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Mariners Re-Sign Kendall Graveman

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11:42am: Graveman’s deal comes with a $1.25MM base salary and another $2.5MM worth of incentives, per USA Today’s Bob Nightengale (Twitter link). That will give him the opportunity to earn a bit more than the $3.5MM he’d have taken home had the Mariners picked up his option.

11:35am: That was quick. Just one day after declining their $3.5MM club option on Kendall Graveman, the Mariners announced that they’ve re-signed the right-hander to a new one-year, Major League contract for the 2021 season. It’s surely at a lesser rate than that $3.5MM price point, but the Sports One Management client looks as though he’ll be locked in as a member of the team’s bullpen again next season.

Graveman, 29, returned to the Majors in 2020 after missing most of 2018 and all of 2019 due to Tommy John surgery. The initial hope was that he’d be a member of the team’s six-man rotation, but Graveman spent much of the year on the injured list due to a neck injury and returned to the club in September as a reliever.

The results upon his return were encouraging, however, as Graveman averaged a career-best 96.4 mph on his sinker and held opponents to four runs on six hits and three walks with five strikeouts in 10 innings. Three of those runs came in one particularly rough outing, but Graveman allowed just one run in the rest of his bullpen outings combined. He also sported a hefty 55.4 percent ground-ball rate in that time, giving further cause for optimism about his potential as a reliever over the course of a full season.

For Seattle, re-signing Graveman is its first noteworthy order of business in what should be an active winter for its relief corps. After the Mariners’ bullpen finished 2020 last in the AL in ERA and fWAR, general manager Jerry Dipoto declared the M’s would try to add three to four relievers in the offseason.

Astros Place Roberto Osuna On Outright Waivers

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The Astros have placed right-hander Roberto Osuna on outright waivers, reports Jake Kaplan of The Athletic (Twitter link). The right-hander missed most of the 2020 season with an elbow injury and was initially recommended to undergo Tommy John surgery, although a second opinion caused him to attempt to rehab the injury without surgery. Osuna was projected by MLBTR contributor Matt Swartz to repeat his $10MM salary in his final trip through arbitration, and his salary and injury have made an obvious non-tender candidate. That’s what this move effectively boils down to.

Given Osuna’s injury, projected salary and prior suspension under Major League Baseball’s domestic violence policy, it’s all but a lock that he’ll clear waivers and become a free agent.

Still just 25 years of age, Osuna pitched only 4 1/3 innings in 2020 before landing on the injured list with what proved to be a season-ending elbow ailment. He’s been consistently excellent every season he’s been on the mound — career 2.74 ERA, 9.9 K/9, 1.6 BB/9 — but Osuna also served 75-game suspension in 2018 after his girlfriend filed domestic violence charges against him. Osuna eventually agreed to a peace bond in Canada, which resulted in the charges being dropped.

Per the Canadian Department of Justice’s web site, peace bonds are generally used when “an individual (the defendant) appears likely to commit a criminal offence, but there are no reasonable grounds to believe that an offence has actually been committed.” The Canadian Department of Justice further specifies  that peace bonds are obtainable by “any person who fears that another person may injure them, their spouse or common-law partner, or a child, or may damage their property.”

All of that will be factored into any future negotiations between Osuna and a new team once he reaches the market, although Osuna’s own track record shows that teams will look past allegations of abuse and assault in order to acquire a productive Major Leaguer. The Astros embarrassingly walked back their own “zero tolerance” policy for domestic abuse in order to acquire Osuna at a lower cost in the middle of his suspension, and we’ve seen other teams pay premium prices to sign players who’ve served suspensions under the domestic violence policy (most notably the Yankees with Aroldis Chapman).

The most immediate determining factor in Osuna’s next destination will be the health of his right elbow (or lack thereof). He began a throwing program about a month after initially being shut down, but he’ll have a ways to go before he’s ready to rejoin a bullpen.

Corey Kluber Cleared For Normal Offseason Routine

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The Rangers will reportedly decline Corey Kluber’s $18MM option in favor of a $1MM buyout after the right-hander missed nearly the entire 2020 season due to a Grade 2 teres major strain. However, it appears as though that injury is behind him, as WEEI’s Rob Bradford reports that Kluber has been cleared for his normal offseason routine.

No timeline for Kluber’s recovery was provided at the time of his injury. Both he and teammate Jose Leclerc sustained the same injury within days of one another, and the Rangers announced that both would be shut down entirely for a month before attempting to throw.

It’s perhaps worth noting — if only to highlight the bizarrely connected web of players with this injury — that the Indians put an 8-12 week timeline on one of their relievers when he had a similar injury back in March: right-hander Emmanuel Clase … whom they landed from Texas in exchange for Kluber. In 2019, another Indians righty, Mike Clevinger, missed about 10 weeks with a teres major strain of his own.

Every injury is different, of course, but those broad timelines, paired with Bradford’s report, suggest that Kluber’s injured muscle has largely healed up by this point. Still, as MLBTR’s Jeff Todd noted as soon as Kluber hit the 45-day IL, it always seemed likely that the $18MM option price would be deemed to risky. That much was apparent even before the Rangers struggled through a dismal season as a whole, finishing with one of the game’s worst records, and began talking of a youth movement.

Unsurprisingly, fans of just about all 30 teams clamored on social media yesterday for their club to be the one to buy low on Kluber this winter. Interest should indeed be widespread, particularly if he is indeed able to go through his typical routine and can be expected to be full-go come Spring Training. Kluber should have a variety of offers to sift through even in spite of a pair of injury-wrecked seasons. His 2019 injuries — a fractured forearm after being hit by a comeback liner and an oblique strain — were fluky, after all.

It’s hard to imagine any club going beyond two years given the missed time and the sport’s revenue losses, and any multi-year offer would probably come with a relatively muted annual rate. Speculatively, a strong one-year offer with a contender would figure to be appealing for Kluber. That would give him the opportunity to reestablish himself for a return to market next winter and to allow him some control over his future for the first time in his career. He’d surely be hit with a qualifying offer at season’s end if he bounces back, but a healthy Kluber would also be a lock to reject that and still find strong interest in free agency.

Phillies Outright Heath Hembree, Adam Morgan

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The Phillies have outrighted relievers Heath Hembree and Adam Morgan, Meghan Montemurro of The Athletic reports (via Twitter). Both were arbitration-eligible, and both have the service time to reject the assignment in favor of free agency, which is a mere formality at this point. Hembree was one of the team’s August trade pickups from the Red Sox. Morgan has been a longtime member of the bullpen but recently underwent flexor tendon surgery that is expected to sideline him for six to nine months.

Hembree, 31, was a stable member of the Boston bullpen for years but got out to an ugly start in 2020 and saw things get worse after the trade. From 2016-19, the right-hander notched a solid 3.60 ERA with 10.1 K/9 against 3.4 BB/9 in 212 2/3 innings of work — plus 4 2/3 shutout frames in the 2018 postseason. He allowed six runs in 9 2/3 frames with the Red Sox prior to the swap, although nearly all of the damage against him came in one nightmare outing (four runs and zero outs recorded).

With the Phils, however, Hembree uncharacteristically yielded runs in eight of his 11 appearances on the mound, including a four-run drubbing in his final outing of the year. All told, he served up 13 runs on 17 hits — a staggering seven of which were home runs — and five walks with 10 strikeouts in just 9 1/3 innings. His struggles made him a clear non-tender candidate, and the Phillies opted to act early rather than prolong the decision.

Morgan, a 30-year-old lefty, was tagged for eight runs in 13 frames during an injury-shortened 2020 season. He broke into the Majors as a rotation hopeful with the Phillies, starting 36 games for the club from 2015-16, but struggled to find success in that role. Upon a full-time move to the ’pen in 2017, though, Morgan found a home as a regular member of the staff. From 2017-19, he tallied 133 2/3 frames with a 3.97 ERA and 4.08 FIP, averaging 9.6 strikeouts and 3.4 walks per nine innings pitched while also recording a solid 47.8 percent grounder rate.

The bullpen figures to be among the Phillies’ top priorities this winter — a new deal with J.T. Realmuto is surely their No. 1 goal — and moving on from Hembree and Morgan now gives them a bit more flexibility as they pursue those goals.

Mets To Decline Options On Ramos, Frazier, Chirinos

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2:48pm: The Mets will also buy out their options on infielder Todd Frazier and catcher Robinson Chirinos, reports Tim Healey of Newsday. As with Ramos, neither decision is surprising. Both Frazier and Chirinos were acquired from the Rangers at the trade deadline, albeit in separate transactions.

Frazier, 35 in February, batted .236/.302/.382 in 172 trips to the plate between Arlington and Queens in 2020. His one-year, $5MM deal included a $3.5MM salary in 2020 and a $1.5MM buyout on a $5.75MM option for the 2021 season. The Mets had a net $4.25MM decision on the slugger, but he’ll head out into the open market once again.

Chirinos, 36, had a $1MM buyout on a $6.5MM option for the upcoming 2021 campaign. Given this season’s dismal .162/.232/.243 performance between the two clubs (82 plate appearances), there was no way the Mets were going to pick him up at that salary.

1:40pm: The Mets are planning to decline their $10MM club option on veteran catcher Wilson Ramos, tweets Mike Puma of the New York Post. It’s anything but a surprise given Ramos’ lackluster tenure in Queens. He’ll be paid a $1.5MM buyout and head back to the open market in search of a new club.

Ramos, 33, was known to be an offense-first catcher when he signed with the Mets prior to the 2019 season, but his production never reached the levels the Mets likely expected of him. His 2019 campaign was solid, particularly for a catcher (105 wRC+), but Ramos’ two years as a Met resulted in a rather pedestrian .276/.339/.410 batting line through 679 trips to the plate.

Were Ramos a strong defensive backstop, that production would make him an excellent all-around catcher, but that hasn’t been the case for some time now. He registered bottom-of-the-scale framing metrics in his two years in Queens, and his -12 Defensive Runs Saved and 15.9 percent caught-stealing rate underscore the struggles he endured. That led to some drama with Noah Syndergaard, who reportedly requested that Tomas Nido catch his starts because of Ramos’ inadequacies as a receiver. The 122 stolen bases allowed by Ramos since 2019 are far and away the most in Major League Baseball; Yasmani Grandal’s 80 are the next-highest, though he’s also logged a solid 29.2 percent caught-stealing rate in that time.

The defensive questions surrounding Ramos will complicate his market this winter, although when he’s at his best at the plate, he’s proven to be one of the more productive bats the game has to offer at the position. From 2016-19, Ramos made two All-Star teams and logged a combined .294/.346/.463 slash with 62 home runs and 72 doubles in 1687 plate appearances.

Nationals Decline 2021 Options On Four Players

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The Nationals have declined their 2021 options on right fielder Adam Eaton, right-hander Anibal Sanchez, first baseman Eric Thames and infielder/outfielder Howie Kendrick, per a club announcement. Eaton’s five-year, $23.5MM deal contained club options for the 2020 season ($9.5MM) and the 2021 season ($10.5MM with a $1.5MM buyout). The Nats picked up his 2020 option last winter but will buy him out on the heels of a woeful season at the plate.

Sanchez’s two-year, $19MM deal with the Nats contained a $12MM club option with a $2MM buyout. Thames signed a one-year, $4MM deal last winter — one that came with a $4MM mutual option and a $1MM buyout. Kendrick’s $6.25MM deal with the Nats came with a $4MM salary in 2020 but a hefty $2.25MM buyout on a $6.5MM mutual option for 2021. All four players will be paid those buyouts and head back to the open market.

Eaton, 32 in December, was acquired in the blockbuster trade that sent pitching prospects Lucas Giolito, Reynaldo Lopez and Dane Dunning to the White Sox — all three of whom started games for the South Siders in 2020. Giolito has emerged as one of the game’s best young pitchers since the trade, but the others have yet to solidify themselves as consistent arms. (Dunning will surely get that chance in 2021.)

While Eaton’s time with the Nats ended with a whimper — he batted just .226/.285/.384 in 2020 — he was a key member of 2019’s World Series roster. Eaton appeared in 151 games with the Nats in that championship season, batting .279/.365/.428 with 15 homers, 25 doubles, seven triples and 15 steals. He had a quiet postseason before breaking out to go 8-for-25 with a pair of homers and four walks during the 2019 World Series.

From 2014-19, Eaton batted .289/.367/.423 with 51 homers, 133 doubles, 37 triples and 74 steals, and any club that signs him this winter will hope for a return to that level of productivity. He’s never won a Gold Glove — he very arguably should have in 2016 — but Eaton has a solid defensive reputation in right field. He’s unlikely to return to those 2016 heights that saw him log 27 Defensive Runs Saved and an 18.5 Ultimate Zone Rating in right field, but Eaton has a solid track record of above-average power, speed and glovework that should appeal to clubs at something less than the one-year, $10.5MM price point on which the Nats passed.

Sanchez, 37 in February, improbably revitalized his career for a second act when he latched on with the 2017 Braves at the end of Spring Training. Sanchez parlayed a brilliant rebound campaign with the Braves into a two-year, $19MM deal in D.C. and, like Eaton, provided considerable value to the World Champs in 2019. That season saw Sanchez rack up 166 innings of 3.85 ERA ball, and he went on to give the Nats 18 innings with a 2.50 ERA in the postseason — including a dominant, 7 2/3-inning scoreless effort against the Cardinals in Game 1 of the NLCS.

Unfortunately for Sanchez and the Nats, his 2020 season swung in the other direction. He pitched 53 innings and was tattooed for a 6.62 ERA in that time, but there’s no denying the crucial role he played in helping the Nats to their first World Series title.

Speaking of that World Series, Kendrick will go down in Nationals lore as perhaps the biggest hero of the whole season. His epic grand slam put away the Dodgers in the decisive Game 5 of the NLDS, and Kendrick again played savior when he banged what looked like a perfectly located pitch from Will Harris off the right foul pole to put the Nats on top over the Astros in Game 7 of the World Series.

Kendrick battled through injuries in his return to the Nats in 2020, however, taking just 100 plate appearances and posting a solid but unremarkable .275/.320/.385 slash in that time. Kendrick isn’t certain whether he’ll play again in 2020 or retire at this point, so he’ll take some time to ponder his future.

Thames inked a one-year deal with the Nats last winter but never really found his footing. He took 140 turns at the plate but managed only a .203/.300/.317 batting line in that small sample. The former KBO star slugged 72 homers in the three prior seasons with the Brewers, and he could fit on a club looking for a lefty bat that can platoon at first base or in the outfield corners. Given the scope of his 2020 struggles, he may need to earn his way onto a roster via a minor league deal, however.

D-backs Decline Options On Mike Leake, Hector Rondon, Junior Guerra

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The Diamondbacks are declining their 2021 options over right-handers Mike Leake, Hector Rondon and Junior Guerra, general manager Mike Hazen announced to reporters (Twitter link via Steve Gilbert of MLB.com). Leake’s five-year, $80MM contract (originally signed with the Cardinals) carried an $18MM club option with a $5MM buyout. Rondon’s one-year, $3MM deal included a $4MM club option that will instead be bought out for $500K. Guerra’s $3.5MM club option is being bought out for $100K, but he’ll remain under club control via arbitration.

Leake, who’ll turn 33 in a couple weeks, didn’t pitch in 2020 after becoming the first of several veterans to opt out of the season due to health and safety concerns. He made 10 starts for the D-backs in 2019 after coming over from the Mariners via trade, pitching to a 4.35 ERA with a 27-to-8 K/BB ratio in 60 innings.

Leake’s five-year deal didn’t at all go how the Cardinals envisioned — they ate a sizable portion of the deal to facilitate a trade to Seattle just a year and a half into the contract — but he was rather solid from 2017-19 under the deal. Leake made 94 starts in that time and logged a collective 4.19 ERA through 568 2/3 frames. He’s never been one to miss many bats, but Leake typically has excellent control and ranked sixth among all MLB pitchers in games started from 2011-19.

Rondon, once the Cubs closer, enjoyed a solid 2018-19 run with the Astros before scuffling through a disastrous 2020 season in Arizona. He tallied 20 innings of work but was clobbered for a 7.65 ERA in what will go down as his lone season with the team. In those 20 frames, Rondon yielded 17 earned runs on 25 hits (six homers) 11 walks with 23 strikeouts. He still has a career 3.49 ERA and 3.63 FIP even in spite of this year’s woeful results, so he should be able to get another look somewhere in 2021, his age-33 season — though it’d likely have to come on a non-guaranteed deal.

Guerra, who’ll turn 36 in January, notched a tidy 3.04 ERA in 23 innings this past season, although his 21-to-15 K/BB ratio and 5.03 SIERA tell another story. Guerra was a frequent contributor for the Brewers prior to signing in Arizona, as he pitched to a combined 3.78 ERA in 416 2/3 frames with Milwaukee from 2016-19. MLBTR contributor Matt Swartz projected a possible $2.8MM salary for Guerra via arbitration, and if the D-backs feel similarly, it’s not a surprise that they opted not to pay the full freight of his 2021 option.

Rob Manfred Discusses MLB’s Revenue Losses

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Talk of revenue losses throughout the sport has been prominent since the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, but commissioner Rob Manfred put some more concrete numbers on the concept this week. In an interview with Barry M. Bloom for Sportico, Manfred claimed that the league’s 30 teams have amassed a collective $8.3 billion in debt and will post anywhere from $2.8 to $3.0 billion in combined operational losses.

Manfred’s comments come at a time when many clubs throughout the league have made sweeping layoffs to both business-side and baseball operations employees. The Athletic’s Alex Coffey reported last week that the A’s, for instance, are preparing to lay off upwards of 150 employees who were furloughed throughout much of the 2020 season. They’re far from the only club making such broad-ranging cuts, although Oakland certainly figures to be on the more extreme end of the spectrum.

Evan Drellich of The Athletic wrote yesterday that a league official claimed Major League Baseball’s EBITDA — earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization — showed a loss of $2.7 billion but also noted that with the league’s books closed, such numbers can’t be independently verified. A league official claimed to Drellich, perhaps more dubiously, that even under normal conditions the league would have expected $10 billion in revenue against $10.2 billion of expenses — a rather eye-opening and frankly questionable assertion when considering last year’s widely reported $10.7 billion of revenue for MLB.

In that sense, the claims put forth by Manfred and the unnamed league official(s) who spoke to Drellich on the condition of anonymity call back to the ugly standoff between MLB and the MLBPA during return-to-play negotiations, wherein the players repeatedly called for ownership to open its books and provide quantitative evidence of the extent of the damage they were facing. Detractors will surely question the veracity of the league’s figures, which Drellich notes do not account for “ancillary” revenue streams like stakes in regional sports networks.

Regardless, there’s no doubting that revenue losses felt by clubs in the absence of fans is enormous. The job cuts throughout the sport are but one way for ownership to soften the blow, but the most direct means of correcting course for owners is expected to be via club payroll. For months we’ve heard expectations of a bloated group of non-tendered players and a tepid market for free agents. To that end, Bloom notes that some club executives have already signaled that they won’t be able to commit salary to players this winter.

Some clubs will surely still spend money. The purported $2.8 to $3 billion in operating losses isn’t necessarily divided evenly among the league’s 30 clubs, and tolerance for loss varies from owner to owner (or ownership group to ownership group). Still, on a macro level it’s wise to anticipate large-scale reductions in team payrolls.

Most concerning for players, remaining club employees and the health of the sport is the potential for additional revenue losses in 2021. While the obvious hope is that fans will be back in the park for a full 162-game slate next season, that’s wholly dependent on the status of the coronavirus and the associated public health guidelines in place. To this point there’s no clear timeline on when a vaccine will be produced, approved, scaled and distributed such that clubs could expect business as usual. And while Manfred has previously taken an optimistic tone on that front, he struck a different chord in speaking with Bloom this week.

“[I]t’s going to be difficult for the industry to weather another year where we don’t have fans in the ballpark and have other limitations on how much we can’t play and how we can play,” Manfred told Bloom. “…It’s absolutely certain, I know, that we’re going to have to have conversations with the MLBPA about what 2021 is going to look like. It’s difficult to foresee a situation right now where everything’s just normal.”

Reds Outright Joel Kuhnel

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The Reds announced Monday that right-hander Joel Kuhnel has cleared waivers been assigned outright to Triple-A Louisville. Between Kuhnel’s outright and the Mets’ claim of Robel Garcia, the Reds have opened a pair of spots on the 40-man roster.

Kuhnel, 25, has pitched 12 2/3 innings with Cincinnati over the past two seasons, working to a combined 4.97 ERA with a 12-to-5 K/BB ratio and a 47.4 percent ground-ball rate in that limited sample. He averaged better than 96 mph on his heater in 2019 with a swinging-strike of 14.5 percent, though both those marks were down in 2020 — albeit in a minuscule sample of three innings (95.4 mph; 3.5 percent).

Kuhnel, an 11th-round pick by the Reds in 2016, obviously didn’t pitch much in a game setting this year thanks to the absence of a minor league season. His last extended minor league work came in 2019, when he notched a tidy 2.18 ERA with a 50-to-16 K/BB ratio in 53 2/3 frames between Double-A and Triple-A.

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