The Times They Are a-Changin
In baseball and at Chavez Ravine. Meanwhile, Andrew Heaney is a Dodger.
It’s a little known fact that when the visionary Bob Dylan wrote about the changing times in 1964, he was thinking about expansion, the designated hitter, the shift, a runner at second base in extra innings and a pitch clock. The in-the-neighborhood play, step off rule and 26-man rosters were in there too.
But five bases, a rover and Clayton Kershaw in a Rangers uniform? No. Those are a bridge too far. So just stop. Kershaw is not riding off from Sunset Blvd. onto some dumb street in Texas. At least, not to play baseball. Worry your little heads over something at least halfway conceivable, like Corey Seager and Chris Taylor leaving Los Angeles via free agency. I’m not predicting that (necessarily), but it can happen.
The fact that the Dodgers passed on a qualifying offer to Kersh is no big deal either. Quite the contrary, actually. Sure, they didn’t want to commit to a an $18.4 million salary for 2022, but equally as important is the notion that after all the future Hall of Famer has done for the organization and the city, they didn’t want to saddle him with a lesser market because the acquiring team would have to forfeit a draft pick to sign him. The club owed their franchise icon that much. At least that much.
We talked about about the makeup of the 40-man roster last week, and as you can see by gazing at the team website (and in part as I predicted), Scott Alexander, Jimmy Sherfy and Andy Burns were outrighted off of it, along with free agents Danny Duffy, Cole Hamels, Kenley Jansen, Clayton Kershaw, Corey Knebel, Jimmy Nelson, Albert Pujols, Max Scherzer, Seager and Taylor. New Dodger Andrew Heaney will take up one of the open spots.
Prior to yesterday, Heaney was known in these parts for briefly being a Dodger, after a trade from Miami with Austin Barnes, Chris Hatcher and Kiké Hernandez for Dee Strange Gordon, Dan Haren, Miguel Rojas and cash to, only to be flipped to the Angels for Howie Kendrick an hour later on December 11, 2014. And for the epic tweet he fired off after the deals went down.
Welp, the 30-year-old left-hander is a Dodger once more, this time for keeps, after signing an $8.5 million free agent deal with the team Monday. While I wasn’t thinking about L.A. going this route at the time, I’d actually fired off a tweet of my own about this very topic a day before it happened, writing “the idea going around that Andrew Heaney is a great bounce back candidate is the baseball equivalent of GameStop being a good stock. Bounce back to what? His one decent full season as a starter?”
Let’s dig into that track record a bit. The one decent full season in a rotation occurred in 2018, when Heaney started 30 games, with a 9-10 won/loss, a 4.15 ERA, 3.99 FIP, 1.200 WHIP, 45 walks and 180 strikeouts in 180 innings. A solid American League, mid-rotation guy (which in Anaheim means he was their ace). He was also quite good over 18 starts three years prior (6-4, 3.49, 3.73, 1.202, 28, 78 and 105 2/3).
ERAs in the remaining seasons of his career were 5.83, 6.00 and 7.06 (immediately prior to and following Tommy John surgery in 2016), 4.91, 4.46 and 5.83 in 2021, split between the Angels (5.27) and Yankees (7.32). All told, Heaney’s career line is 32-38, 4.72, 4.45, 1.263, 179, 650 and 634 1/3. There are things to like, of course, in that he consistently gets a strikeout per inning, has a good strikeout percentage, a great spin rate, a fine walk rate and an impressive ground ball rate, the latter four of which matter to a guy like Andrew Friedman.
On the other hand, home runs were a concern the instant Heaney was traded to the New York, and he didn’t disappoint on that score. In other words, uh, he allowed a ton of long balls (13 in 35 2/3 innings, to be precise) and was optioned off the roster the final week of the season.
But look, if there’s an organization in baseball that finds, tinkers with and/or fixes pitchers better than L.A., I can’t think of one. Just look at the finds from this past year alone: Phil Bickford, Justin Bruihl, Evan Phillips and Alex Vesia (2.56 ERA combined).
The Dodgers are really good at this kind of thing. The Angels aren’t. I can’t explain what happened in the Bronx, and I’m as horrified as you are thinking about it. But it’s not my money, I’ll gladly pay an extra 50 cents for a Dodger Dog (a buck if they actually cook the damn thing all the way through), $8.5 mil isn’t all that much, it didn’t cost the team a single player in trade and I trust Friedman and the organization when it comes to pitching.
I don’t see Heaney taking the National League by storm, but as a depth piece, sure. Why not? Nineteen Dodgers started games in 2021 for Los Angeles, which concluded its postseason run with a grand total of three starters, all of them exhausted. I’ll keep a good thought for Heaney. The all-important baseball-reference.com projects his 2022 stats this way: 8-8, 5.06, 1.307, with 46 walks and 150 strikeouts in 133 frames. Draw your own conclusions.
With free agents being free to sign with any team as of Monday and a lockout possible as early as December 1, I expect the Dodgers to be quite busy through November.
A one-year or one-plus-an-option with incentives for Kersh could come down at any time, as could a Trevor Bauer suspension, which would give L.A. an idea of how much money they have to spend on players who aren’t at best freaks and at worst criminals.
Having already let Wade Miley walk with nothing in return and dumping Tucker Barnhart in the last few days, the tanking Reds have let it be known that they’re open for business on Luis Castillo. There’s one trade candidate right there, expensive though he will be.
Over the weekend clubs extended qualifying offers to Brandon Belt, Nick Castaellnos, Michael Conforto, Carlos Correa, Freddie Freeman, Raisel Iglesias, Robbie Ray, Eduardo Rodriguez, Marcus Semien, Trevor Story, Noah Syndergaard, Justin Verlander, Seager and Taylor, the final two of those being the only ones I expect Los Angeles to court with zeal.
Free agent starters Max Scherzer, Marcus Stroman, Kevin Gausman; definitely. Anthony DeSclafani, Zack Greinke, Robbie Ray, Carolos Rodon? Perhaps. Danny Duffy, Rich Hill, Steven Matz, Alex Wood? Stranger things have happened. Relievers Kendall Graveman, Kenley Jansen, Corey Knebel, Mark Melancon, Ryan Tepera and Kirby Yates? Maybe. Position players Kris Bryant, Josh Harrison, Joc Pederson and Donovan Solano? Sure.
Times are changing, all right. The Boys in Blue will feature a bunch of new boys come Opening Day, March 31, 2022. Included will be a handful from the lists above, another handful I haven’t mentioned and yet another handful of not particularly prominent men who will be signed as non-roster invitees, I reckon.
Enough 2021 Dodgers will return to keep you comfortable, however, including but not limited to most of these guys: Austin Barnes, Matt Beaty, Cody Bellinger, Mookie Betts, Bickford, Bruihl, Buehler, Caleb Ferguson, Tony Gonsolin, Victor Gonzalez, Brusdar Graterol, Andre Jackson, Tommy Kahnle, Gavin Lux, Dustin May, Zach McKinstry, Max Muncy Evan Phillips, AJ Pollock, Will Smith, Blake Treinen, one or two Turners, Julio Urias, Vesia and Mitch White.
A sobering thought:
If no collective bargaining agreement is reached between the owners and the players union by December 1, a lockout is the logical next step. All transactional activity will likely (although not necessarily) stop at that time. Once player personnel work is paused, Major League Baseball may be motivated to keep the lockout in place until just prior to the start of Spring Training, in mid-February.
Why? Because with hundreds of players looking for jobs in a short window of time after the lifting of a lockout in late winter, there will dozens of guys left standing when the music stops. Salaries will be depressed, there will be more bargains than you can shake a Louisville Slugger at, and, I estimate, a good quarter of a billion dollars left unspent by management.
If you’re wondering how I came up with that figure, I started by looking at the Dodgers and decided that they could sign three new players in February for anywhere from major league (around $600,000 in the new CBA) to a million bucks, instead of paying them $3 million to $5 million each minus a lockout. Then I rounded the sum of that down to $10 million in money not spent by L.A. on said three guys, multiplied by 30 (for the 30 clubs), came up with $300,000,000, and subtracted $50 mil just to be conservative. Leaving me with $250,000,000. Yep, a cool quarter bil.
However close or far off I am on that number, there is no question that a lockout would benefit the owners. So, unless cooler heads prevail in the next three weeks and a day, with all the heavy lifting of a shotgun negotiation to be consummated later, it’s going to get ugly soon. Really ugly, real soon.
ICYMI:
Baseball Photos of the Day:
Felipe Alou, Joe Torre and Hank Aaron.
Sonny Jackson and Joe Morgan.
Sam Crawford, 1910.
Carl Yastrzemski and Orlando Cepeda, 1967 World Series.
Roberto Clemente.
And remember, glove conquers all.
Howard Cole has been writing about baseball on the Internet since Y2K. Follow him on Twitter. Follow OBHC on Twitter here. Be friends with Howard on Facebook.
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