‘DEAD’ OF WINTER
Late offseason action would be hurt by transaction cutoff
IF SHIFTS, launch angles and exit velocity weren’t bad enough, are the nerds now ruining the winter meetings, too?
Does the Hot Stove League require its own regulations to avoid the same fan alienation that newfangled on-field strategies have created?
The short answer, so The Post doesn’t string you along, is no. Yet it’s fascinating to see the thematic overlap between on-field and off-field frustrations — and to wonder if Major League Baseball eventually will contemplate taking measures for this time of year as it has for the games themselves.
The 2018 winter meetings went down as a dud, their Las Vegas locale notwithstanding, as no transaction reached the buzz threshold of actually mandating an industry-wide news conference to announce it.
The Phillies signed former Yankee Andrew McCutchen — one of the many players envisioned long ago to be a centerpiece of a presumably spectacular 2018-19 free-agent class, only for age to demote him to “nice piece” — and the Mariners, Indians and Rays completed a three-player trade that was as much about moving money (Edwin Encarnacion to Seattle and Carlos Santana back to his Cleveland roots) as filling talent needs.
That quietude prompted Red Sox president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski, the dean of his field as well as the reigning champion executive, to float the idea of an offseason transaction deadline.
“I just think that we’ve reached a point where there’s not any down time for people in the game,” Dombrowski told me on Thursday, echoing sentiments he voiced earlier, “because before, players generally wanted to sign before the holidays, so then there was a little bit of a down [time]. Now, the way the market’s going, when you look at young people in the game, they’re going to go 12 months a year, seven days a week. You need some breaks.”
If Dombrowski didn’t formulate his sentiment from a marketing prism — MLB makes a huge fuss over its winter meetings, hence the disappointment when so little goes down — his proposal would have the same effect. He said such a deadline occurred at the start of his career in the 1970s, though this appears to have been more of an informal deadline of both teams and players wanting to tie up business by the holidays.
Noting how the amateur draft signing deadline has shortened significantly with virtually no harmful effects, Dombrowski said, “Sometimes, maybe you just need a deadline.”
Pirates general manager Neal Huntington — though acknowledging, “We are a deadline-driven society” — said, “We’re in favor of a free market. I don’t know that you can dictate by when rosters need to be set by or anything like that. I haven’t really put a ton of thought into it, but my gut answer would be no. I’m not sure how it would function, actually.”
Last year’s slowburning Hot Stove resulted largely from analytically driven baseball operations people a) recognizing the benefits of waiting out players and their agents, and b) refusing to commit large sums to players over 30. This year’s market, if not blazing hot, has proceeded differently.
Both the Mets’ acquisition of Robinson Cano and Edwin Diaz from the Mariners, and the Nationals’ signing of Patrick Corbin would’ve hit the news-conference room in Vegas if they hadn’t happened too early for the meetings. And the Red Sox’s $68 million commitment to Nathan Eovaldi, whose health struggles define his career even more than his great stuff, should put the kibosh on any and all collusion theories.
That Bryce Harper and Manny Machado remain unsigned should not surprise you, not when both want franchise-rattling deals, Harper’s agent, Scott Boras, works at a notoriously deliberate pace, and Machado’s camp has needed to work through the infielder’s self-sabotaging October.
The notion of a winter deadline has not hit the greater MLB realm — though on a related matter, GMs discussed at their meetings last month the idea of altering the in-season calendar in which all non-waiver deals must be completed by July 31 and postseasoneligible players must come aboard by Aug. 31. We could see, sooner than later, something like a splitting of the difference: You can make non-waiver trades but also must finalize your playoff-eligible roster by, let’s say, Aug. 15, thereby giving clubs more time to determine whether they’re in the race or not while also locking in their intentions on the back end.
These are good discussions to have, the byproduct of so much brainpower dramatically changing both how teams are constructed and how the games are played. The success of the nerds (the term used here lovingly by a wannabe nerd columnist) has prompted the game’s owners to discuss the regulating of infield shifts, the likes of which we’ve never quite seen in baseball history, and many players — particularly frustrated lefty pull hitters — figure to be OK with mandating that two infielders play on each side of second base.
A conversation with MLB’s official historian, the always delightful John Thorn, produced some historical comparables, if not exact parallels, to policing shifts: Turning foul balls from non-events into strikes (except for strike three). Raising and lowering the mound. Instituting the designated hitter. None emanated quite from the place of halting an intellectually motivated strategic edge.
Maybe the success of the 2017 Astros and 2018 Red Sox, champions that hit for high averages, could resolve the “not enough balls in play” crisis organically, and this past week, The Athletic’s Cliff Corcoran proposed that raising the bottom of the strike zone would help, too. Those would be highly preferable to penalizing innovation, though the shift-regulating might be too far down the road already to stop.
And the same goes for the Hot Stove. Let teams and agents use every Jedi mind trick of which they can conceive to prevail. It can be fascinating to see which players and teams jump too soon at deals and which wait too long. The occasional January/February bombshell — Alex Rodriguez traded to the Yankees?! Yoenis Cespedes re-signs with the Mets?! — adds to the fun.
Remember MLB’s excellent “Let the kids play” ad campaign about allowing the players to emote during the postseason? Let the nerds play, too. All year long.