MLB Hot Stove: The malaise before and even with movement
By Rick Soisson
The MLB Hot Stove has been quiet, aside from a brief flurry of activity.
As the MLB hot stove season crawled past Thanksgiving, lines from the old poem for a holiday on the horizon could be applied to free agents and hungry MLB teams. For the free agents: “all thro’ the house, / Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse….” As for any team not called the Boston Red Sox (and their fans), “the stockings were hung by the chimney with care.”
By the Monday after Thanksgiving, those stockings were basically empty. Only four free agents had found their 2019 teams, according to ESPN.com. CC Sabathia would be finishing his career with the Yankees. Jung Ho Kang, perhaps sober, would rejoin the Pirates, and Trevor Rosenthal would be with the Nationals. The Blue Jays had picked up the option on Justin Smoak.
These players are not what makes this MLB hot stove season hot; only two of the four were ranked as free agents by ESPN. Sabathia was no. 27, and Smoak was no. 26.
The Winter Meetings were on the horizon as well, Dec. 9-13 in Las Vegas, as turkey leftovers dwindled. Baseball fans, however, were hungry for Machados and Harpers and Corbins now. Speculative articles multiplied like bunnies, but the stockings just hung there.
Some of those speculative pieces were produced by the industry mouthpiece, MLB.com. Cyber Monday saw one such piece on seven “stars” who could be traded before the first big free agent shoe drops. Or maybe they’ll move after that shoe-drop, or not at all – who knows? The MLB hot stove season always involves a certain amount of waiting for the market to be “set.”
The seven industry-designated stars with trade value were Zack Greinke, Whit Merrifield, J.T. Realmuto, Corey Kluber, Nicholas Castellanos, Corey Dickerson, and Carlos Santana.