Hello, hello, hello, and the happiest of Mondays to you! ‘Why so pepper?’ you might ask as you attempt to winch open your eyeballs on this frigid morning. The answer, my friends, is that the Angels off-season has somehow continued to get worse! Yes, my primary source of joy as a Mariner fan this off-season has been schadenfreude. No, I don’t feel bad about it.
In Mariners news...
All was quiet on the home front yesterday.
Around the league...
- The biggest news of yesterday: the Rangers traded for Corey Kluber.
The Rangers have acquired two-time A.L. Cy Young Award winner Corey Kluber and cash considerations from Cleveland for RHP Emmanuel Clase and OF Delino DeShields. Roster is at 39.
— John Blake (@RangerBlake) December 15, 2019
- Early analyses of the trade have been overwhelmingly in favor of the Rangers.
If, in fact, this is Delino + Clase for Kluber, I'm gobsmacked. The $36.5M Kluber is making the next two years is nothing. I keep waiting to see that Josh Jung or Sherten Apostel or someone is part of the deal.
— Adam J. Morris (@lonestarball) December 15, 2019
- One upshot of this trade is that the Angels’ options for starting pitching are rapidly drying up. There might be a reason for that, though.
Heard the Indians wanted two top 10 prospects from the #Angels, including Brandon Marsh. That would suggest they have a much higher opinion of Clase than most of baseball. We will see.
— Jeff Fletcher (@JeffFletcherOCR) December 16, 2019
- The other major news from yesterday is that Madison Bumgarner has agreed to a five-year contract with the Diamondbacks.
Madison Bumgarner will get $85 million over five years from the Diamondbacks, a source confirms to ESPN. Arizona was Bumgarner’s top choice, and when the Diamondbacks went to five years, a deal got done. @Ken_Rosenthal had the financials.
— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) December 15, 2019
- The main starting pitching options left on the market are Dallas Keuchel and Hyun-Jin Ryu. After that, it quickly gets dicey.
- Per FanGraphs, MLB has reportedly voted 29-1 in favor of sharing Trackman and other similar data acquired at team facilities universally between clubs, as well as banning any exclusive deals between clubs and amateur facilities or colleges. Data sharing has become increasingly important in recent years, and data has often exchanged hands as part of a trade.
- In more fluffy news, the bat that Babe Ruth used to hit his 500th home run has sold for over $1 million.
Zach’s pick...
- You may have heard about Oumuamua a couple of years ago. A large cigar-shaped object travelling so fast near the sun that it couldn’t possibly have originated in the solar system, Oumuamua was the first-ever “interloper” to be detected within our solar system. Speculation and conspiracy theories of Oumuamua being an alien-made object quickly ran rampant — and were recently snuffed out. Well, we’ve now discovered a second interloper — a comet called 2I/Borisov — and the Hubble Space Telescope has gotten some amazing shots of it.