Hey guys, happy Friday! Here’s a little bit of baseball news to get your day going.
Week in review at LL...
- I wrote about how M’s fans shouldn’t freak out that the Mariners aren’t planning to make any major starting pitcher acquisitions before spring training.
- Kate took a look back at the career of new Mariners reliever Juan Nicasio.
- Jake dove into the whole “spin rate” phenomenon that’s driving the M’s pitching decisions.
- Jake and John teamed up to look at the possible paths of the 2018 Mariners, starting with the good before moving to the bad.
In Mariners news...
- The Mariners have got a neat feature on Amanda Hopkins, a scout for the team who was the first-ever woman to be an area scout for an MLB club.
Around the league...
- Jeff Sullivan thinks the Marlins and Braves are a potential fit for a deal involving Christian Yelich.
- It seems we’ve reached an impasse.
MLBPA has decided that it won’t agree to @MLB proposal on pitch clock and pace-of-play rule changes, source confirms @Ken_Rosenthal report. @MLBNetwork
— Jon Morosi (@jonmorosi) January 18, 2018
- The Marlins, Yankees, and Rangers are finalists for Cuban prospect Julio Pablo Martinez.
- Marc Normandin breaks down this whole “collusion” thing that people are speculating about in the sport.
- David Schoenfeld wonders how much defensive ability should play into Hall of Fame voting.
- Viva El Birdos says it’s time the Cardinals retired Curt Flood’s jersey number.
- It might be unrealistic to ask Aaron Judge to lower his strikeout rate, unless the team wants to fundamentally change him as a player.
- Alec Denton at Baseball Prospectus gives his theories as to why the offseason has been painfully slow.
A note from Kate:
Hey, remember way back when we made the off-season plan and asked you to come up with your own and I promised a prize? And then Ohtani broke our hearts and the whole off-season ground to a screeching halt and Jerry suddenly lost every single one of his phones? And then I said I’d do this, and forgot again? And then nothing continued to happen? Good times all around. Anyway, I put the names of everyone who wrote an off-season plan FanPost into this convenient online randomizer and the winner of the Safeco Field print is...[fanfare] [balloons] [confetti]...
MHanny17! John applauds you for winning, and also for your taste in favorite Mariners. I’m sending an e-mail to the address associated with your account so you can let us know if you’d like a print or a t-shirt, and where you’d like it sent. As a reminder, the prize is an architectural print (or a t-shirt) of Safeco from the people at BallparkBlueprints.com. Congratulations! Thank you to everyone who posted their off-season plans. Who knew that would be 100x more exciting than the actual MLB off-season?