's an almost incomprehensible set of gaffes.
The real value of Realmuto
The Phillies saw first-hand just how important J.T. Realmuto is to their fortunes over the past two seasons. Their numbers in his starts, per Paul Hembekides:
94-84 W-L record
+46 run differential
.259 team batting average
.783 OPS
5.2 runs per game
Then there were these numbers in games in which he did not start:
15-29 record
-71 run differential
.204 BA
.635 OPS
3.4 runs per game
Yankee still seeing the bright side of this offseason
Whenever the Yankees prepare for a possible trade, manager Aaron Boone likes to reach out to people he knows to get personal background on the players being discussed. As he said the other day, 80-90% of the feedback he gets is positive. Even weighed against that scale, however, what he heard about pitcher Jameson Taillon stood out.
"This is the best [feedback] I've gotten, by far," Boone said. "Across the board, what I heard was how this guy is unbelievable, as far as the human being that he is."
For example: Pittsburgh felt so strongly about Taillon that even as he went through the last months of his elbow rehabilitation last summer and wasn't available to pitch, the Pirates included him with the travel squad because they felt he would be a great influence on other players.
Taillon has been sidelined often in his career, but he has been effective in his 82 career starts, with a 3.67 ERA. He had Tommy John surgery in August 2019. Typically, it takes pitchers about 12 to 15 months to recover. By the end of the 2020 season, he had thrown as many as three innings in intrasquad games, so he should be fully cleared at the outset of the 2021 season. The Yankees are hopeful that he'll continue to improve as he returns, through substantive changes he has made in his mechanics -- using his legs more and shortening the path of his pitching arm through his delivery, which has enhanced the spin rate of his slider and four-seam fastball.
As I wrote about the other day, some rival evaluators look at the Yankees' rotation and see a lot of risk, a lot of uncertainty, in Taillon, Corey Kluber, Domingo German and Luis Severino. What the Yankees see is high upside, pitchers whom Boone would want to give the ball to in a playoff or World Series game.
Second-tier outfield market
The best available outfielder signed when George Springer agreed to his six-year, $150 million deal with the Blue Jays. There remains an enormous collection of third-tier outfielders in the free-agent market, however, and it might be that the Tigers will look to add one of the many available veterans for depth: Adam Duvall, Jay Bruce, Kevin Pillar, Tyler Naquin, Matt Joyce.
Jackie Bradley Jr. is part of the second tier that'll be more expensive. An interesting name is that of Yasiel Puig, who did not play at all in 2020. In Puig's last full season of 2019, he played 149 games for the Reds and Indians and had a .785 OPS, with 24 homers.
The Hall of Fame's character clause
The scattershot handling of the so-called character clause in this year's Hall of Fame voting should convince the baseball writers who vote of what Tim Kurkjian talked about on the podcast the other day: The writers need guidance from the Hall. More to the point: The writers should insist that the Hall of Fame determines questions of character for itself before forwarding the list of candidates for a vote. The process, the prerequisites, the rules, all belong to the Hall; the writers don't control any of that. The Hall of Fame should also own responsibility for explicitly determining whether players like Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Manny Ramirez, Curt Schilling and Omar Vizquel meet its character standard -- the words laid out, it is believed, by the late commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis -- just as it did with Pete Rose. The Hall has effectively hidden behind the writers in these questions, and now the writers are in a weird place of trying to apply a conduct standard constructed by a man whose name they stripped off the MVP award just last summer because of his efforts to keep Black players out of baseball.
About the Rays' rotation ...
The Rays decided to not pick up the option of Charlie Morton and traded Blake Snell, but that does not mean they've given up on trying to upgrade the rotation this winter. They were in the bidding for Corey Kluber, with manager Kevin Cash driving across the state to see Kluber in person. They also tried to trade for Jameson Taillon -- with both pitchers landing on the roster of the division-rival Yankees.
Noteworthy
Cleveland has a little money to spend this winter, but the Indians did sign middle infielder Cesar Hernanez. They also added AL Central veteran Eddie Rosario on a one-year, $8 million deal. Still, the internal conversation is that rather than add a journeyman outfielder or two, the team would prefer to give the available plate appearances to its young players. The team wants a better sense of what Bradley Zimmer, Jake Bauers, Yu Chang and Oscar Mercado can contribute in the big leagues. ... As the Nationals pursued catcher Alex Avila, they got a strong internal recommendation from Max Scherzer, who played for years with Avila in Detroit. ... With the Red Sox lacking much space under the luxury-tax threshold, they are unlikely to re-sign Jackie Bradley Jr., who could wind up with a three-year deal elsewhere. The Red Sox will look to add a right-handed hitter who can share time in center field. There is sentiment in the organization that the club is better off hanging on to Andrew Benintendi, who had a miserable performance in the truncated 2020 season. Benintendi lifted weights and got bigger going into 2019, but sources in the organization say he has continued to focus on flexibility and speed this winter. Staffers thought he looked great last March, poised for a bounce-back year, but a slump at the outset of the 60-game season wrecked his numbers. ... Few players raised on the U.S. mainland opt to play winter ball anymore, but Jarren Duran played in Puerto Rico this winter, mustering a .386 on-base percentage and fueling belief in the organization that he's going to turn out to be a pretty good player. ... Some rival evaluators were surprised that the Red Sox took more than $8 million owed to reliever Adam Ottavino for 2021, and don't share Boston's enthusiasm for the prospect the Red Sox got in the deal, former fourth-round pick Frank German. But something to look for: The Yankees and the Blue Jays, two division rivals for Boston, have lineups that are predominantly right-handed. When Ottavino is commanding his vicious slider, he can destroy right-handed hitters. In 2019, his only full season for New York, right-handed batters hit .177 against him, with a .266 slugging percentage. ... One evaluator watched some of the highlights of Hank Aaron and noted the powerful swing that generated 755 homers, 3,771 hits and more total bases than any player in MLB history. "It's a flat, line-drive swing, probably honed through hours and hours of him playing ball as a kid," the evaluator said. "And you know what? If somebody saw that swing these days, they'd probably try to change it."