Predictions ravage the online forums of the baseball world, as the offseason feels to be on a temporary pause after the Phillies resigned Aaron Nola and the Cardinals geriatric-ally rebuilt their rotation with the additions of Kyle Gibson, Lance Lynn, and Sonny Gray. But there’s still a lot of winter left, and with the Winter Meetings coming next week, there’s a lot of baseball thought leadership real estate still up for grabs, so I will attempt to wrangle in as much as I can of it. This is a two-part post, with the second part coming this Saturday, in which I examine some fun storylines as the calendar turns to 2024. Let's do it!
The Juan Soto situation
It’s becoming clearer by the day that the Padres, sans a TV deal and burdened by a recent line of credit, will have to trade Juan Soto before the start of the season, with starting pitching most likely coming back in return. Now, you could say that this is what any Yankees fan wants to hear, as guys like Clarke Schmidt and Drew Thorpe could easily be flipped for the lefty All-Star outfielder that will conveniently fit into the Bronx like a glove. But what interests me about a hypothetical Soto trade is who would have more leverage, the team getting Soto or the Padres? With every big-market team in the hunt (although it probably comes down to the Yanks, Mariners, and Cubs), can the Padres use the bidding war to their advantage? To me, this doesn’t seem like a Giancarlo Stanton situation, when the down-on-their-luck Marlins disillusioned themselves into needing to trade the 2017 NL MVP. This is different. The Padres were an underachieving team that could very well make the playoffs next year in what should be a weird NL Wild Card race. The reason why they have to trade Soto is because all of their other stars that make up the third-largest team payroll in baseball are under contract for decades. In other words, they have to trade Soto, but they don’t have to trade Soto. All I’m saying is that this has the opportunity to be another bonkers Soto trade if the Padres play their cards right.
Blake Snell’s value
No, Snell’s Cy Young season in 2023 for San Diego wasn’t a fluke, but it was weird. His 99 walks and 5.8 hits per nine innings both led the league, but he also led the league with a 2.25 ERA, including an ERA near 1.00 over his final two-thirds starts in 2023. Snell was an escape artist with runners on base, pitching strategically to eliminate all the possible threats he allowed. But can that strategy hold up in the long-term? That'd what teams will be considering as Snell hits free agency for the first time in his career. What they will also be considering, however, is completely unrelated to Snell; Sonny Gray just signed for $25 million a season with the Cardinals. Can Snell expect to make that same money, will his rocky history cause that number to plummet, or will recency bias earn him 3,000 Benjamins a season or more?
The trades! Oh, the trades!
This year’s pitching market for free agency seems average to below-average at best, which leaves the window open for some insane trades this offseason. Well, it just so happens that next year’s free agency class might be the most stacked crop of pitchers in recent memory. Max Fried, Dylan Cease, Shane Bieber, and Corbin Burnes, among others, will have the opportunity to test the waters of contract freedom after the 2024 season, that is, if they don’t get locked up before that. Fried, being on the Braves, is sure to be earning an AAV of $5 for the next 75 years if GM Alex Anthopoulos has anything to say about it, but Cease, Biebs, and Burnes are all on teams that could go through fire sales if their trajectories don’t change. That’s the key word in that sentence, though: if. The White Sox, Guardians, and Brewers are in extremely weak divisions, and even if the hot stove is boiling over the idea of them trading their year-after-year Cy Young candidates, it might be in the AL/NL Mid teams’ best interests to stay put and see what develops and how.
The legacy of the Shohei deal
Shohei Ohtani has been referred to as a unicorn by MLB media, myself included, for years. No one has ever tried to sign a unicorn. Do you see what I’m saying? Shohei is about to make some serious dough, and depending on how much moolah he gets from whichever midnight blue pinstriped team signs him, it might reset the entire free agency pool as we know it for both pitchers and hitters. He’s a generational talent, yes, but owners and general managers might be wary to get in a bidding war with so many teams to sign the Japanese phenom. Remember: we’re still pretty raw off of the 2021-2022 lockout, so I’m not so sure owners would want to sell the barn for one player just so every subsequent free agent wants twice as many barns as Shohei was actually worth. Talks of an AAV of over $50 million seem preposterous to me, and Scherzer and Verlander are each earning a little over $43 million in their short-term contracts, while Judge is getting $40 mil on the dot. Ohtani is going to be in that general vicinity, but the politics surrounding the signing might leave many questioning motives come Spring Training.
The Nashville stars and the Nashville Stars
The Winter Meetings are in Nashville this season, which could spark some much-needed dialogue on MLB expansion. Two consortia seem to have the leg up on the rest in terms of securing an MLB team, one based in Portland and the other in Music City itself, Nashville. I’ve been advocating for expansion for years (it hasn’t happened since I was born) and with the owners so eager to move the A’s to Las Vegas, it seems that times are-a changing. Who knows? Maybe by next year’s Winter Meetings, we’ll be up to 34 MLB teams, with the last two based in Paris and Sydney.
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