For another year, baseball is over, so:
It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.
So begins the long winter slumber of bats, after the Chicago Cubs beat ridiculous odds and clawed back from a 3 - 1 World Series deficit to defeat the Cleveland Indians.
[yt]
But now the season is over and we begin the preparations for next year. Teams are already in the process of making decisions with regard to their player options; Ryan Howard's tenure in Philadelphia is over, while Jaime Garcia's time in St. Louis will continue for now.
In theory, teams have until five days after the end of the World Series to tender qualifying offers to their pending free agents. Those players have one week after that to decide whether or not to accept the QO (which affects whether or not draft pick compensation is attached). The winter meetings are currently scheduled for December 5 - 8.
However, all of this is in theory. Normally, there would be other dates set in stone (like the deadline to tender contracts to players who are arb-eligible), but everything is up in the air because the current Basic Agreement expires at 12:01 a.m. on December 1. We don't know, for example, if the QO system will remain in its current incarnation under the terms of the new CBA. (It shouldn't, but this will be one of Tony Clark's first real tests as the MLBPA chief.)
Currently, there have been absolutely no leaks from either side about CBA negotiation progress -- outside of the union pushing for a 154-game season and ownership making it clear that such a change will not happen without across-the-board salary cuts -- and, theoretically, no news is good news, because if we were headed towards labor armageddon, Rob Manfred and Tony Clark would be holding press conferences every other day calling the other guy a doodyhead.
List of upcoming free agents
(Note: That list will be subject to change pursuant to option pickups and QOs. For example, Dexter Fowler has a team option with the Cubs, but Epstein promised that the team wouldn't pick up the option or QO him in exchange for coming back to Chicago for less money than what Baltimore offered.)
Let us all huddle around the hot stove until February 15...
It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.
So begins the long winter slumber of bats, after the Chicago Cubs beat ridiculous odds and clawed back from a 3 - 1 World Series deficit to defeat the Cleveland Indians.
[yt]
But now the season is over and we begin the preparations for next year. Teams are already in the process of making decisions with regard to their player options; Ryan Howard's tenure in Philadelphia is over, while Jaime Garcia's time in St. Louis will continue for now.
In theory, teams have until five days after the end of the World Series to tender qualifying offers to their pending free agents. Those players have one week after that to decide whether or not to accept the QO (which affects whether or not draft pick compensation is attached). The winter meetings are currently scheduled for December 5 - 8.
However, all of this is in theory. Normally, there would be other dates set in stone (like the deadline to tender contracts to players who are arb-eligible), but everything is up in the air because the current Basic Agreement expires at 12:01 a.m. on December 1. We don't know, for example, if the QO system will remain in its current incarnation under the terms of the new CBA. (It shouldn't, but this will be one of Tony Clark's first real tests as the MLBPA chief.)
Currently, there have been absolutely no leaks from either side about CBA negotiation progress -- outside of the union pushing for a 154-game season and ownership making it clear that such a change will not happen without across-the-board salary cuts -- and, theoretically, no news is good news, because if we were headed towards labor armageddon, Rob Manfred and Tony Clark would be holding press conferences every other day calling the other guy a doodyhead.
List of upcoming free agents
(Note: That list will be subject to change pursuant to option pickups and QOs. For example, Dexter Fowler has a team option with the Cubs, but Epstein promised that the team wouldn't pick up the option or QO him in exchange for coming back to Chicago for less money than what Baltimore offered.)
Let us all huddle around the hot stove until February 15...
, unless they sign Hammel for less money.
