Spare Parts: MLB’s wealth divide grows, but effort divide is more concerning

8:30 AM CST on January 20, 2025

By most standards -- and perhaps yours -- the White Sox's free agent outlay has been pitiful, with no new 2025 salary greater than $3.5 million added to the books.

By the standards of this particular offseason, it has been reasonably productive, because you can at least say that Chris Getz is minding the gaps on the roster. They're not covered by anything sturdy enough to stand on, yet it's also more than a lot of teams are doing.

A shocking amount of teams have lay dormant this season. A two-paragraph sequence from Matthew Trueblood's Baseball Prospectus article about the Pittsburgh Pirates kinda sums it up:

Owners are giving us the same problems. John Fisher and Bruce Sherman are both courting legal action from the players’ union. Fisher uprooted one of the game’s original franchises (albeit from their third home) to move them to the middle of nowhere. The Pohlad family put indefensible financial clamps on the Twins out of nowhere 14 months ago, and the only reprieve will come when the team is officially sold. Teams (the Marlins and White Sox) are still voluntarily plunging into old-fashioned rebuilds. Teams (the Reds and Brewers) are still steering back into the dying RSN model, even after promising fans a fresh start in a different medium. There’s a fight brewing over control of the Padres, and A.J. Preller is frozen in horror watching it play out. The Mariners are exactly the type of team that needed to stay aggressive heading into this winter, but they’ve chosen extreme stinginess instead. Ditto for the Tigers. How do you decide where to direct your righteous fury?
I’ll tell you: Be mad at the Pirates. Be loudly, lividly mad at the Pittsburgh Pirates, who have steadily conditioned us all to expect shockingly little of them and are still coming in way, way below those expectations. There’s still a month until spring training and 10 weeks until Opening Day, but barring something substantial and unexpected, the Pirates have thoroughly blown an opportunity here. They entered this offseason needing relatively little to step forward and be semi-contenders in the weak NL Central. They claimed to have money to spend, and early estimates of their 2025 payroll were in the $100-million range. Now, with the avenues to significant improvement dwindling, they have made virtually no progress toward that goal. Right now, their projected payroll is $81.6 million, according to Cot’s Contracts. That’s the fifth-lowest in MLB, and it should be a humiliating number for Bob Nutting.

Frustration is boiling over in Pittsburgh, as "sell the team" chants interrupted a Q&A session at PiratesFest over the weekend. But it's not just the smallest of markets feeling squeezed. Cardinals fans are calling out John Mozeliak during the team's Winter Warm-Up event. Cubs fans booed Tom Ricketts as he maintained a cry-poor stance for carrying a middle-third payroll in the nation's third largest market.

“I don’t think fans should spend all their time thinking about which team has more money or how much they’re spending," Ricketts said during his radio appearance with 670 The Score at the convention. “It just becomes a big narrative that’s a distraction.’’ [...]
“Obviously, the Dodgers have done a really nice job of making good business decisions, making good player decisions,’’ Ricketts said, “and they built a fortress. That’s tough. But I don’t begrudge them any of that. It’s like the Yankees from 30 years ago or whatever, these things come and go.
“I think our fans somehow think we have all these dollars that the Dodgers have or the Mets have or the Yankees have, and we just keep it. It’s not true. We just try to break even every year.’’

While the Dodgers and Mets are indeed lapping the field when it comes to new spending -- the Dodgers followed up their signing of Roki Sasaki by signing Tanner Scott to a four-year, $72 million contract -- it's partially because the majority of the league is standing still. Below are a bunch of other stories covering the inaction from teams that would benefit most from assertive offseasons, and the two forces make an owner-to-owner CBA showdown feel inevitable two years from now.

Spare Parts

The Dodgers were the presumed favorites for Roki Sasaki's services all along, which made the Blue Jays' Hail Mary trade to absorb an $11.8 million obligation to Myles Straw for $2 million for international pool space a real costly desperation move. It'd be one thing if they could write off Straw's contract as a byproduct of an aggressive winter, but the Blue Jays haven't been able to make any move of consequence this offseason, which makes it seem like Toronto's front office never recovered from Shohei Ohtani's rejection.

Trading Nolan Arenado remains 'priority 1, 2 and 3' of Cardinals winter, says John Mozeliak -- St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Mozeliak is spending his last offseason in charge of the Cardinals having his hands tied by Nolan Arenado's no-trade clause, which seems like a particularly humiliating way to start a farewell tour.

Mariners placing pennies above pennants is swaying yet another offseason -- Seattle Times

The Mariners have won 90, 90, 88 and 85 games over the last four years, but have only made the postseason in one of them. That's the kind of team that would benefit most from a splash, but they've instead been preoccupied by trying to trade Luis Castillo.

The Twins are still hoping for a sale of the team by Opening Day, but for the time being, they have yet to make any kind of transaction, be it a trade or signing, for a major league player.

With Rays' stadium deal in jeopardy, owner Stuart Sternberg's tenure appears headed for a crossroads -- The Athletic

If Stuart Sternberg can't regroup and repair his relationship with Tampa Bay politicians in time to salvage a deal for a new stadium, the league will be forced to contemplate its next move if Rob Manfred is hellbent on making the market work.

I wouldn't expect somebody like John Schriffen to self-flagellate, so the fact that he identified an accurate point of contention ("maybe the tone of some of the games was a little off and I was a little too excited") is a small victory. It's certainly more specific and correctable than anything the equally embattled Pedro Grifol ever said about himself. I just worry about sentences like "Now I've gotten to the point where I just don't care what people think about me," because while it might be a standard expression of self-confidence, not caring what people thought about him backed Schriffen into some corners. Working in one market and speaking to one audience on an everyday basis means he has relationships to maintain.

Rangers' Jake Burger to wear No. 21 for daughter with Down syndrome -- Associated Press

Jake Burger wore No. 30 with the White Sox and No. 36 with the Marlins, but he's switching his uniform number to No. 21 in honor of his daughter, who was born with Down syndrome (trisomy 21).

Burger credits his wife with the idea of wearing No. 21, and was working to change his number from No. 36 with the Marlins before being traded. The couple got their daughter's diagnosis in April.
He said a foundation is being established to help other families impacted by Down syndrome.
"We're really, really excited to push that forward and help as many families as we can," Burger said. "For us, we call it the lucky few. That's families with Down syndrome, with a kid affected with Down syndrome. And that's how my wife, Ashlyn, and I feel. That's how Brooks feels as her brother."

As last week's news of Bob Uecker's death circulated and the memorials and tributes followed, I started thinking about the time that he dropped into the White Sox booth to spend an inning with Hawk Harrelson during the latter's final season in 2018.

Harrelson always talked about wanting to broadcast games to the very end, and were he wired a little bit differently, he probably could have. Listen to the two Frick winners "tell some lies" (to borrow a Hawkism), and while they're not exactly cut from the same cloth, they share a fair amount of fabric. Nobody expected them to deliver rapid-fire pitch-by-pitch updates, know the 40-man rosters of every team or stay on top of the latest Statcast metric. Viewers wanted the voice, the experience, the charisma, and the emotions the combination conjures.

But reading the various obituaries and remembrances of Uecker, his sense of humor really set him apart, and in a way that never aged him. He effectively built his post-playing career on being a fun hang, and you'd never know from his disposition that he'd endured the sorts of hardships -- two of his children preceding him in death, countless health scares of his own -- that can embitter anybody. His friends and colleagues say he always found his energy at the ballpark, where he loved seeing everybody, and everybody loved seeing him. Particularly the players, who considered him part of the team and voted him full playoff shares.

Happy Ueck Day pic.twitter.com/UUq5QVKEjG
— Christian Yelich (@ChristianYelich) September 25, 2021

It's remarkable that he was able to carve out such a niche in a sport on the sheer strength of personality, yet that personality never wore out its welcome. Though he was 10 days short of turning 91 years old, it's a credit to his being that it still somehow feels way too soon.