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None of North America’s major sports leagues are currently playing games, but the NFL is in the midst of one of its biggest weeks of the year, and Pro Football Rumors is covering all the action.

The NFL’s free agency period kicked off on Monday with a series of agreements on major deals, including the Texans trading DeAndre Hopkins to the Cardinals, the Vikings sending Stefon Diggs to the Bills, and Amari Cooper reaching a $100MM deal with the Cowboys.

Tuesday began with Tom Brady dropping a bombshell, announcing that his time with the Patriots has come to an end. Brady’s eventual landing spot is one of the biggest NFL offseason questions still to be answered, but Pro Football Rumors is keeping tabs on every potential roster move, big and small.

If you’re suffering from hot stove rumor withdrawal and you’re an NFL fan, be sure to follow PFR (@pfrumors on Twitter) for all the latest offseason updates.

Major League Baseball decided Monday to close clubhouses to media members for an undisclosed period of time because of the coronavirus outbreak. Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball took the more drastic measure to postpone the start of its regular season.

The Korea Baseball Organization is now following the NPB’s lead, Dan Kurtz of MyKBO.Net reports (Twitter links). The league, which had already canceled preseason games, will hold off the beginning of its regular campaign until an April date that hasn’t been determined. It had been scheduled to kick off March 28. The KBO’s hope remains that it will play its typical 144-game season, Kurtz adds. Regardless, the league will notify its teams two weeks before it plans to start its regular season.

Unlike the Japanese and Korean leagues, MLB has no plans right now to make any changes to its spring or regular schedules, per the Associated Press. The league admitted, however, that it “recognizes the fluidity of this rapidly evolving situation.”

“The health and safety of everyone in our communities is of the utmost importance to us,” MLB continued. “We have been engaging on an ongoing basis with a wide range of public health experts, infectious disease specialists, and governmental agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to obtain the latest information.”

Commissioner Rob Manfred held a conference call Monday with MLB’s 30 teams to discuss the situation, according to the AP.

Major League Baseball will initiate a major change in its standard operating practices in response to the spread of the coronavirus. Per Jeff Passan of ESPN.com (Twitter links), clubhouses will be closed to media.

Just how long this standard will apply remains to be seen, though there’s no indication it’s anything but a temporary measure. Presumably, it’ll depend upon the course of the worrisome disease. The move comes on the heels of similar actions from the NBA and NHL.

It’s something of a partial measure that relates only to the safety of team personnel. There’s no reason to believe that media interactions are any more dangerous than the many other person-to-person interactions that players engage in on a daily basis. The league also has plans to limit travel and clubhouse access for certain team employees.

There’s some evident incongruity in this action. It will not offer any protection to fans and will not help guard against the broader spread of the coronavirus through the staging of large-scale events. Passan says that the league will continue to hold Spring Training and (ultimately) regular-season games. Those plans remain subject to change, on both a universal and situational basis.

Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball has announced that it will delay the start of the 2020 season owing to the worldwide coronavirus outbreak. Veteran reporter Jim Allen has the news from across the Pacific.

For the time being, Japan’s top league will push its opening date back into mid-April. It had been scheduled to kick off on March 20th. Whether further delay might be contemplated isn’t clear.

League commissioner Atsushi Saito framed the decision was an imperative. “We must protect the players, staff, families, but no one more so than the fans,” he said. “We must protect the cultural legacy of pro baseball.”

While NPB’s Spring Training contests have been taking place without fans in attendance, MLB’s Grapefruit and Cactus League action has proceeded as usual. The league has instituted some policies to help limit the potential for coronavirus transmission to or between players and others actually employed in or around the game. But fans have been left to make their own decisions.

By all indications from the scientific community, the questions facing the MLB commissioner’s office aren’t going to recede anytime soon. The dangerous Covid-19 virus is believed to have spread more broadly than positive tests reflect, with potential for exponential growth. Social distancing measures, including the avoidance of large public gatherings, represent a key tactic for slowing the transmission of the disease.

We have already seen several major events cancelled in the United States. The National Basketball Association has contemplated staging games without fans present. It seems that MLB will at minimum need to prepare for potential mitigation efforts — whether or not entered voluntarily or dictated by governmental action.

As Saito puts it, “if you have games you have to make a maximum effort.” NPB determined that the necessary level of precaution was not feasible. It remains to be seen how the matter will be handled in North America.

With much concern around the world regarding the spread of coronavirus, it was inevitable that there’d be an impact on the staging of sporting events. Asia’s two most significant baseball leagues are beginning to adjust their schedules to adapt to a situation in which large public gatherings would not be prudent.

The situation is especially concerning in Korea, which has seen the most cases of infection outside of China (where the disease originated). The Korea Baseball organization is responding by canceling its slate of planned pre-season games, as Jee-ho Yoo of Yonhap News reports.

For the KBO, this may only be the beginning. The league is still pondering what to do about the upcoming regular season. Delaying Opening Day (presently scheduled for March 28th) is presumably one possibility.

Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball is also taking action, as the Associated Press reports, but it is taking a somewhat different initial step. The NPB’s spring contests will take place in empty stadiums. There’s still hope of launching the regular season as scheduled on March 20th, but that decision has yet to be made.

Keeping fans away from the spring contests was a “bitter decision,” in the words of the NPB commissioner, but it seems clear that tougher choices could still be to come. In addition to the baseball regular season, Tokyo is scheduled to host the Summer Olympics beginning in late July.

The handling of these difficult questions abroad could help inform Major League Baseball’s approach to the coronavirus situation — if and when it must do so. No doubt the league is already working through contingency plans that would avoid disruption to the extent possible while serving far more important public health imperatives.

Pre-arbitration extensions aren’t exactly a new phenomenon. We’ve seen an increasing number of long-term deals with newer MLB players — and even pre-MLB players — over the past decade or so. (Way back in 2013, for instance, I referred to a “baseball-wide trend of … early extensions.”) Last winter featured a dizzying number of extensions, including quite a few involving players that hadn’t yet cracked into the big-dollar earnings stages of their careers.

Some further contracts of that kind were to be expected. But we could be seeing yet more expansion of the kinds of players targeted. The early-career extensions inked by still-youthful reliever Aaron Bummer and swingman Freddy Peralta may only be the tip of the iceberg, ESPN.com’s Jeff Passan indicates on Twitter.

It seems there’s something potentially afoot that goes beyond typical team-by-team extension targeting. Passan says that “teams across baseball are trying to lock up pre-arbitration players,” specifically, and that “there could be a rash of such deals in the coming weeks.”

This evidently widespread effort is all the more interesting given the marked open-market shift observed in the just-completed offseason. In each of the two prior winters, free agents — even high-end, younger ones — were approached with obvious reluctance. But MLB teams attacked the 2019-20 market vigorously, doling out both market-moving superstar deals and a series of hefty, lengthy payouts to quality older veterans.

It goes without saying that it’s good for business for a MLB organization to put a quality product on the field. But doing so consistently and in a cost-efficient manner is the gold standard. That’s also naturally quite challenging, since a baseball season is not only a zero-sum game but one that can swing upon innumerable, not-always-controllable factors.

Teams understandably prefer only to enter competitive bidding situations for free agents as needed. It’s not difficult to recognize a team’s potential upside in drafting (or trading for), developing, and then extending a player at an early enough stage in his MLB career that it can lock in low-cost, productive seasons for many years to come. There are obvious risks here as well. The Yankees-Luis Severino extension seemed a slam dunk but has been gutted by unfortunate injuries. But that deal could easily still pay out. Even if it doesn’t, it’d equate to whiffing on a good but not great free agent signing.

Anyway, all of that has long been appreciated and acted upon by MLB teams. So, what to watch for the rest of this spring? Beyond the obvious — whether specific young stars will be approached and wooed — it’ll be interesting to find out how far teams can take this approach. Remember: it’s still unclear just how certain major issues — the next CBA, the lively ball, universal DH, robo umps — will be resolved in the near term. Will there be a chase for upside or an attempt to lock in reasonable rates of pay for solid pieces? Will teams look to get a jump on anticipated changes to the labor market? MLB organizations also value roster flexibility and will be loath to tie up future payroll to non-productive players. Much remains to be seen, but it appears we’re in for another lively and interesting extension season this spring.

In 2019, BABSbaseball.com said we could draft…

• Charlie Morton (ADP 119) instead of Blake Snell (30)
• Ketel Marte (220) instead of Lorenzo Cain (66)
• Matt Olson (109) instead of Khris Davis (45)
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• Eloy Jimenez (117) instead of Vlad Guerrero Jr. (46)
• Zack Greinke (66) instead of Aaron Nola (25)
• DJ LeMahieu (265) instead of Robinson Cano (123)
• Mitch Garver (435) instead of Francisco Mejia (249)
• and on and on…

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