DeadsetAce
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damn, Wake 
2023 Official MLB Season Thread
- Thread in 'Sports & Training' Thread starter Started by CP1708,
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I didn’t realize Blue Jays hadn’t clinched a spot.
Damn AL EAST
Damn AL EAST
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why expensive teams #epicfailed this season
www.espn.com
The poor performance of these teams has been so surprising that some throughout the sport are wondering if free agent spending will fall below expectations this winter because owners of larger payroll clubs will see a correlation here and may mistake it for causation -- especially with the Baltimore Orioles, Tampa Bay Rays and Arizona Diamondbacks all likely to make the playoffs with bottom-10 payrolls.
The Mets, Yankees and Padres share some ingredients in their own cocktails of disappointment -- underperforming their advanced statistics, losing true coinflip situations at an unsustainable rate, having more injuries than their rivals and seeing potential team building flaws become gaping holes within months -- but they also have a number of unique features that have led to their respective 2023 dumpster fires.
Using a combination of analyzing the numbers and information from conversations with MLB front-office insiders, let's examine the primary culprits for each big-money underachiever to see what went wrong, and what it means for their 2024 hopes -- and beyond.
In fact, the combined 2023 contracts of New York's seven highest-paid players would rank in the top half of MLB payrolls, with Luis Severino the only one of the group set to become a free agent after this season.
The Aaron Judge and Gerrit Cole deals look solid right now, and they have to pay off early because the long-term nature of the deals make it highly unlikely they'll look that good at the end of their contracts, when both players are in their late-30s. If Cole is close to his 2023 form again next season, the Yankees will be forced to add another year at $36 million to his contract to keep him from opting out of the remaining four years and $144 million on his deal. The other five players listed have been terrible this year, combining for just 0.5 Fangraphs' WAR.
Combine this risky approach to the top of the roster with some tough injury luck, young players who were slow to fully integrate and some truly baffling moves by GM Brian Cashman over the last three seasons, and it's not hard to see how things went awry.
Let's take a deeper look at just how much of a toll those head-scratching moves have taken from 2021 to this year -- a time span in which the Yankees have won just three total playoff games despite running a top-three payroll each season. Here are the five most costly transactions in that timeframe:
The Yankees don't have the Padres' problem of bad sequencing of events, they just aren't that good right now. The international and domestic amateur scouting groups have kept the pipeline running to prop things up, even with Cashman's trades clearing out prospect depth. About half of the youth movement -- SS Anthony Volpe, SS Oswald Peraza, CF Jasson Dominguez, CF Everson Pereira, C Austin Wells, RF Spencer Jones, C Agustin Ramirez, SS Trey Sweeney, RHP Chase Hampton, RHP Drew Thorpe and RHP Will Warren -- has arrived in the big leagues already. Those players were all originally signed/drafted by the Yankees, they all project to be at least good role players if not core players, and they all may make their debuts by this time next season. If they immediately click upon arrival in the big leagues, the current problems would basically be solved -- but that is a long shot.
Integrating that group along with some better luck and some standard roster shuffling should be enough to get the Yankees back in contention next season. That said, if the young players don't perform in the big leagues next season and the over-30 crowd continues showing its age, it could get ugly again for Cashman's 27th season as general manager, assuming he is back for another run in the Bronx after this year's shortcomings.
Yes, there has been some bad luck at play here, but the underlying stats say this isn't a playoff team, so the Mets' disappointing season is more about why players underperformed than bad sequencing of outcomes.
A few neglected spots are at the center of this season's mess in Queens: The Mets were worst in the National League by a lot at third base production, producing a -2.1 WAR. They started the season with Eduardo Escobar, who wasn't hitting well before being traded to make way for prospects Brett Baty and Mark Vientos, who also have not been good. Nobody the Mets have played at third base in 2023 other than Escobar has played above replacement level at the position. Right field has also been a trouble spot with just 0.9 total WAR -- a number only rising above replacement level because of DJ Stewart's shocking late-season performance and utilityman Jeff McNeil's 137 plate appearances playing there. Designated hitter (-0.7 WAR) has mostly been Daniel Vogelbach and Vientos. The bullpen has been the least effective in the NL, producing just 0.3 WAR, while the league average bullpen was around 4.0 WAR.
Simply put, the Mets have a group of valuable star-level players, but what separates them from the league's elite teams is that those clubs all have reliably solid depth that keeps them from having any huge WAR deficits anywhere on the field.
If all of those Mets position groups were just league average this season, the team would've added almost exactly 10 WAR, which with neutral luck would turn 10 losses into wins and put the Mets in a tie for the final wild-card spot.
How could so many positions on the same team produce such poor performance? It comes down to a combination of age-related decline, holes in roster construction and injuries.
Edwin Diaz tearing the patellar tendon in his knee in the WBC is something no one could have foreseen. The bullpen was more good than great behind Diaz entering the season and losing him at the back end which set off a domino effect hurting the rest of the relief group. David Robertson, one of just two solid performers in the 2023 bullpen, was traded at the deadline, so expect to see this area addressed this winter, with Josh Hader, Jordan Hicks, Craig Kimbrel, Aroldis Chapman, Reynaldo Lopez and Will Smith among the free agents who could fit to reconstruct the group.
I thought it was savvy of the Mets to build their 2022-23 offseason around signing players who would not cost them draft pick compensation because they did not have a qualifying offer from their teams. Aside from adding Kodai Senga (posted from Japan) and retaining their own players (Brandon Nimmo, Diaz), the strategy largely meant going after older players who had already been offered a QO in the past. Justin Verlander (age 40 at signing) and Jose Quintana (34) fit that description, as did the Mets' key signings from the previous winter: Max Scherzer (37), Starling Marte (33), Mark Canha (33) and Eduardo Escobar (33). All of those players got at least $20 million guaranteed and have largely underperformed, with two of the smaller contracts -- Canha, who was traded to Milwaukee at the deadline, beating expectations and Quintana mostly hitting them -- giving the best return on investment.
This strategy is savvy for holding on to draft picks and limiting the length of contracts to cut long-term risk, but the cost of that comes in added risk of age-based decline and/or injuries from older players. Some sources were emphatic to me entering last offseason that, despite Verlander coming off a Cy Young winning campaign, his stuff metrics had already begun declining, which continued this year with his surface stats now reflecting that reality. Scherzer has been gently declining, and given his age and intense style, it was reasonable to assume another step down was coming. Escobar fell off a cliff this season at age 34, and Marte regressed a lot and missed half the season, also at age 34.
The Mets committed just under $350 million to Verlander, Scherzer, Marte and Escobar. Now three of the four are gone while Marte has his age-35 and age-36 seasons remaining, in which he is likely to be more of a role player than a potential All-Star.
Both the Mets and Yankees created top-heavy older teams saddled with big contracts. Both got too many poor performances from their veterans. The Mets opted to pivot away from that core and try to build up an upper minors wave of young talent similar to what the Yankees already have.
Much like the Yankees, the Mets' heralded prospects in the majors this season didn't contribute what the team was hoping they would, with the one exception of Francisco Alvarez. Now the question becomes will these players perform to those expectations, starting with next season. If they get a giant leap in young player performance, the Mets could solve multiple problems with one solution. They would likely end up with enough position-player depth to prop up the flailing DH production and some combination of Christian Scott, Mike Vasil, Blade Tidwell, Justin Jarvis and Brandon Sproat could also add some of the pitching depth from the minors that was missing in 2023.
The good news for Mets fans is that incoming president of baseball ops David Stearns excels at these very things. It may take a season for him to get the coaches, execs, analytics and scouting groups in place to get that working like what he had in Milwaukee, but creating cheap and effective major league depth with scrap-heap acquisitions and integrating prospects while getting the most out of the trusted veterans on the roster is basically what he did (on a comparative shoestring budget) in Milwaukee.
Overall, it's a dead heat as to which of the two New York clubs is most likely to right the ship the quickest, but you can at least see a path forward for both of them.
Using a stat known as Pythagorean "Luck" that measures the gap between a team's actual record and the record that you'd expect given their runs for and against, we can start to get a sense of where things went wrong for the Padres in 2023. In fact, their 11-games worth of bad luck is the worst since the 2014 Athletics.
If I knew nothing about this team but the above table and the aforementioned continuity, I'd attribute this regression to some combination of bad managing, lack of clubhouse chemistry/leadership, bullpen issues, poor situational hitting and also plenty of simple bad luck.
The bullpen has been roughly league average with elite closer Josh Hader heading a group of nine regular contributors who have posted positive WAR this season, so we can rule that out as the primary factor.
Let's do a deeper dive on the situational hitting. There's a stat called "Clutch" which measures a hitter's (or a team's) performance in high leverage or clutch situations versus standard ones. This is better than other clutch or "close and late" stats since it factors in how good a hitter is overall. As you might've guessed, the Padres are last in the majors at this stat, too. The FanGraphs version has San Diego as the worst team since the 2018 Dodgers while the Baseball Reference version has the Pads as the worst clutch hitting team since the 1965 Red Sox -- yes, more than half a century ago.
It's hard to do a deep dive on the clubhouse chemistry or leadership objectively since the data is noisy and overlaps when it comes to judging a manager. By WAR or run differential, the 2023 team is performing just as good, if not better, than last year's club, so the sequencing is the issue, not the player production.
If you continued to simulate this MLB season over and over, I do think the Padres would have made the playoffs in a majority of the simulations. So the real question becomes: If the Padres responded worse to the adversity and bad luck than other teams would have, had they been dealt this string of snake eyes over and over -- does the combination of payroll, star power and high expectations make the Padres more likely to spiral when they get a series of unlucky coin flips?
It's impossible to know, but it's also easy to point at the manager as he's in charge of the strategic decisions and controlling the culture in the dugout. Recent articles delving into this topic have pointed the finger at GM A.J. Preller, manager Bob Melvin and the leadership of star players, though the Padres have pushed back at reports of dysfunction; everyone I spoke with mentioned these candidates as well, with some specific examples.
Coming out of the Aug. 1 MLB trade deadline, the Padres went 4-8 over their next 12 games, and each win was by at least five runs. Hader faced just three batters in those 12 games as San Diego's playoff hopes dwindled. Fair or not, the sequencing of events is much more the purview of the manager than the general manager. That said, Preller has been in charge for nine years and has cleared .500 just twice while employing seven managers and now running a top-three payroll, so he can't have infinitely more security than Melvin.
Whether it was poor roster construction, underperformance at key positions or just bad luck, all three of these teams learned the hard way that spending big doesn't necessarily buy a ticket to October.
tl;dr poor rosters, players underperforming, plain old bad luck. I'd say that all 3 were pretty top heavy so expensive stars not playing like expensive stars really hurts.
$880 million, zero playoff games: Why the Mets, Yankees and Padres became 2023's big-money disappointments
San Diego and MLB's two New York teams entered the season ticketed for deep postseason runs. Instead, they're left wondering where it all went wrong.
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Kiley McDaniel, ESPN MLB InsiderSep 28, 2023, 07:00 AM ET
Close- ESPN MLB Insider
- Kiley McDaniel covers MLB prospects, the MLB Draft and more, including trades and free agency.
- Has worked for four MLB teams.
The poor performance of these teams has been so surprising that some throughout the sport are wondering if free agent spending will fall below expectations this winter because owners of larger payroll clubs will see a correlation here and may mistake it for causation -- especially with the Baltimore Orioles, Tampa Bay Rays and Arizona Diamondbacks all likely to make the playoffs with bottom-10 payrolls.
The Mets, Yankees and Padres share some ingredients in their own cocktails of disappointment -- underperforming their advanced statistics, losing true coinflip situations at an unsustainable rate, having more injuries than their rivals and seeing potential team building flaws become gaping holes within months -- but they also have a number of unique features that have led to their respective 2023 dumpster fires.
Using a combination of analyzing the numbers and information from conversations with MLB front-office insiders, let's examine the primary culprits for each big-money underachiever to see what went wrong, and what it means for their 2024 hopes -- and beyond.
New York Yankees
The first thing that jumps out when examining New York is its roster construction. The Yankees built their team around a handful of elite players on big contracts, supported by a collection of role players and a steady flow of youngsters from the farm system.In fact, the combined 2023 contracts of New York's seven highest-paid players would rank in the top half of MLB payrolls, with Luis Severino the only one of the group set to become a free agent after this season.
The Aaron Judge and Gerrit Cole deals look solid right now, and they have to pay off early because the long-term nature of the deals make it highly unlikely they'll look that good at the end of their contracts, when both players are in their late-30s. If Cole is close to his 2023 form again next season, the Yankees will be forced to add another year at $36 million to his contract to keep him from opting out of the remaining four years and $144 million on his deal. The other five players listed have been terrible this year, combining for just 0.5 Fangraphs' WAR.
Combine this risky approach to the top of the roster with some tough injury luck, young players who were slow to fully integrate and some truly baffling moves by GM Brian Cashman over the last three seasons, and it's not hard to see how things went awry.
Let's take a deeper look at just how much of a toll those head-scratching moves have taken from 2021 to this year -- a time span in which the Yankees have won just three total playoff games despite running a top-three payroll each season. Here are the five most costly transactions in that timeframe:
- Infielder Thairo Estrada was traded to the Giants for cash in 2021 and has posted 7.7 WAR since the deal.
- Ezequiel Duran put up 0.9 WAR this season for the Rangers as the headliner in the return of a 2021 deal for Joey Gallo, who put up 0.8 WAR for the Yankees before being dumped to the Dodgers; the Rangers have the 24-year-old Duran's cost-controlled rights for another five years.
- The Yankees traded Jordan Montgomery (5.7 WAR since the trade) to the Cardinals for Harrison Bader (1.1 WAR); both are set to be free agents this winter.
- Frankie Montas (a free agent this winter) and Lou Trivino have combined for 0.3 WAR since being acquired from Oakland in a 2022 deadline blockbuster while the A's got 24-plus years of collective control over a group of young players (Ken Waldichuk, Luis Medina, JP Sears, Cooper Bowman) who have already posted 1.5 WAR.
- The Yankees doled out $162 million for Carlos Rodon last winter even though the pitcher has only topped 2.7 WAR twice in his career, both times in walk years.
The Yankees don't have the Padres' problem of bad sequencing of events, they just aren't that good right now. The international and domestic amateur scouting groups have kept the pipeline running to prop things up, even with Cashman's trades clearing out prospect depth. About half of the youth movement -- SS Anthony Volpe, SS Oswald Peraza, CF Jasson Dominguez, CF Everson Pereira, C Austin Wells, RF Spencer Jones, C Agustin Ramirez, SS Trey Sweeney, RHP Chase Hampton, RHP Drew Thorpe and RHP Will Warren -- has arrived in the big leagues already. Those players were all originally signed/drafted by the Yankees, they all project to be at least good role players if not core players, and they all may make their debuts by this time next season. If they immediately click upon arrival in the big leagues, the current problems would basically be solved -- but that is a long shot.
Integrating that group along with some better luck and some standard roster shuffling should be enough to get the Yankees back in contention next season. That said, if the young players don't perform in the big leagues next season and the over-30 crowd continues showing its age, it could get ugly again for Cashman's 27th season as general manager, assuming he is back for another run in the Bronx after this year's shortcomings.
New York Mets
The Mets won 101 games in 2022, were the talk of the MLB offseason and ... are 15 games under .500 with a team that has never really made even a small run at contention this season.Yes, there has been some bad luck at play here, but the underlying stats say this isn't a playoff team, so the Mets' disappointing season is more about why players underperformed than bad sequencing of outcomes.
A few neglected spots are at the center of this season's mess in Queens: The Mets were worst in the National League by a lot at third base production, producing a -2.1 WAR. They started the season with Eduardo Escobar, who wasn't hitting well before being traded to make way for prospects Brett Baty and Mark Vientos, who also have not been good. Nobody the Mets have played at third base in 2023 other than Escobar has played above replacement level at the position. Right field has also been a trouble spot with just 0.9 total WAR -- a number only rising above replacement level because of DJ Stewart's shocking late-season performance and utilityman Jeff McNeil's 137 plate appearances playing there. Designated hitter (-0.7 WAR) has mostly been Daniel Vogelbach and Vientos. The bullpen has been the least effective in the NL, producing just 0.3 WAR, while the league average bullpen was around 4.0 WAR.
Simply put, the Mets have a group of valuable star-level players, but what separates them from the league's elite teams is that those clubs all have reliably solid depth that keeps them from having any huge WAR deficits anywhere on the field.
If all of those Mets position groups were just league average this season, the team would've added almost exactly 10 WAR, which with neutral luck would turn 10 losses into wins and put the Mets in a tie for the final wild-card spot.
How could so many positions on the same team produce such poor performance? It comes down to a combination of age-related decline, holes in roster construction and injuries.
Edwin Diaz tearing the patellar tendon in his knee in the WBC is something no one could have foreseen. The bullpen was more good than great behind Diaz entering the season and losing him at the back end which set off a domino effect hurting the rest of the relief group. David Robertson, one of just two solid performers in the 2023 bullpen, was traded at the deadline, so expect to see this area addressed this winter, with Josh Hader, Jordan Hicks, Craig Kimbrel, Aroldis Chapman, Reynaldo Lopez and Will Smith among the free agents who could fit to reconstruct the group.
I thought it was savvy of the Mets to build their 2022-23 offseason around signing players who would not cost them draft pick compensation because they did not have a qualifying offer from their teams. Aside from adding Kodai Senga (posted from Japan) and retaining their own players (Brandon Nimmo, Diaz), the strategy largely meant going after older players who had already been offered a QO in the past. Justin Verlander (age 40 at signing) and Jose Quintana (34) fit that description, as did the Mets' key signings from the previous winter: Max Scherzer (37), Starling Marte (33), Mark Canha (33) and Eduardo Escobar (33). All of those players got at least $20 million guaranteed and have largely underperformed, with two of the smaller contracts -- Canha, who was traded to Milwaukee at the deadline, beating expectations and Quintana mostly hitting them -- giving the best return on investment.
This strategy is savvy for holding on to draft picks and limiting the length of contracts to cut long-term risk, but the cost of that comes in added risk of age-based decline and/or injuries from older players. Some sources were emphatic to me entering last offseason that, despite Verlander coming off a Cy Young winning campaign, his stuff metrics had already begun declining, which continued this year with his surface stats now reflecting that reality. Scherzer has been gently declining, and given his age and intense style, it was reasonable to assume another step down was coming. Escobar fell off a cliff this season at age 34, and Marte regressed a lot and missed half the season, also at age 34.
The Mets committed just under $350 million to Verlander, Scherzer, Marte and Escobar. Now three of the four are gone while Marte has his age-35 and age-36 seasons remaining, in which he is likely to be more of a role player than a potential All-Star.
Both the Mets and Yankees created top-heavy older teams saddled with big contracts. Both got too many poor performances from their veterans. The Mets opted to pivot away from that core and try to build up an upper minors wave of young talent similar to what the Yankees already have.
Much like the Yankees, the Mets' heralded prospects in the majors this season didn't contribute what the team was hoping they would, with the one exception of Francisco Alvarez. Now the question becomes will these players perform to those expectations, starting with next season. If they get a giant leap in young player performance, the Mets could solve multiple problems with one solution. They would likely end up with enough position-player depth to prop up the flailing DH production and some combination of Christian Scott, Mike Vasil, Blade Tidwell, Justin Jarvis and Brandon Sproat could also add some of the pitching depth from the minors that was missing in 2023.
The good news for Mets fans is that incoming president of baseball ops David Stearns excels at these very things. It may take a season for him to get the coaches, execs, analytics and scouting groups in place to get that working like what he had in Milwaukee, but creating cheap and effective major league depth with scrap-heap acquisitions and integrating prospects while getting the most out of the trusted veterans on the roster is basically what he did (on a comparative shoestring budget) in Milwaukee.
Overall, it's a dead heat as to which of the two New York clubs is most likely to right the ship the quickest, but you can at least see a path forward for both of them.
San Diego Padres
While both New York teams had roster construction issues that helped derail their seasons, the Padres returned the same front office, manager and mostly the same team from last year's group that reached the NLCS, leaving luck as the biggest factor behind their struggles.Using a stat known as Pythagorean "Luck" that measures the gap between a team's actual record and the record that you'd expect given their runs for and against, we can start to get a sense of where things went wrong for the Padres in 2023. In fact, their 11-games worth of bad luck is the worst since the 2014 Athletics.
If I knew nothing about this team but the above table and the aforementioned continuity, I'd attribute this regression to some combination of bad managing, lack of clubhouse chemistry/leadership, bullpen issues, poor situational hitting and also plenty of simple bad luck.
The bullpen has been roughly league average with elite closer Josh Hader heading a group of nine regular contributors who have posted positive WAR this season, so we can rule that out as the primary factor.
Let's do a deeper dive on the situational hitting. There's a stat called "Clutch" which measures a hitter's (or a team's) performance in high leverage or clutch situations versus standard ones. This is better than other clutch or "close and late" stats since it factors in how good a hitter is overall. As you might've guessed, the Padres are last in the majors at this stat, too. The FanGraphs version has San Diego as the worst team since the 2018 Dodgers while the Baseball Reference version has the Pads as the worst clutch hitting team since the 1965 Red Sox -- yes, more than half a century ago.
It's hard to do a deep dive on the clubhouse chemistry or leadership objectively since the data is noisy and overlaps when it comes to judging a manager. By WAR or run differential, the 2023 team is performing just as good, if not better, than last year's club, so the sequencing is the issue, not the player production.
If you continued to simulate this MLB season over and over, I do think the Padres would have made the playoffs in a majority of the simulations. So the real question becomes: If the Padres responded worse to the adversity and bad luck than other teams would have, had they been dealt this string of snake eyes over and over -- does the combination of payroll, star power and high expectations make the Padres more likely to spiral when they get a series of unlucky coin flips?
It's impossible to know, but it's also easy to point at the manager as he's in charge of the strategic decisions and controlling the culture in the dugout. Recent articles delving into this topic have pointed the finger at GM A.J. Preller, manager Bob Melvin and the leadership of star players, though the Padres have pushed back at reports of dysfunction; everyone I spoke with mentioned these candidates as well, with some specific examples.
Coming out of the Aug. 1 MLB trade deadline, the Padres went 4-8 over their next 12 games, and each win was by at least five runs. Hader faced just three batters in those 12 games as San Diego's playoff hopes dwindled. Fair or not, the sequencing of events is much more the purview of the manager than the general manager. That said, Preller has been in charge for nine years and has cleared .500 just twice while employing seven managers and now running a top-three payroll, so he can't have infinitely more security than Melvin.
Whether it was poor roster construction, underperformance at key positions or just bad luck, all three of these teams learned the hard way that spending big doesn't necessarily buy a ticket to October.
tl;dr poor rosters, players underperforming, plain old bad luck. I'd say that all 3 were pretty top heavy so expensive stars not playing like expensive stars really hurts.
Hunt? Yes.
Playing well? No.
We took 2 of 3 from ATL at Wrigley last month and the Braves didn't like it.
They are just loaded. We played them tight but just couldn't hold a lead without Alzolay.
Braves entire lineup stresses me out. 6-0 thru 6 and they scored 7 in 3 innings. (Granted a terrible error gifted them two.)
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Mets Marlins went into a rain delay about an hour ago...
They have to complete this game but it is possible that a crazy rule might play out...
They have to complete this game but it is possible that a crazy rule might play out...
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M’s still alive with walk-off
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When the hell are the Marlins vs Mets going to make up the game? It was suspended in the 9th last night after the Marlins came back.
Fate might be on the Marlins side right now
After the Cubs embarrassed themselves and blew it this week and then the Marlins come back right before the rain starts.
Fate might be on the Marlins side right now
After the Cubs embarrassed themselves and blew it this week and then the Marlins come back right before the rain starts.
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The outcome of this game could mean a few things for a few teams.
Mister Meaner
formerly super producer j
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And it’s still raining cats and dogs in NY.
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God damn.
This is going to be a wild finish.
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This is just an insane stat.
Especially when you compound it with the fact they've only won a couple of games all year when they've been trailing after 8/extra innings.
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Astros and Diamondback play tonight and can both clinch tonight.
Do they just have one big party?
Do they just have one big party?
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Last series of the season, finally. Bad baseball is not a good feeling couldn't imagine going through this for 108 years 
couldn't imagine going through this for 108 years
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Pusoygate
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One of those “can’t fire the players” situations
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Hmm but who is responsible for assembling the roster?
Tbh I wouldn’t fire Farhan either. He went all in on Judge and didn’t get him. Landed Correa next but then the medicals came up and then had to shift to whatever scraps were left on the market after that. It was an unlucky offseason.
Gabe did what he could with the roster (except for preventing pusoy dos from being played).
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Farhan gets part of the blame because he's responsible for that role. But maybe MAGA Greg Johnson and other members of ownership (minus Buster) handcuffed him in making some moves? Idk.Hmm but who is responsible for assembling the roster?
Tbh I wouldn’t fire Farhan either. He went all in on Judge and didn’t get him. Landed Correa next but then the medicals came up and then had to shift to whatever scraps were left on the market after that. It was an unlucky offseason.
Gabe did what he could with the roster (except for preventing pusoy dos from being played).
They better go all-in for Shohei. If not, trade for Trout!
