The most successful salary purge in history stole the headlines last week, overshadowing the Rays’ two-headed signing of AL East mercenaries Manny Ramirez and Johnny Damon. Tampa stayed dormant throughout the holiday shopping season, watching their former stars sign for big dollars with rival teams, and allowing the flood of DH-types to slowly drain. Andrew Friedman [...]

The teams of the NL Left acted quickly this off-season, but it has been quiet on the western front since the Winter Meetings. In a classic case of the Have’s and the Have-not’s, teams with money to spend have opened their wallets early and often, while the cheap clubs have been slashing payroll and eyeballing [...]

The deep DH pool is starting to drain, with Adam Dunn and Paul Konerko having signed long-term deals to play in Chicago, and pseudo-catcher/DH Victor Martinez set to join them in the AL Central next season. Lance Berkman is also off the market and re-learning left field on a one-year contract with the Cards. That [...]

The hot stove has set off fire alarms in the days leading up to the Winter Meetings. We have seen the first $100+ million contract of the off-season, the pinstriped re-instatement of two Yankee legends, the fulfillment of Adam Dunn’s manifest destiny to the American League, and the arrival of a long sought-after bomber in [...]

The water has not yet begun to boil on baseball’s hot stove, but the blogosphere is already burning with speculation with regard to where the high-profile free agents might land. Never underestimate the deluded optimism of a fanatic, but that wishful thinking often seems to ignore the home team’s bottom line. Nothing squashes optimism quite like [...]

After Game 163, I went on Marty Andrade’s podcast and said what I’d been thinking for a long time: We’ve judged Bill Smith too quickly.
His first winter on the job, he was essentially handed something of a crisis in the making. Torii Hunter was asking for an unholy sum of money and Johan Santana was [...]

For hardcore baseball fans, the off-season moves at a glacial pace. But mercifully, pitchers and catchers report in a couple of weeks. Spring training is closing in, but there are still a number of players out there looking for employment.
In late January, I took a look at what major league clubs are dishing out for [...]

Let me start by saying that I used to be a real big fan of Ben Sheets. Back in 2005, I traded a boatload to acquire him mid-season in my long-running NL-only fantasy keeper league. At the time Sheets was 26-years old and coming off of a breakout season with incredible ratios, including an eye-popping [...]

Anecdotally, it seems as though this offseason has provided teams with a strong buyer’s market. Free agents are finding jobs and cash to be scarce. Sure, the elite players aren’t suffering: Matt Holliday inked a deal that will pay him more than the Gross Domestic Product of Anguilla, while Jason Bay and John Lackey also [...]

In essence, the Angels have swapped gimpy designated hitters, downgraded from Lackey to Piniero, lost Figgins and gained Rodney. Meanwhile, Roy Halladay went to Philadelphia, Cliff Lee went to Seattle, and Aroldis Chapman went to Cincinnati. The Angels wanted an ace pitcher and they ended up with Joel Piniero. It’s the kind of dream/reality contrast one would expect to find with the New York Mets, not the L.A. Angels.