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Free Agent Notes: Kendrick, Ozuna, ChiSox, Braves, Kahnle

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Infielder Howie Kendrick has been noncommittal about his long-term playing status, suggesting in September he could step away from the game after 15 MLB seasons.  However, Kendrick seemed to hint in an Instagram post this afternoon (h/t to Britt Ghiroli of the Athletic) that he is planning to continue his career, along with firmly indicating that he will continue his charitable endeavors off the field.  “What a season!  Proud to partner with Bank of America and Boys & Girls Clubs of America to help fuel rallies all season long and make a difference for kids in our communities.  See you all next year,” Kendrick wrote.

The Nationals declined their 2021 club option on Kendrick’s services, making the former World Series hero a free agent.  Kendrick only hit .275/.320/.385 with two home runs across 100 plate appearances in 2020, but he’s just a year removed from an elite season at the plate.  A return to Washington wouldn’t seem to be out of the question, and surely other teams would have some interest in signing a veteran with Kendrick’s track record.

More on some other available players…

  • Marcell Ozuna’s free agent market is explored by an MLB.com panel of Mark Bowman, Alyson Footer, Scott Merkin, and Jesse Sanchez, with a particular focus on the White Sox (Merkin’s team on the beat) and Braves (Ozuna’s most recent team, and Bowman’s beat).  The White Sox had some interest in Ozuna last winter but now might be looking for more of a full-time outfielder, Merkin says, since star prospect Andrew Vaughn is expected to step into the first base/DH mix alongside Jose Abreu at some point in 2021.  Since Ozuna profiles more as a DH over the long term, the Braves might have some hesitation over bringing Ozuna back since it isn’t yet known if the National League will adopt the designated hitter for 2021.  However, Bowman also notes that Ozuna quickly became a valued figure in Atlanta due to both his production and clubhouse presence.  Early reports have already suggested that the Braves are interested in re-signing Ozuna, but at least nine other clubs have also inquired about his services.
  • Tommy Kahnle is weighing multiple two-year offers, MLB Network’s Jon Heyman reports (via Twitter).  Kahnle underwent Tommy John surgery in early August, though it isn’t uncommon for recent TJ patients to still land multi-year deals on the open market.  In most of these cases, the player receives the bulk of the salary in the second year of the contract and a minimum salary in the first year, with the understanding that most or all of year one will be spent recovering from the surgery.  Kahnle, Heyman says, is hoping to return by the end of the 2021 season, which would be on the short end of the usual 12-15 month recovery timeline for Tommy John patients.

Cubs Open “To Move Almost Any Veteran” In Trades

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For the third straight offseason, the Cubs are indicating that some roster shuffling could be in order, and they seem closer than ever before to making some notable moves.  As per ESPN.com’s Buster Olney (subscription required), the Cubs have told other teams that “significant turnover” is coming, and “the Cubs are signaling…a willingness to move almost any veteran.”

Javier Baez is reportedly one of the players Chicago is open to at least hearing offers for, which is significant since Baez has been the member of the Cubs core group most often discussed as an extension candidate, rather than as a trade chip.  Baez’s extension talks with the Cubs last offseason didn’t really go anywhere, however, and any attempts at further progress were impeded first by the pandemic and the transactions freeze, and then possibly by Baez’s struggles once the 2020 season got underway.  The shortstop hit only .203/.238/.360 with eight homers over 235 plate appearances, easily his worst performance since his 2014 rookie season.

Taking a look at the Cubs’ pricier veterans, Baez, Kris Bryant, and Kyle Schwarber are all arbitration-eligible for the final time this winter before being eligible for free agency, while catcher Willson Contreras is heading into the second of three arb-eligible years.  Anthony Rizzo is under contract through the 2021 season, Craig Kimbrel is guaranteed through 2021 with a $16MM club/vesting option for 2022, and Yu Darvish, Jason Heyward, Kyle Hendricks, and David Bote are all locked up through at least the 2023 season on longer-term contracts.

Naturally, the phrasing of “almost any veteran” means some trades are more realistic than others.  While a case could be made for the Cubs to sell high on Darvish or Hendricks, for instance, the team is also counting on them as long-term anchors for the rotation, so it’s probably less likely that either of those two pitchers are moved.  Also, in terms of pure due diligence, most front offices are usually open (to some extent) to discuss trades for almost any player, just in case another team comes along with a truly stupendous offer.

The Cubs also made little in the way of noteworthy transactions in either of the past two winters, despite Theo Epstein’s past hints that bigger moves were necessary.  With all these caveats in mind, however, it does seem like the Cubs are finally approaching some level of wider-scale shakeup, as the loss of revenues due to the pandemic may have forced the team’s hand.  Nothing can really be ruled out, whether it’s trading only one highly-paid veteran, or perhaps moving several such players in order to cut payroll.

Four Teams Showing Interest In Jake Odorizzi

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Despite an injury-shortened 2020 season, right-hander Jake Odorizzi is getting a lot of attention on the free agent market.  The Giants, Blue Jays, and Mets have all shown interest in Odorizzi, according to ESPN.com’s Buster Olney (subscription required), and the Twins are also keen to re-sign their former All-Star.

Between a back strain, a blister on his throwing hand, and a chest contusion after being struck by an Alex Gordon line drive, Odorizzi ended up pitching only 13 2/3 innings for the Twins last season, and he didn’t see any action in Minnesota’s two games the wild card series.  Nonetheless, Odorizzi still ranked 11th on MLBTR’s list of the offseason’s top 50 free agents, due to both the rather minor nature of those 2020 injuries and his overall solid track record.  Between 2014-19 with the Rays and Twins, Odorizzi averaged 165 innings per season with a 3.88 ERA, 8.7 K/9, and 2.79 K/BB rate.

This isn’t the first time Odorizzi has been linked to the Jays, and in fact Toronto was Odorizzi’s predicted landing spot on the MLBTR top 50.  The Blue Jays have already re-signed Robbie Ray and are known to still be looking for pitching to bolster a rotation that doesn’t offer much certainty beyond Hyun Jin Ryu.  San Francisco and New York are also looking to add arms this winter and have also made early pitching moves, both via the qualifying offer — Kevin Gausman and Marcus Stroman each accepted the one-year, $18.9MM deals to remain with their former teams.

Beyond their shared need of pitching, these are also three of the teams thought to have some extra spending capacity this winter.  The Giants don’t have much salary committed beyond 2021, the Jays have even lesser salary obligations and corporate ownership, and the Mets are expected to spend big (if not “like drunken sailors“) now that Steve Cohen has bought the team.  It wouldn’t be surprising if we hear of these three specific clubs checking in on more or less every available pitcher on the free agent and trade markets as the Giants, Jays, and Mets gauge how to best deploy their financial resources.

Minnesota doesn’t have quite as glaring a pitching need as the other three clubs, since the Twins have Kenta Maeda, Jose Berrios, Randy Dobnak, and a full season of Michael Pineda lined up for their 2020 rotation.  Still, retaining Odorizzi would only further strengthen that depth as the Twins continue to look for the right roster mix to finally break their postseason losing streak.

Kyuji Fujikawa Retires

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Right-hander Kyuji Fujikawa officially retired earlier this week, after pitching in his final game for the Hanshin Tigers on Tuesday.  The 40-year-old Fujikawa tossed a 1-2-3 inning to close the book on an outstanding pro career that included three Major League seasons.

North American fans best remember Fujikawa from his three seasons with the Cubs and Rangers from 2013-15, though that stint was hardly indicative of Fujikawa at his finest.  Signing with Chicago on a two-year, $9.5MM contract in December 2012, Fujikawa appeared in only 12 games before undergoing Tommy John surgery and missing much of the 2013 and 2014 seasons.  Overall, Fujikawa managed only a 5.74 ERA over 26 2/3 innings in Major League Baseball.

In Japan, however, Fujikawa rose to legendary status over 17 seasons in the Hanshin Tigers bullpen.  Fujikawa posted a 2.08 ERA, 11.7 K/9, 3.60 K/BB rate, and 243 saves over 935 1/3 career innings with the Tigers, acting as both a top setup man and closer.  Fujikawa was a big contributor in the last two Tigers teams to reach the Japan Series (in 2003 and 2005, though the Curse Of The Colonel remained intact).

We at MLBTR wish Fujikawa all the best in retirement, and congratulate him on a fine career.

Transaction Retrospection: The Mike Yastrzemski Trade

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During his first offseason leading the Giants, president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi aggressively remade the back half of the 40-man roster. Among that spate of transactions was the unheralded acquisition of outfielder Mike Yastrzemski in a spring training swap with the Orioles.

In March 2019, San Francisco picked up Yastrzemski in exchange for right-hander Tyler Herb. Then 28 years old, Yastrzemski was a former 14th-round pick who had yet to play a major league game. To the extent that there was any fanfare surrounding his acquisition, it had much more to do with his relation to Carl Yastrzemski than to his play.

The deal now looks like a masterstroke. Over his first 636 MLB plate appearances, Yastrzemski has put up a fantastic .281/.357/.535 slash (135 wRC+) and hit 31 home runs. He has been worth about five wins above replacement over the equivalent of one full season. The left-handed hitter earned an eighth-place finish in NL MVP voting this past season thanks to a .297/.400/.568 line.

Herb, on the other hand, didn’t reach the majors during his two years in the Baltimore organization. The 28-year-old elected minor-league free agency earlier this month, per Chris Hilburn-Trenkle of Baseball America.

Even if Yastrzemski takes a bit of a step back from his star-level production, he at least looks like an above-average regular. His late-career breakout is another reminder that even the lowest-profile transactions have some chance of being impactful.

AL East Notes: Blue Jays, Red Sox, Rodriguez

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Some notes from the American League East:

  • Blue Jays general manager Ross Atkins has spoken previously about making a high-impact addition to the roster. He reiterated that desire when speaking with Jim Duquette and Jim Bowden of MLB Network Radio on SiriusXM (Twitter link). Toronto indeed plans to make a run at elite talent this offseason, Atkins stated. That’s easier said than done, of course. Atkins also spoke of a desire to improve the team’s overall run prevention numbers. Trevor Bauer is handily the top free agent pitcher on the market, but the Jays could also look for a high-end defender to keep runs off the board.
  • Atkins also addressed the Blue Jays’ 2021 stadium situation during his MLB Network Radio interview (Twitter link). The current hope is the team returns to the Rogers Centre after playing their 2020 home games at Buffalo’s Sahlen Field. Atkins also left open the possibility of starting the 2021 season outside Toronto and returning to their home city at a later date. No one knows what the COVID-19 rate will look like next April, of course, so the organization is preparing “contingency plans” in case international travel continues to be restricted next year.
  • Last offseason, Eduardo Rodríguez expressed some openness to working out an extension with the Red Sox. There’s no indication the sides ever seriously discussed a potential long-term agreement, but Rodríguez is now just one season away from free agency. The Sox should approach the southpaw about an extension this offseason, opines Rob Bradford of WEEI. Rodríguez missed the entire 2020 season due to a scary bout with myocarditis after contracting COVID-19; fortunately, he’s expected to return at full strength in 2021.

Analyzing The Tigers’ Matthew Boyd Decision

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In the coming weeks, the Tigers will have to decide on a course of action regarding starter Matthew Boyd.  That was the case last winter as well, but Boyd’s disastrous 2020 season puts the Detroit organization in a much less favorable position this time around.

Boyd was one of the most commonly-referenced trade candidates around the 2019 deadline and during the subsequent offseason. The rebuilding Tigers held firm on a lofty asking price for the controllable strikeout specialist and ultimately kept him in the fold. Unfortunately, Boyd struggled through an abysmal twelve starts in 2020, no doubt dealing a heavy blow to his trade value.

The southpaw pitched to a 6.71 ERA across 60.1 innings this past season. A fly-ball pitcher, Boyd has always been vulnerable to home runs, but the long balls spiked to an untenable level in 2020. Even more concerning, the swing-and-miss stuff that had made Boyd so appealing fell off substantially. His strikeout rate dropped from an elite level (30.2%) in 2019 to slightly below-average (22.1%) last year. Boyd still generated whiffs at a solid clip on a pitch-by-pitch basis, but his 238-strikeout 2019 season now looks more like an outlier than an indicator of an upward trend in performance.

With teams having to decide whether to tender contracts to arbitration-eligible players by December 2, the Tigers have to determine if Boyd can get back on track. Arbitration salaries are tougher than ever to project this offseason, but MLBTR’s Matt Swartz pegs Boyd for something in the $5.5MM – $7.8MM range. That’d be great value for a high-strikeout, mid-rotation workhorse. But it’s not an insignificant amount of money for a player with a career 5.08 ERA/4.75 FIP. If Detroit feels Boyd’s 2019 season was something of an aberration, the organization could look to move on.

That could still take the form of a trade. Surely, the Tigers wouldn’t recoup anything close to what they would’ve received six months ago. It’s easy to envision other teams having interest in buying low, though. Boyd’s still only 29 years old (30 in February). He comes with another season of arbitration-eligibility beyond 2021, so there’s some long-term contractual upside if he figures things out. Notably, Boyd’s velocity and spin rates weren’t marginally different in 2020 than they were in 2019, so it’d be easy to hope for a rebound.

Robbie Ray, another high-strikeout southpaw who endured a similarly miserable 2020 season, could be an instructive case. Ray signed a one-year, $8MM deal with the Blue Jays shortly after entering free agency. Which one of Boyd or Ray one would rather have on their team is debatable, but that $8MM mark might be an approximate figure for Boyd’s current market value. That’s right around the high-end range of Boyd’s arbitration projection, making this an interesting dilemma for the Tigers.

Caleb Cotham “Clear Frontrunner” To Be Next Phillies Pitching Coach

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NOVEMBER 15: The Phillies are indeed hoping to finalize a deal with Cotham in the next week, hears Jon Heyman of MLB Network (Twitter link).

NOVEMBER 14: Reds’ assistant pitching coach and director of pitching Caleb Cotham is the leading candidate to take over as the next pitching coach of the Philadelphia Phillies, per Jim Salisbury of NBC Sports Philadelphia. Salisbury names Cotham as the “clear frontrunner.”

Cotham, 33, pitched for two seasons at the major-league level, making his debut for manager Joe Girardi and the New York Yankees in 2015. Girardi likely has significant sway in this hiring decision as the manager of the Phillies, especially since they continue to search for a new head of baseball ops. The Phillies, however, aren’t the only team that Cotham has spoken with this offseason.

Speculatively speaking, Cotham’s experience with Driveline Baseball could be a selling point for data-interested hurlers, as well as the organization on the whole. One such hurler happens to be the top starting pitcher on the free agent market. It’s easy to connect the dots between a potential Cotham hire and NL Cy Young Trevor Bauer – just as we do between Cotham and Girardi – but that’s two steps down the line. If a connection is all it takes to sign Bauer, after all, the Reds would still be in pole position. The Phillies have, however, shown a willingness to spend for starting pitching on the open market in recent years with the additions of Jake Arrieta and Zack Wheeler. Still, if Cotham does indeed turn out to be their hire, it will be on his own merit.

Poll: Which Qualifying Offer Free Agent Will Sign First?

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The deadline for accepting the qualifying offer has come and gone, with two players (the Mets’ Marcus Stroman and the Giants’ Kevin Gausman) opting to accept the one-year, $18.9MM deal from their most recent team.  That leaves four other players in this year’s QO class, all of whom rejected the one-year offer — Trevor Bauer, J.T. Realmuto, George Springer, and DJ LeMahieu.

There was some debate over whether or not Stroman or Gausman would even receive a qualifying offer, so it perhaps isn’t surprising that the two hurlers each chose to accept rather than test the open market.  For the other four, however, there was no doubt that each would receive and reject the QO since more lucrative, longer-term offers surely await in free agency.  Bauer, Realmuto, Springer, and LeMahieu take up four of the top five places on MLBTR’s list of the offseason’s top 50 free agents, with only Marcell Ozuna — who was ineligible for another qualifying offer after being issued one last winter — interceding in the #4 spot.

Now that the QO detail has been settled, the question is which of the quartet will be the first to land that lucrative, long-term contract?  (And, it should be noted that “long-term” may not necessarily be the case in regards to Bauer.)  All of the financial uncertainty of the 2020-21 offseason might not necessarily impact these top-tier free agents in terms of overall earning potential, though the ripple effects of other signings elsewhere in the market could impact when exactly these big four stars sign their next contract.

For instance, there is some thought around baseball that this will be another slow winter for offseason activity, as the strained payrolls throughout the sport will make teams even more wary about making big free agent investments.  A large group of new free agents is expected to flood the market by the December 2 non-tender deadline, so teams might wait until that date to make any sort of significant move so they can assess all of their options.  A team in need of catching, for example, could hold off on making an offer to Realmuto until they know whether or not the Yankees could actually non-tender Gary Sanchez.

But this poll isn’t asking who the last to sign will be, it’s who will be the first.  As mentioned, Bauer/Realmuto/Springer/LeMahieu could be shielded in many respects from the crunch that other free agents are likely to face, and could get a lot of early attention from teams looking to make their offseason as simple as possible.  In the case of the Yankees and LeMahieu, a relatively quick re-signing would allow New York to check off one big box, and then figure out how to address other needs with what resources remain (if the Yankees are indeed trying to get under the $210MM luxury tax threshold).

With so much up in the air about the 2021 season, there’s a case to be made that any of these free agents would prefer to get a new contract locked up soon, so they can fully focus on getting ready for whatever challenges 2021 may bring.  If we reach March and there’s still question as to whether or not the pandemic will allow Opening Day to proceed as scheduled, or if the 2021 season will still be 162 games or not, no player would want the added uncertainty of still not knowing where they’ll be playing whenever Opening Day does occur.

Cast your vote, which of the Qualifying Offer Four will be the first to land their new contract? (Poll link for app users)

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