Ramirez, Dodgers Won’t Negotiate Until Season’s End
Team president Stan Kasten says the Dodgers will not be discussing a new contract with free-agent-to-be Hanley Ramirez until after the season, Bill Shaikin of the Los Angeles Times reports. Ramirez is currently on the disabled list with an oblique injury.
“Both sides have agreed we’ll sit down and talk at the end of the season and decide,” says Kasten. “As difficult a season as he’s had physically, there is still lots of time for him to have an enormous impact for us.”
Ramirez and the Dodgers discussed an extension at the beginning of the season, and Ramirez has voiced his desire to be a “Dodger for life.” Ramirez’s injuries and defensive troubles will likely be issues, however — Shaikin cites one insider who says that Ramirez might not be able to get a contract of more than two years unless he’s willing to move from shortstop to a new position. (Obviously, his .277/.367/.455 line this year will play at any position.)
The consensus among those Shaikin polled suggested Ramirez would get two to three years at about $15MM per season, a total that seems surprisingly small, but reasonable, given the question of what position he’ll play and the likelihood that the Dodgers will extend a qualifying offer.
Yankees, Red Sox, Tigers Seen As Major Players For Rusney Castillo
FRIDAY, 8:22pm: One factor in Castillo’s possible impact on the current season is his visa situation, Sherman notes (Twitter links). He has yet to obtain a work visa, which he will need by the end of the month in order to achieve postseason eligibility.
3:50pm: Joel Sherman of the New York Post reports that Castillo and his reps at Roc Nation began looking over offers today. He points out that interested contenders will be urgent to sign him in order to get him on a pro roster in advance of Aug. 31 (players acquired after that date are ineligible for the postseason). However, Sherman notes that several non-contenders are interested in Castillo as well due to his status as a 27-year-old that won’t require draft pick compensation. Sherman lists the Yankees, Red Sox and Tigers as “major players” for Castillo (all links to Twitter).
7:59am: A source with knowledge of the situation told George A. King III of the New York Post earlier this week that Castillo has already received offers from some clubs and will sift through all of his offers this weekend, with a goal of making a decision next week. As King notes, if Castillo is to play in the Majors this season, he will need to sign quickly, as he’ll likely require at least a brief tour through the minors before joining a Major League club.
WEDNESDAY: 7:41pm: The Red Sox are “expected to be aggressive” on Castillo, tweets Scott Lauber of the Boston Herald, who also hears that Castillo will begin narrowing the field to the highest bidders in the coming days.
5:00pm: Cuban outfielder Rusney Castillo is said to be wrapping up his one-on-one workouts with interested teams and will narrow the field of interested teams in the coming days, reports MLB.com’s Jesse Sanchez (on Twitter). Not surprisingly, Sanchez notes that the field will be narrowed to the highest bidders.
Castillo, 27, held a showcase last month that drew scouts from 28 of the 30 Major League teams, and attendees left with generally favorable impressions. Reports from the showcase explained that Castillo showed surprising power, speed that was perceived as anywhere from “very good” to “outstanding” (depending on the scout) and an average throwing arm that some felt was his worst tool.
The Yankees, Red Sox, Phillies, Mariners, Orioles and Cubs were all said to have private workouts scheduled for Castillo, and the Astros were said to be trying to schedule one as well. Sanchez tweets that the Tigers have shown interest as well, though it’s not certain to what degree Detroit is interested. The White Sox, Giants, Blue Jays and Braves have all been listed as potential suitors since Castillo’s showcase as well, while the Twins are said to find his price tag too high. At this time, Sanchez tweets that there’s no favorite, as the field is “wide open,” but that will likely change in the days ahead as Castillo and his representatives at Roc Nation Sports weigh their offers. (Speaking of Roc Nation, fans interested in Castillo can check out a new highlight video of his showcase that was produced by Roc Nation and set to music by — who else? — Jay-Z.)
Rob Manfred Elected Next MLB Commissioner
FRIDAY: Manfred’s initial contract will be a three-year deal, tweets Nightengale.
THURSDAY, 5:58pm: Jon Heyman of CBS Sports tweets that Manfred’s support vacillated between 20, 21 and 22 voters over the course of the day. The Brewers and Rays pushed the vote to 21 and 22. Of the final eight holdouts, the Nationals were the team that eventually changed their vote and put Manfred over the top, Heyman adds.
5:14pm: Bill Shaikin of the L.A. Times tweets that Manfred passed 30-0 in the final vote. Presumably, once one owner flipped his vote, the other seven conceded the defeat and made the decision unanimous. Indeed, in a follow-up tweet, Shaikin calls the 30-0 vote “an olive branch for posterity” by the seven owners who were still opposed to Manfred.
5:01pm: Major League Baseball owners have elected Rob Manfred as the next commissioner of MLB, according to Michael S. Schmidt of the New York Times (Twitter link).
Manfred, 55, will succeed Selig, who had announced that he would step down after the season. The former Brewers’ owner has been at the helm since 1992, when he was named acting Commissioner, taking over for Fay Vincent. His seat was formalized in 1998. During his tenure, baseball went through a devastating strike and still-lingering PED crisis, and also saw significant economic growth.
Manfred has been along for much of that ride, as Lynn Zinser of the New York Times wrote yesterday. After representing MLB as part of his practice with a large firm, Manfred entered league employment full-time in 1998 and spent fifteen years running point on many of the key labor issues that defined Selig’s stint.
The Harvard Law graduate’s ability to work with the MLB Player’s Association was perhaps seen as both a strength and weakness, as a minority group of owners emerged recently to challenge his assumed ascension. Red Sox chairman and part owner Tom Werner arose as the most plausible alternative, and managed to win the initial support off a reported eight owners during the early rounds of voting.
As Bob Nightengale of USA Today wrote yesterday, Manfred supporters will point to his status as head of labor negotiations and the 19 years of peace between MLB and the MLBPA. He also helped to implement baseball’s current drug testing system and headed last year’s Biogenesis investigation. His detractors, Nightengale notes, will point to the fact that baseball is the only sport without a salary cap. They also credit the drug testing agreement to the MLBPA for changing its stance and criticize Manfred for allowing all but $2 billion of the Dodgers’ $8.35 billion TV deal to be protected from revenue sharing.
After the first two rounds of voting, Manfred had just 22 of the necessary 23 votes of support, with the White Sox, Red Sox, Blue Jays, Angels, Nationals, Athletics, Diamondbacks and Reds all opposing. It’s unclear which of the eight opposing teams owners flipped his vote and tipped the scale in Manfred’s favor.
Carlos Gonzalez To Undergo Season-Ending Surgery
11:22pm: The Rockies have announced (on Twitter) that Gonzalez will indeed undergo season-ending surgery to repair the patellar tendon in his left knee. The operation will be performed by Dr. Tom Hackett next Monday.
8:08pm: Just one day after the news that superstar shortstop Troy Tulowitzki will miss the remainder of the season to undergo hip surgery, the Rockies are now facing the likely loss of their other best player for the remainder of the year. Carlos Gonzalez seems resigned to the fact that his season will end prematurely due to left knee surgery, reports Nick Groke of the Denver Post.
Rockies head athletic trainer Keith Dugger tells Groke that Gonzalez has been battling tendinitis in his knee since last season, and an MRI performed yesterday revealed that the injury had worsened in the past few weeks. Manager Walt Weiss, in particular, spoke definitively in regards to his stars’ injuries: “Everyone felt like that might be the case, that we might not have [Tulowitzki and Gonzalez] for the rest of the season, and unfortunately, that’s what it’s gonna be.”
Gonzalez himself didn’t offer a much more optimistic take, telling Groke: “I show up the first game and go 3-for-5 with a home run and I extend a single into a double. And then the next day I feel like I got hit by a bus. … It’s hard to play that way, when you go out there and feel like, ‘I can’t move today. I just hope nobody hits the ball where I’m playing right now.'”
Both Tulowitzki and Gonzalez have seen their names pop up in trade rumors over the past month, but the injuries to both serve as a cautionary tale and a reminder to potentially interested parties. Neither player has been able to consistently stay on the field over the past few years. If this is the end of Gonzalez’s 2014 campaign, he will have averaged just 110 games over the past four seasons. Gonzalez has never played in more than 145 games — a total he reached back in 2010 when he finished third in the National League MVP voting.
The soon-to-be 29-year-old signed a seven-year, $80MM contract to be a building block for the Rockies, but the aforementioned 110-game average has come over the first four years of that contract, and he now has just three years remaining on that deal. The heavily backloaded contract still calls for Gonzalez to earn $53MM over the next three seasons — $16MM in 2015, $17MM in 2016 and $20MM in 2017. Those annual salaries are below market value for a full season of a healthy and effective Gonzalez, but they would present a risky investment for a team looking to acquire him via trade.
Overall, Gonzalez has batted .238/.292/.431 with 15 homers as he has battled knee injuries, a tumor in his index finger (which was surgically removed midseason) and a sprained ankle this season.
Diamondbacks Acquire Brett Jackson From Cubs
The Diamondbacks have acquired former first-round pick and top prospect Brett Jackson from the Cubs in exchange for minor league reliever Blake Cooper, the Cubs announced. The Arizona Republic’s Nick Piecoro tweets that Jackson will be assigned to Triple-A Reno in the D’Backs organization. Piecoro adds that Jackson had been claimed off waivers prior to the trade’s completion.
Jackson, 26, rated as one of the game’s top 100 prospects from 2010-12, according to both Baseball America and Baseball Prospectus (he topped out at No. 32 on BA’s list and No. 44 on BP’s list). When his stock was at its highest, BA likened him to Jim Edmonds, noting that he had that type of ceiling at the plate, if not that type of Gold Glove caliber defense in center field. However, Jackson’s swing-and-miss tendencies caused his stock to plummet, as a problem he looked to have eliminated at the Double-A level resurfaced in Triple-A and still has yet to be corrected. Jackson was batting just .210/.298/.348 with a 37.3 percent strikeout rate for Triple-A Iowa this season and will look to deliver on some of his once sky-high potential in a new organization.
Cooper, also 26, was a 12th-round pick by the Diamondbacks in 2010 and reached Triple-A for the first time in 2014. Though he’s struggled to a 6.00 ERA in 24 innings there, Cooper was excellent at Double-A this year, posting a 1.85 ERA with 8.2 K/9 and 2.6 BB/9 in 34 frames. His command has faltered since moving up to the top minor league level, as he’s walked 17 hitters in his 24 innings at Reno. The 5’11”, 190-pound righty has never ranked among Arizona’s top 30 prospects, according to BA, and he didn’t rank on MLB.com’s midseason list of the D’Backs’ top 20 prospects either. In parts of five minor league seasons, Cooper has a 3.27 ERA with a 217-to-98 K/BB ratio (seven of those free passes were intentional) in 236 2/3 innings.
Because Jackson was waived by an NL team, the D’Backs had the second-highest priority of any club in placing a claim (by virtue of the second-worst record in the NL). Only the Rockies had a higher priority, and it’s not a surprise to see a team with as many outfield options as Colorado pass on a contact-challenged outfielder such as Jackson.
Commissioner Voting In Progress; Manfred Still One Vote Shy
4:33pm: Selig and White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf are speaking in private, tweets Nightengale. Reinsdorf has long been a Selig advocate, but his opposition to Manfred as Selig’s successor has been well documented. The ChiSox, as noted below, are one of the teams currently opposing Manfred.
4:05pm: Schmidt tweets that the second vote for Manfred again resulted in a 22-8 split. Heyman tweets that there will be a 30-minute break in the action before any further proceedings resume.
3:48pm: The eight teams currently not willing to join the majority on electing Manfred include the Blue Jays, Red Sox, White Sox, Nationals, Angels, Athletics, Diamondbacks, and Reds, according to reporting from the New York Daily News (via Twitter).
2:43pm: The next stage will involve an up-or-down vote on Manfred, reports Schmidt (Twitter links). Voting has yet to begin at this point.
1:47pm: Manfred was just one vote shy of being selected as commissioner after the first round of voting, tweets Jon Heyman of CBSSports.com.
Michael Schmidt of the New York Times offers some interesting vignettes of the still-ongoing proceedings.
1:32pm: After several votes, there is still not a sufficient consensus to name a new commissioner, tweets Bob Nightengale of USA Today. The meeting has been adjourned for a break at this point.
12:58pm: Major League Baseball’s owners took part in a series of meetings again this morning and are now prepared to hold a first vote on the game’s new Commissioner at approximately 1:30 EST. One of the three finalists, MLB VP of business Tim Brosnan, has dropped out before the voting, Jon Heyman of CBSSports.com reports on Twitter.
That leaves MLB COO Rob Manfred and Red Sox chairman Tom Werner as the two candidates for the Commissioner’s chair (unless a deadlock were to result in a re-opening of the search process, at least). As MLBTR’s Steve Adams explained yesterday, the vote had expected to come down to the pair. The major question has been, and seemingly still is, whether Werner’s backers could draw enough support to hold up the coronation of Manfred, who has been considered the heir apparent to longtime Commissioner Bud Selig. A vote of 23 owners is necessary to elect the game’s new leading executive.
We will keep track of any updates in this post, as they are reported.
Mets Re-Sign Bobby Abreu
The Mets announced (on Twitter) that they have re-signed Bobby Abreu to a minor league contract and assigned him to Triple-A Las Vegas. The 40-year-old veteran has already appeared in 67 games for the Mets this season after signing a minor league contract at the end of March. New York designated him for assignment and released him earlier this month.
Abreu slashed .238/.331/.336 with one homer in 142 plate appearances for the Mets earlier this year. He raked in 45 plate appearances at Triple-A before being promoted to the big league club, hitting .395/.489/.579. Prior to hooking on with the Mets this season, Abreu had inked a minor league deal with the Phillies, a team with which he enjoyed some of his best seasons, but Philadelphia cut him loose late in Spring Training despite a respectable showing.
Pirates Acquire John Axford
The Pirates have officially acquired righty John Axford from the Indians, the clubs have announced. Ken Rosenthal of FOX Sports first reported the transaction (via Twitter). Axford, 31, joined Cleveland on a one-year, $4.5MM free agent contract after being non-tendered by the Cardinals.
Pittsburgh added the righty through a straight waiver claim , tweets ESPN.com’s Buster Olney. That means the club will be on the hook for the approximately $1.1MM that he is still owed this year, though it will not need to part with any young talent to add the veteran arm.
On the year, Axford has posted a 3.92 ERA with 10.5 K/9 but a troubling 6.5 BB/9 over 43 2/3 innings. He does have a career-best 54.1% groundball rate, but advanced metrics have not been impressed on the whole (4.71 FIP, 3.98 xFIP, 3.80 SIERA). Axford opened the season as the Cleveland closer, and picking up ten saves in the process, but lost the job with inconsistent performance. He has been much better of late, though saw his ERA jump 78 points in his last outing (August 8th) when he gave up four earned runs on three hits and an ill-timed home run.
Axford has now been dealt in August for the second time in as many seasons. Last year, the one-time Brewers closer moved from Milwaukee to St. Louis in late August. Though Axford has two years of arbitration eligibility remaining, it seems rather likely that he will be a non-tender candidate once again. As with Ernesto Frieri, who was recently acquired and later outrighted by the Pirates, early-career save opportunities make it difficult to justify tendering contracts to non-elite bullpen arms.
For the Bucs, Axford represents another attempt to shore up a pen that has failed to match last year’s unit, which was third in baseball with a collective 2.89 ERA. In 2014, the Pittsburgh relief corps has put up a negative fWAR tally and combined to allow 3.52 earned per nine.
Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images.
Tulowitzki To Undergo Season-Ending Hip Surgery
The Rockies received more bad news on the injury front today, as Thomas Harding of MLB.com tweets that MVP candidate Troy Tulowitzki will miss the remainder of the season to undergo surgery to repair the labrum in his left hip.
Tulowitzki, 29, has appeared in just 91 games this season but is hitting a hefty .340/.432/.603 with 21 homers in 375 plate appearances and elite shortstop defense. Both Fangraphs and Baseball-Reference.com peg him for more than five wins above replacement despite the shortened season. This will mark the third consecutive season with a significant DL stint for Tulowitzki, who has not topped 126 games since the 2011 season and hasn’t topped 150 games since 2009.
Tulowitzki’s name has been at the center of quite a bit of trade buzz as of late, due in large part to repeated comments about his impatience with losing and a desire to see change in the Rockies organization. Rockies owner Dick Monfort has said multiple times that he has no plans entertain the thought of trading his superstar, although there’s been speculation that Tulowitzki could ask for a trade this winter. He has clarified, however, that he doesn’t want to be traded and prefers to win as a member of the Rockies organization.
The Rockies control Tulowitzki through at least the 2020 season, as he is guaranteed $20MM annually from 2015-19 and is guaranteed $14MM in the 2020 season. His contract contains a $15MM club option for 2021 with a $4MM buyout, making for a total of $118MM guaranteed following the completion of this season.
Marlins Not Trading Stanton, Will Pursue Top-Of-Rotation Starters In Offseason
Reports have surfaced that the Marlins plan to make legitimate run at extending Giancarlo Stanton this offseason, and MLB.com’s Joe Frisaro hears the same, shedding more light on the situation. According to his sources, the Marlins are serious about not only building around Stanton, but supplementing him by adding a top-flight starter this winter. Frisaro says the 2015 payroll could jump to $75MM, which, while modest relative to the rest of the league, would be about $30MM higher than the team’s Opening Day payroll from the current season. He suggests that the team could make a run at James Shields on the open market, who would front the rotation while Jose Fernandez rehabs from Tommy John surgery.
Suffice it to say, Frisaro gets the impression that the Marlins won’t be trading Stanton under any circumstances this offseason. In fact, he hears that even in the event that Stanton doesn’t sign an extension, the team is comfortable going year-to-year and keeping him as long as possible, then watching him leave in free agency. Miami feels that it has built a team that can be a serious postseason contender in 2015 and 2016 — Stanton’s final two years of arbitration eligibility.
As it stands right now, the Marlins could slot a free agent starter atop their rotation and fill in the remaining four spots with Henderson Alvarez, Nathan Eovaldi, Jarred Cosart and Tom Koehler. Fernandez projects to return around the All-Star break next year, if not sooner, and the team also has one of the top pitching prospects in all of baseball — Andrew Heaney — looming in the minor leagues. With rising young talent such as Christian Yelich and Marcell Ozuna on board, that would seem to be enough to give them a chance to contend in 2015.
Frisaro adds that in the hypothetical event that the Marlins ever do decide to move Stanton, it won’t be solely for a package of prospects. The Marlins would require Major League talent from another club’s roster in addition to top prospects in order to part with their elite slugger. As Frisaro writes: “You’re not going to see a repeat of the Miguel Cabrera trade. It’s not going to be Stanton for six prospects.”