A Guide to Following MLB Hot Stove Happenings: 2023 Edition
When will stuff happen? Why hasn't they happened yet? What does a given report mean? We try to suss out those questions.
Major League Baseball free agency has officially kicked off, the GM meetings are underway, qualifying offers are out, and all free agents can negotiate new deals with whomever they want.
It’s now the hot stove season, and it’s one of my favorite times of the year.
I’ve followed MLB for the past 32 seasons. The game has changed a lot since 1992, and the way we follow it has changed a lot too. The offseason has become an extremely active time for attention to MLB, which is a good thing for the game’s health overall.
For those who may have only started caring about the hot stove season recently, I wanted to offer a guide for following the winter happenings. I posted a version of this guide last year on my personal Medium, and am happy to bring it to Beyond the Monster for the 2023-24 hot stove season.
When Things Will Actually Happen
In recent years, MLB has been plagued by notoriously slow-developing offseasons. The other three major North American pro leagues all have salary caps, and thus player values are mostly reached by consensus before free agency starts.
That’s why there’s always a huge flurry of activity when free agency opens and Woj and Shams and Schefter immediately send out those reports they’ve had saved in their drafts.
There’s nothing like that in baseball, where markets take time to develop and both teams and players are often loath to be the first ones to make a move and set a market.
Teams and agents are feeling each other out this week at the GM meetings. Maybe a few things will happen, but anything major would be a huge surprise. From there, teams will focus next week on the upcoming non-tender deadline and Rule 5 protections while continuing conversations with teams on trades and agents on new contracts.
Then, it’s the week of Thanksgiving, and stuff doesn’t really ever happen that week. Realistically, we’re still about three weeks away from anything serious happening at all. It’s frustrating, but that’s just how the MLB offseason works.
Typically, the first big domino falls and then everyone else starts making their moves because of that domino. On one hand, it’s possible the market will be paralyzed until Shohei Ohtani signs what is expected to be a record deal. On the other, only a small number of teams will realistically be in the running for Ohtani so it may not impact the entire market all that much. It’s hard to know right now.
There’s a realistic scenario that, because this is a weak free agent class, the non-Ohtani members may try to drag things out and get the best deals they can by waiting until well into January to sign.
For the sake of all of us who follow this stuff, let’s hope this year plays out similarly to last year, where most of the big business was done by the end of the early-December Winter Meetings. That was a stronger class of free agents, though.
Who You Should Be Following
The hot stove season is only fun because of the information that well-connected journalists can share. It’s important to know who to trust and who to blow off this time of year, because there are a lot of both.
When it comes to national reporters, the best of the best are Jeff Passan of ESPN, Ken Rosenthal of the Athletic, Jon Heyman of the New York Post, Buster Olney of ESPN, Jon Morosi of MLB Network, Mark Feinsand of MLB.com and Robert Murray of FanSided.
Nobody is perfect (remember “Arson Judge”???) but these are the ones to follow.
Others who report on the national level can get good info but you may have to take what they say with a grain of salt. If you’re looking for solid info from across MLB, stick with following those seven reporters I listed above.
How to Interpret Reports You See
When you see something reported from an anonymous source, on Twitter or in an article or a column, it’s a good practice to ask yourself questions before jumping to conclusions one way or another. These are some of them:
Who is doing the reporting?
Why is the reporting happening now?
Where is this info coming from?
Who stands to benefit the most from this info being reported?
We can only guess at the answers to some of these questions, especially the last two, and it’s possible that what we think on those is wrong. But still, take a critical eye to anything you see this time of year.
Here’s an example of a recent Tweet from Morosi, an outstanding and deeply-connected reporter, on a Red Sox-related item.
This is not to pick on Morosi, but I’m just providing this as an example of how reporting tends to work during the offseason. This tweet predictably got a lot of attention from Red Sox Twitter, but when you dig into it, there’s not that much meaningful substance here.
It’s the offseason. Craig Breslow, the Red Sox new chief baseball officer, is supposed to be on the phone with teams and agents as much as possible this time of year. The Red Sox are in dire need of top-level starting pitching this winter, so Breslow would not be doing his job if he wasn’t in contact with the agent of one of the top starting pitchers available from the jump.
Now, go back to those questions above. Who stands to benefit from this bit of information being made public? The team? The player? Why is the reporting happening now? Does it have anything to do with one side trying to let it be known that a deep-pocketed team is interested in a specific free agent, something other deep-pocketed teams might notice?
We can’t know for certain any of the answers to these questions, but my advice is to ask yourself and draw your own conclusions.
If something is reported through anonymous sources that isn’t some version of “close to an agreement” or “deep in discussions,” it’s probably one side of a negotiation trying to get their version of a story out for the purpose of leverage.
I hope you found this guide helpful. Now, let’s get some stuff happening.
Follow Jake on Twitter @JakeTODonnell. If you’re a fan of sports trading cards and history, subscribe to Jake’s Wax Pack Wisdom YouTube channel.
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