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Diamondbacks Interested In Eddie Perez For Managerial Job

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The Diamondbacks have interest in Braves first base coach Eddie Perez for their managerial opening, David O’Brien of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution tweets. Perez interviewed for the Braves managerial job that ultimately went to Brian Snitker, and he’s reportedly also recently attracted interest from the Rockies.

Perez spent 11 seasons as a catcher in the big leagues, spending much of that time working as Greg Maddux’s personal catcher in Atlanta. He also played a season apiece for the Indians and Brewers. He has worked as a coach in the Braves organization since 2006, and has managed in the Venezuelan Winter League.

We haven’t heard much about who will replace Chip Hale as the Diamondbacks’ manager, and perhaps for good reason — departing along with Hale was general manager Dave Stewart, and the Snakes have yet to fill their GM job. One would think the Diamondbacks would hire a GM first before hiring a manager. Involving a new GM in a managerial hiring process would help ensure that the GM and manager are a good match for one another — a GM and manager who don’t work well together can cause problems, as we’ve seen lately with Jeff Bridich and Walt Weiss in Colorado, and before that with Jerry Dipoto and Mike Scioscia in Los Angeles. Hiring a manager before hiring a GM could make the GM opening less attractive for highly qualified candidates, which is potentially a serious issue for the Diamondbacks, who might already have a hard time attracting such candidates given how short their last two GMs’ tenures have been.

Of course, it’s possible the Diamondbacks’ search for a GM (or a head of baseball operations) is further along than has previously been reported. Arizona has already been connected to Nationals exec Mike Rizzo (although the Nationals have denied Rizzo is a serious candidate), Royals assistant GM J.J. Picollo, former Dodgers GM Ned Colletti, MLB senior VP Kim Ng and a variety of candidates with ties to the Diamondbacks organization. Former Blue Jays and Dodgers exec Alex Anthopoulos and Rays VP of baseball operations Chaim Bloom have already indicated they’re not interested.

5 Key Stories: 10/8/16 – 10/14/16

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Here are five of the biggest stories this week at MLBTR.

Brian SnitkerBraves hire Brian Snitker as manager. The Braves dropped Brian Snitker’s interim tag, officially making him their full-time manager. They also hired former Rangers manager Ron Washington as their third base coach, and made third base coach Bo Porter a special assistant to GM John Coppolella. Washington left a coaching job with the Athletics in order to be closer to his family in New Orleans.

The 2017 qualifying offer will be $17.2MM. FOX Sports’ Ken Rosenthal reported that the amount of the qualifying offer will increase to $17.2MM this offseason, and will be included in the next CBA, albeit with some adjustments. That’s a boost of $1.4MM over last year’s qualifying offer figure. Last week, MLBTR’s Steve Adams listed Neil Walker, Michael Saunders, Wilson Ramos, Kendrys Morales, Mike Napoli and Matt Wieters as players who might or might not receive a qualifying offer; perhaps the increase of the qualifying offer figure will affect some of them.

Super Two cutoff to be between 2.127 and 2.131 years of MLB service time. MLBTR projected the Super Two cutoff for this year’s crop of players approaching arbitration. Kevin Kiermaier could become eligible for arbitration as a Super Two, while Rougned Odor, David Peralta and Dan Straily seem likely to just miss the cut. MLBTR also projected arbitration salaries for the 2017 season.

Pitchers receive injury news. Cardinals reliever Zach Duke underwent Tommy John surgery and will miss the 2017 season. Injured Padres righty Tyson Ross, meanwhile, had surgery to relieve thoracic outlet syndrome, and could be ready for Spring Training. The news was better for Angels righty Garrett Richards, who made only six starts in 2016. He’s set to have a normal offseason after avoiding Tommy John surgery.

Carlos Beltran to play in 2017. Rangers DH/OF Carlos Beltran says he’ll be back in 2017 for his age-40 season. Beltran, who batted a strong .295/.337/.513 with 29 home runs in 2016, figures to be a solid option for AL teams in need of an extra bat.

Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images.

West Notes: Hernandez, Rockies, Hale

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The Dodgers left utilityman Enrique Hernandez off their roster for the NLDS, but they’ve added him for their upcoming series against the Cubs and will start him today against lefty Jon Lester, ESPN’s Buster Olney tweets. The idea, perhaps, is that the Dodgers’ group of position players is lefty-heavy, and the Cubs have plenty of lefty pitching (including Lester, Aroldis Chapman, Travis Wood, Mike Montgomery, and rookie reliever Rob Zastryzny, who the Cubs have announced has replaced infielder Tommy La Stella on their NLCS roster). Hernandez gives the Dodgers an extra right-handed bat. While he struggled overall this season, batting .190/.283/.324 in 244 plate appearances, Hernandez has a career .270/.362/.478 line against left-handed pitchers. Here’s more from the West divisions.

  • It’s time for the Rockies to start spending heavily in hopes of making a playoff push, writes Patrick Saunders of the Denver Post. Saunders cites Olney, who notes the recent correlation between spending and winning, with the Indians being the only team with a below-median payroll to make the playoffs. Whether some of Saunders’ proposed moves would actually propel the Rockies to the postseason is debatable — he suggests, for example, that the Rockies ought to consider sending Charlie Blackmon to St. Louis for Matt Adams and Trevor Rosenthal, should such a deal be offered. Adams’ power would likely play well at Coors Field, but the Rockies would sorely miss Blackmon, who joined Nolan Arenado and DJ LeMahieu as one of the team’s best players in 2016.
  • The Athletics are talking to former Diamondbacks manager Chip Hale about their third base coach position, Susan Slusser of the San Francisco Chronicle writes. The job opened when Ron Washington departed for the Braves. All the Athletics’ other coaches are expected to return next season. Hale was the Athletics’ bench coach for three seasons before heading to Arizona, and Slusser writes that he was popular with Athletics players.

Cubs Notes: Baez, NLCS Roster, Zastryzny

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Heading into the 2011 draft, the Cubs were set on Javier Baez with the ninth overall pick, FOX Sports’ Ken Rosenthal writes. Rosenthal reports of a pre-draft conversation between then-Cubs scouting director Tim Wilken (now a special assistant with the Diamondbacks) and Padres exec Jason McLeod (now with the Cubs). The Padres wanted to take Francisco Lindor with the tenth overall pick and were curious about whether the Cubs would be selecting him. Wilken told McLeod that Baez was a “no-doubter” if he was still on the board when the Cubs picked. McLeod wasn’t as convinced: “I remember calling Jed after the game and saying, ‘This guy may be Manny Ramirez, or he might never get out of Double A!’ We weren’t convicted on the hit tool at the time and probably could have done a better job getting to know him personally.” In fairness to McLeod, Baez has struggled to control the strike zone in his young career, although he’s made up for that with defense and power. Either pick would have turned out just fine, of course, as both are now emerging young players who have already made noise in this year’s playoffs. The Indians ultimately took Lindor with the eighth pick; the Cubs took Baez at No. 9, as promised, and the Padres selected Cory Spangenberg at No. 10. Here’s more out of Chicago.

  • Cubs GM Jed Hoyer says the process by which the team sets its NLCS roster will involve a “lot of yelling,” as Sahadev Sharma of the Athletic writes. That roster will be announced this morning. “The first one to get to this point was a lot of back and forth. This will obviously be a quicker meeting with less time to make the decision,” says Hoyer. It’s just one decision, whether we want to do 12 or 11 [pitchers]. A lot of that will depend on the opponent.” Sharma outlines the decisions in play this time, suggesting that infielder Tommy La Stella, outfielder Matt Szczur, lefty Rob Zastryzny and others could be on the bubble.
  • Since they’re facing the Dodgers (whose collection of left-handed hitters includes Adrian Gonzalez, Corey Seager, Chase Utley, Andre Ethier, Joc Pederson, Josh Reddick and Andrew Toles), the Cubs seem likely to add Zastryzny, Mark Gonzales of the Chicago Tribune writes. Gonzales notes that the rookie left-hander has already faced the Dodgers once in his brief MLB career, throwing 3 2/3 scoreless innings against them in a strong outing April 27. “I looked at their lineup. I watched (Game 5 of the NL Division Series),” says Zastryzny. “I have thrown against them before.”

David Ross 99% Certain He Will Retire

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Cubs catcher David Ross is still 99.9% certain he will retire at the end of the season, ESPN’s Jesse Rogers tweets. Ross indicated last November that he would likely retire after the 2016 season, although that was before a strong campaign in which he batted .229/.338/.446 in 205 plate appearances while playing his usual strong defense.

The 39-year-old Ross explained his thought process in some detail last week, as Rogers described at the time. “I just don’t want to be that weak link,” said Ross. “I don’t want to be the guy that holds everyone up. I want no regrets on my end.”

Ross did go on to say that he might consider continuing to play if the Cubs “blew [his] socks off,” although he seemed to be at least half-joking. He listed not being able to play with outfielder and fellow catcher Kyle Schwarber, who missed almost the entire season due to a knee injury, as one of his regrets about leaving the game behind.

For now, Ross appears to be concentrating on winning a World Series with the Cubs. “People ask, ’Where does my retirement stuff rank?’ Winning a World Series is way better than that. It’s an amazing thing to dog pile out there while no one else can do that,” he said last week.

Ross has played parts of 15 seasons in the Majors, suiting up with the Dodgers, Pirates, Padres, Reds, Braves and Red Sox before signing a two-year, $5MM deal with the Cubs prior to the 2015 season. He’s collected just 2,644 plate appearances in his career, since he’s generally played as a backup, and batted .229/.316/.423. He won a World Series as a member of the Red Sox in 2013.

Moore: Royals To “Mix It Up” This Offseason

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Following their World Series victory in 2015, the Royals headed into 2016 with a similar core in place, re-signing Alex Gordon and Chris Young and inking Ian Kennedy and Joakim Soria as their only main additions. After an 81-81 season, GM Dayton Moore acknowledges that the team might have to try something different to prepare for 2017, as Rustin Dodd of the Kansas City Star writes.

“Last year, we pretty much stood pat,” says Moore. “We didn’t make a lot of changes to our team. And that didn’t work too well for us.”

Making big changes, though, will be tricky, for reasons Dodd points out. A number of key Royals players, including Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas, Lorenzo Cain, Alcides Escobar, Wade Davis, Danny Duffy and Jarrod Dyson, will be eligible for free agency after next season, and Moore wants to give the Royals another shot to win a championship with his existing core. And Dodd had previously reported that the Royals expect their payroll to drop in 2017, even though their current obligations for next season (including contracts likely to be tendered to arbitration-eligible players) already approach their 2016 payroll total.

Something has to give, or so it would seem. The team could trade a player to clear salary, such as Cain, Davis or Kennedy. But to do so would solve one problem while creating another, since all of those players are helpful. The team also must look past 2017, possibly offering extensions to some players who will be eligible for free agency.

“We won’t be able to sign them all,” Moore says.

What’s clear is that part of the Royals’ plan for getting back to the postseason will be to depend on key players  returning to their previous levels of performance. That list could perhaps include Gordon, who hit just .220/.312/.380 in the first year of his new contract; Moustakas, who missed most of the year with a torn ACL; and Hosmer.

“We have a lot of All-Star caliber players that we think can get back to their accustomed level,” says Moore. “We’ll count on that. But we also recognize the need to maybe mix it up a little bit.”

Poll: Should MLB Change September Roster Expansion Rules?

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Earlier this week, former Rockies outfielder Ryan Spilborghs penned a guest piece for MLBTR in which he offered a former player’s take on the September expansion of MLB active rosters from 25 to 40. Spilborghs’ opinion was a nuanced one, but he noted that most coaches and players intensely dislike roster expansion, noting that it slows the pace of games and prevents MLB role players from getting playing time.

Roster expansion rules have come in for criticism with beat writers recently as well, due in part to the long game times and frequent pitching changes that now seem so characteristic of late-season baseball. Matt Gelb of the Philadelphia Inquirer, for example, described a recent Phillies/Mets series as “a perverted type of baseball,” noting that one game took nearly four hours and featured 38 players, including two relievers who had pitched not at all, or close to not at all, in the previous two weeks. Those sorts of figures are, unfortunately, quite common in September, as contenders and non-contenders alike attempt to outmaneuver one another with seemingly limitless situational matchups.

“Let’s put it this way: That’s the thing about September,” said Phillies manager Pete Mackanin, via Gelb. “They have a lefty for every righty I bring in and vice versa. That’s what makes it so difficult. There’s no moves you can make that can’t be countered. So, what are you going to do?”

Gelb notes that September roster expansion could be part of this winter’s round of CBA negotiations. One possible solution would be a rule that allows teams to expand their active rosters in September, as they do now, but to declare a 25-man roster for each game. Such a rule might somewhat limit substitutions and pitching changes, thereby reducing game times, although it would do little to address Spilborghs’ concern about veteran role players losing out on playing time.

MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, for his part, agrees that roster expansion rules should be reformed. “I’m not looking to take away service time or anything like that, but I do think it would make sense to get to a situation where we played out September games closer to the rules that we play with the rest of the year,” he says. “I don’t think 18 pitchers in a game is a good thing.”

Of course, the benefits of expanded rosters are almost as easy to see as the drawbacks. Young players, particularly those on non-contending teams, can get their first tastes of big-league action, while managers and executives are more easily able to watch their young players against top competition. Also, the sheer number of bodies available helps teams get to the end of a lengthy 162-game season, by which point many established players are struggling with nagging injuries.

So what should MLB do about roster expansion? We’ll begin with a simple poll question about whether the rules should change. If you have a suggestion for how the rules should change, share it in the comments.

AL Notes: Liriano, Joyner, Wallace

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Blue Jays lefty Francisco Liriano was cleared to return home to Toronto with his team after being struck by Carlos Gomez’s eighth-inning line drive in Game 2 of the ALDS Friday, as Shi Davidi of Sportsnet and others have noted. The ball hit Liriano in the back of the head as he turned away, and it caromed into right center field. “I know what he’s going through right now, hoping for the best for the results,” says fellow Jays hurler J.A. Happ, who fractured his skull after taking a line drive to the head in 2013. “[B]ut yeah, that was scary.” Here’s more from the American League.

  • The Tigers have announced that hitting coach Wally Joyner will not return in 2017, as he intends to pursue “other interests in the game of baseball.” Assistant hitting coach David Newhan’s role with the team will be determined once the team finds a replacement for Joyner. Other key Tigers coaches (including pitching coach Rich Dubee, bench coach Gene Lamont, first base coach Omar Vizquel, third base coach Dave Clark, bullpen coach Mick Billmeyer and defensive coordinator Matt Martin) will return. The Tigers exercised manager Brad Ausmus’ 2017 option earlier this week. Under Joyner and Newhan, the Tigers had one of MLB’s better offenses in 2016, batting .267/.331/.438, although it should perhaps be noted that having Miguel Cabrera in the middle of their lineup gave them a hefty head start.
  • Orioles pitching coach Dave Wallace, who retired from his full-time role earlier this week, will be missed, Rich Dubroff of CSNmidatlantic.com writes. Wallace had no connections with Buck Showalter or Dan Duquette when the Orioles hired him three years ago, but his hiring turned out to be a boon for Orioles pitchers like Chris Tillman, Wei-Yin Chen and Brad Brach, along with younger hurlers like Kevin Gausman and Dylan Bundy. Perhaps the best orange and black feather in Wallace’s cap is that of Zach Britton, who transformed from a struggling (and out-of-options) starter to a dominant closer soon after Wallace arrived.

5 Key Stories: 10/1/16 – 10/7/16

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Here were this week’s five biggest stories here at MLBTR.

Dave StewartThe Diamondbacks clean house. The Diamondbacks parted ways with GM Dave Stewart and manager Chip Hale following a disastrous 69-93 season for which they’d prepared by spending very heavily, both in money and prospects. Chief Baseball Officer Tony La Russa remains in the organization, but will no longer run the team’s baseball operations. Ned Colletti, Kim Ng and a variety of executives with Diamondbacks ties are reportedly among the candidates to replace Stewart (who took to the media to discuss his firing).

Walt Weiss resigns. In more upheaval in the NL West, the Rockies manager left his post, citing a working relationship with GM Jeff Bridich that “wasn’t healthy, wasn’t productive,” as he told FOX Sports’ Ken Rosenthal. The Rockies are reportedly considering Triple-A manager Glenallen Hill and Braves first base coach Eddie Perez to replace him.

Tigers exercise Brad Ausmus’ option. As of early this week, Tigers manager Brad Ausmus still hadn’t heard whether the team planned to retain him for 2017. But the Tigers finally ended speculation about Ausmus’ future — or at least his immediate future — by announcing that they had exercised his 2017 option. His outlook beyond next season remains unclear.

Braves extend Jim Johnson. The Braves kept a key reliever from hitting the free agent market this winter, extending veteran righty Jim Johnson through 2018. The 33-year-old posted a 3.06 ERA, 9.5 K/9 and 2.8 BB/9 in 64 2/3 innings in 2016 in his second stint with Atlanta.

Marlins part ways with Barry Bonds. The Marlins are going in a different direction at hitting coach, electing not to renew the contract of legendary slugger Barry Bonds. Reporting from Craig Mish of MLB Network Radio indicated that there was at least some friction between Bonds and manager Don Mattingly. The Marlins also parted ways with third base coach Lenny Harris and bullpen coach Reid Cornelius.

Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images.

Latest On The Rockies’ Managerial Search

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The Rockies are considering Braves first base coach Eddie Perez for their vacant managerial position, Reyes Ureña of El Universal in Venezuelan tweets (link via MLB.com’s Thomas Harding). Perez recently interviewed for the Braves’ managerial job as well, although the team has acknowledged that it would be difficult to hire him, given the work interim manager Brian Snitker has done.

Previous Rockies manager Walt Weiss resigned this week, citing an unhealthy relationship with GM Jeff Bridich. Immediately after Weiss’ departure, Glenallen Hill, the Rockies’ manager at Triple-A Albuquerque, emerged as a possible candidate. As Harding notes, Bridich acknowledges that Hill is a potential candidate.

“I think he [Hill] would be somebody internally that we would consider, certainly,” says Bridich. “But then again, this is all very new information and new news. So there have been no formal plans put in place.”

The 48-year-old Perez played parts of 11 seasons in the big leagues, suiting up for the Braves, Indians and Brewers, notably serving as Greg Maddux’s personal catcher in Atlanta. Since retiring as a player, he’s worked as a bullpen coach as well as first base coach for the Braves, while also managing in the Venezuelan Winter League.

Hill, 51, played for the Blue Jays, Indians, Cubs, Giants, Mariners, Yankees and Angels over the course of a 13-year big-league career. He began coaching in the Rockies system in 2003 and has served as the team’s first base coach. He has managed the Rockies’ Triple-A team (first in Colorado Springs, then in Albuquerque) for the past four seasons.

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