Daily Duce: The Winter Meetings begin, Hyun Jin Ryu meets with Ha-seong Kim, and more!
By Cam Lewis
3 years agoDaily?!?!?
The Winter Meetings are underway! This should mean that things are going to start to happen soon.
It seems as though we’re just waiting for one team to come out and make a splash and that’ll start the domino effect. My money would be on the New York Mets with their new ownership being the team everyone else is waiting on. Once they finally dive and sign a big fish, the other active teams in the mix will get moving.
As Ben Nicholson-Smith points out, that’s what we saw from the Blue Jays last year. After Gerrit Cole and Zack Wheeler signed, the Jays inked Hyun Jin Ryu to a four-year deal right at the end of December…
Yes, the Winter Meetings are technically underway, but for all intents and purposes this is just another week in December. Rushing a deal to appease a fan base or grab some headlines won’t serve the long-term interests of a franchise and executives are rightfully mindful of that risk. Better to wait, as the Blue Jays did before signing Hyun-Jin Ryu last Dec. 27, than overpay just because deals are ‘supposed to’ happen this week.
Assistant general manager Joe Sheehan again iterated the same message by saying that the Jays are looking to strike a balance between being aggressive while not being reckless. With that in mind, don’t expect the Jays to be the team to push over the first domino.
Anyway, some stuff happened yesterday. The Blue Jays claimed a pair of pitchers (Anthony Castro and Walker Lockett) off of waivers, giving them 40 players on their 40-man roster. Any addition the Blue Jays make now, whether a signing or a Rule 5 draft claim, would require somebody being removed from the roster.
Elsewhere around the league, the Chicago White Sox have started doing stuff. On Monday night, they sent Dane Dunning and another prospect to Texas in exchange for Lance Lynn. And then, on Tuesday, the White Sox went and signed Adam Eaton to a one-year, $7,000,000 deal. Ironically, Dunning is one of the prospects Chicago got back in exchange for Eaton when they traded him to the Nationals four years ago.
Lynn is a name I would have loved for the Blue Jays to acquire. He’s signed for one more year at $9,333,333, which is insanely cheap for what he brings. Lynn produced a 3.57 ERA over his two seasons with the Rangers (46 starts) and struck out 10.3 batters per nine.
Dunning, a former first-round pick, posted great numbers in the minors and had a nice big-league debut in 2020, posting a 3.97 ERA over seven starts. I’m not sure the Blue Jays have the MLB-ready arm to get this deal done. The closest comparable I can think of is Anthony Kay, but Dunning is the better pitcher of the two.
And then there’s the Eaton deal, which doesn’t really move the needle at all.
Eaton had a really ugly 2020 season. He slashed a .226/.285/.384 line and was whiffing on pitches a lot more than usual. As Mike Petriello points out, it looks like Eaton has fallen completely off of a cliff over the past couple of years, so it’s a bit odd that Chicago went ahead and pulled the trigger on a deal.
I mean, ultimately, they just saw a guy they liked and decided to bring him in on a fairly cheap, low-risk, one-year deal, but it’s a bit of a strange move to make right now especially given the other names on the market.
You’d think that somebody better like Joc Pederson or Kyle Schwarber might fall through the cracks and be available for cheap in a couple of months. But I guess it’s much like the deal the Jays and Robbie Ray agreed to right off the hop. The team likes the player and the deal is essentially peanuts, so why not.
Again, unfortunately, it doesn’t give us much of an indication of how the market is going to play out. It just goes to show how boring things are that I’m sitting here thinking about moves the fucking White Sox have made.
So that brings us to good old fashioned off-season fodder and speculation stuff.
According to Daniel Kim, a great follow for baseball happenings in Korea, Hyun Jin Ryu had dinner with Ha-Seong Kim, who was recently posted by the Kiwoom Heroes.
I wrote about Kim being an interesting target back in October. There’s obviously some risk when a player comes over from the KBO, which isn’t as good as Japan’s NPL, but the opportunity to add a high-quality infielder at the age of 25 doesn’t come around in normal, MLB free agency. Kim would fit in nicely with the Jays’ young core.
I also speculated in that post that having Ryu already on the team could help the Jays lure Kim to Toronto. Ryu is one of the most successful Korean baseball players of all time and having a countryman on your team would obviously make acclimatizing to a new country and league much earlier. Apparently, it was Kim to reached out to Ryu for the meeting.
And, finally, we have a Francisco Lindor thing, because of course.
There’s honestly nothing to this report save for the fact Ross Atkins referred to Lindor by the nickname “Frankie.” Just make the goddamn trade already, Ross. We all know Frankie wants to be a Blue Jay.
Recent articles from Cam Lewis
