Outside The Confines: The dead of winter

I just wanted to wish happy birthday to my daughter. There’s no chance she’ll see this. Oh well, that’s her problem.

For a dead time in baseball, there sure was a lot of news this week.

It is another chapter today in Billionaires Behaving Badly. Of course, that’s every day these days.

• Let’s start out today with this piece from Hannah Keyser wondering whether we’re in a golden age of shortstops or whether this is just the start of a trend.
• Speaking of that, agent Scott Boras addressed the negotiations with the Mets over Carlos Correa. Boras confirmed everything that his client had said previously and also wondered why the Mets would use the same physician for Correa’s physical who had previously flunked him for the Giants. I’ve got to agree with Boras here. That’s an odd move by the Mets, unless they were actively looking to get him to agree to a discount.
• Manny Randhawa has which team is the most set at each position.
• Reds team president Phil Castellini is auditioning once again to be the villain in a family baseball movie. One year after telling Reds fans “Well, where are you going to go?” when they questioned the direction the team was going in, Castellini went to an off-season luncheon for Rosie Reds, a philanthropic organization of Reds fans. There he managed to offend more Reds fans, saying that the Reds operated as a “non-profit,” criticized guaranteed contracts in baseball and said all the great young Reds prospects will soon be “ex-Reds.” (The Athletic sub. req.)
• But Castellini isn’t the only son of a team owner behaving badly. Orioles chairman John Angelos held a press conference on Monday and then got angry that he was asked questions about the team during the press conference. He told the reporter that it was “highly inappropriate” for him to ask tough questions the on Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. In response, the reporter pointed out that Angelos scheduled the press conference for today and it was only the second time in four years that he was available to the media.
• The reporter in question, longtime Orioles beat writer Dan Connolly, wrote in The Athletic that the Angelos family owes the public more transparency. (The Athletic sub. req.) Also, that it takes a lot of chutzpah for the son of a billionaire who runs the team by the virtue of who his father is to call a mere beat reporter “out of touch with what real people face.”
• So I guess what we need is more billionaires running baseball. The Athletic is running a series of articles on potential MLB expansion cities. Here’s a look at Nashville and here’s another look at Portland. (The Athletic sub. req.)
• Alden Gonzalez explains why Shohei Ohtani could be baseball’s first $500 million man. (ESPN+ sub. req.)
• Thirty-three MLB players filed for arbitration, out of the 170 who were eligible. The rest came to an agreement with their team.
• It’s been international signing day in MLB this week, and I’ve been too busy to cover it. But if you want to know where all the top 16-year-old Latin Americans signed, Jesse Sanchez has you covered.
• Here’s another look at the international signings. (The Athletic sub. req.)
• Will Leitch has seven veteran free agents who are still worth giving another shot to.
• Ben Clemens argues that the Yankees should sign outfielder Harrison Bader to a contract extension.
• Zach Crizer looks at all the new rules changes for this year and ranks them by how much impact they’ll have.
• Sad news as Frank Thomas died. No, not the Hall of Famer with the White Sox. He’s fine and still hawking supplements on TV. No, the former Pirates and Mets outfielder of the same name from 1951 to 1966 has passed away. He was 93.
• Brian Murphy has the players with the most to prove in 2023. Cody Bellinger is at the top of the list.
• Anne Rogers has three predictions for the Royals this year.
• Will Leitch has ten key questions about the American League West.
• It’s not often that the writers of this blog have to give a round of applause to the people who run the St. Louis Cardinals, but Derrick Goold reports that Cardinals team president Bill DeWitt attacked the “antiquated” broadcast territorial and blackout rules and he’s “hopeful” that something will be done about them.
• Matt Snyder reveals and justifies his hypothetical Hall of Fame ballot.
• Nick Selbe argues that outfielder Torii Hunter has a better case for Cooperstown than you probably thnk.
• Manny Randhawa has a look at the “funkiest pitching windups” in history.
• If you have an Athletic subscription (or can get a pass from someone who does, you need to read this piece about Gary Huckabay, the usenet and the origins of Baseball Prospectus. (The Athletic sub. req.)
• And finally, Anthony Castrovince has a look at the time when the Braves became the Boston Bees.

And tomorrow will be a better day than today, Buster.