MLB Offseason 2014-15: Wait, pitchers and catchers report WHEN?

Even Year Bullshit has struck again, and the San Francisco Giants are your 2014 Major League Baseball World Champions. Let us now begin the five months of darkness until baseball returns to us.

Important dates to remember:

November 3: Last day for teams to tender a qualifying offer to pending free agents
November 4: Free agents may negotiate and sign with any team
November 10: Last day for players to accept a qualifying offer
November 10 - 12: GM fall meetings
December 2: Last day to offer contracts to unsigned arbitration-eligible players
December 8 - 11: GM winter meetings
December 11: Rule 5 draft
February 18, 2015: Pitchers and catchers report

Other news of note:

- Alex Rodriguez is now officially back on the Yankees' 40-man roster. Welcome back, A-Rod, may you mash taters in all your at-bats.

- Bug Selig's tenure as commissioner is effectively over. While his last day in office is technically January 24, 2015, Rob Manfred has spent the last few months preparing for transition into the league's top office and will continue to do so. For those who have forgotten Manfred's pedigree, he has served as a top lieutenant in MLB's structure since 1998; prior to that he was one of the league's lead lawyers in the 1994 strike, championing the efforts to break the union, and he was the lead negotiator in the two most recent CBA negotiations, neither of which were particularly favorable for the MLBPA. He is responsible for MLB's private investigation unit, which has broken several federal, state and local laws over the past few years. He is no friend of organized labor and it is not outside the realm of possibility that baseball's twenty years of uninterrupted labor peace (the longest in American professional sports) will be in jeopardy after the 2016 season, when the current CBA expires.

- MLB has been testing several rule changes during the Arizona Fall League, aimed at speeding up the game. The changes range from pretty smart (hitters must keep one foot inside the box at all times) to patently stupid (limit of three mound visits per game). I would not expect any major rule changes to occur in 2015, however.

- Current front-office openings are with the Rockies, who finally fired Dealin' Dan O'Dowd, and the Rays, whose front office has collapsed in the wake of Andrew Friedman's departure to the Dodgers. (The Dodgers, however, lost scouting director Logan White, which is huge and almost instantly counterbalances any benefit from Friedman's hiring.)

- Current official managerial vacancies are in Minnesota, Chicago (Cubs) and Tampa Bay, though I say official because the Cubs are likely to announce Joe Maddon as their new manager tomorrow morning, thereby fucking Rick Renteria.

- This is an exceptionally weak free-agent class. After the top prizes of Scherzer and Lester in the starting pitcher segment, there's a steep drop down to James Shields, then another drop to the likes of Francisco Liriano and Jason Hammel. The DH market comprises three old, broken dudes (Giambi, Victor Martinez and Raul Ibanez), and at 3B your options are Pablo Sandoval and a whole bucket of shit after him. You get the idea. Look for a very active trade market at the fall and winter meetings, and don't be shocked if Lester's price tag starts to approach the monster deal that Kershaw got.

So there we have it! We are 157 days away from the return of baseball. Let us sit around the hot stove and await its return.

 

I just realized that Dan fucking Uggla gets a World Series ring.

This feels wrong.

 

The first is possible, but he's the only legitimate 3B free agent this year, and there are a lot of teams needing to fill that hole. The Giants still have debt service on their park through 2017, so that's $20 million off the top and they're going to have to worry about their rotation (Hudson will almost certainly retire, Vogelsong needs to be shot into the sun, and they also have Peavy to consider). As for Bumgarner, he's cost-controlled through 2017, they won't even consider ripping that deal up for at least another year.

He'd better fucking not.

In other news, the Cubs fired Rick Renteria this afternoon, paving the way for hiring Maddon. Jesus Christ, Theo, fire the guy a month ago so he could at least find another job.

The most annoying part of this is that Maddon is going to get credit even if the Cubs' prospects amount to a dead cat bounce. And beyond that, the Cubs fire their minority manager via bullshit, then hire a white manager -- potentially via tampering -- without interviewing a minority manager. How does MLB not get involved, here?

 

Well, there are two issues at play, here; one is the potential tampering, and the other is that this appears to have been a sham interview process. MLB has had its version of the Rooney Rule since 1998 (so it actually predates the NFL's), and for the Cubs to boot Renteria and hire Maddon with no actual process taking place is a pretty clear violation of that rule.

That being said, they won't invalidate the hiring or anything like that. The Cubs will get hit with a few hundred thousand dollar fine and life will move on.

 

And that's the $64,000 question. The more I consider it, the more I find it highly unlikely that Maddon opts out when he does (with only one official vacancy in the league) unless he had already talked with another team and knew that he had a sure landing spot. And it's also telling that the Cubs were the only team that went into absolute radio silence and refused to say anything about their managerial situation.

I'm not convinced there was tampering, but I think it's very likely. And to be honest, Theo is probably the only executive in the league who could get away with this and not be excoriated by the league and in the media -- he's a PR genius and is very, very, very good at playing situations like this.