Welcome to the MLB off season!
The off season calendar is pretty full with plenty of baseball stuff to get us through what Southern California calls winter. Free agency started yesterday and by the next Weekend Links qualifying offers will have been offered and rejected.
Who might get a qualifying offer and who is ineligible? I’m glad you asked and here is your answer.
Among the many awards to be handed out over the Winter are Silver Sluggers. Ohtani and Brandon Drury are each up for their second Sluggers.
Ohtani will collect that slugger and is a huge favorite to win another MVP.
It is pretty crazy to think the Angels went from perennial MVP candidate Mike Trout to perennial MVP candidate Shohei Ohtani and have absolutely nothing to show for it.
What the Angels will do next year is unknown, but Rhett took a stab at answering some questions in his mailbag.
Lots of us questioned why Chris Rodriguez was let go for nothing earlier this week. Friend of the site Jeff Fletcher has the insight.
Of course all of this off season activity is only possible because the Texas Rangers ended the 2023 series with a 5-0 victory over the Arizona Diamondbacks in the 5th game of the World Series. Congrats to the franchise and one of my all time favorite managers, Bruce Bochy.
I missed Bochy’s playing career but found this great picture when looking for links:
Great players make a manager look really smart some times. Bochy can definitely thank Marcus Semien for making the lineup card a little easier every day.
I have to think both the Giants fans and Dodgers fans were watching this Series a little wistfully. Why did the Dodgers let go of Seager? Even fans at the games are asking.
Or maybe the fans weren’t watching. Seems like not many people did. This was the lowest rated World Series in history. It is almost like audiences for everything were larger when people had 3 channels to choose from rather than a million.
Hey, we have a move! Max Muncy stays with the Dodgers for 2 years $24 million.
Don’t forget to set your clocks back from glorious evenings with sunsets to dark before you get off work time tomorrow night. And change the batteries in your smoke detectors (mine always seem to go off at 3 AM).
The boy hadn’t been hitting lately but another coach noticed he’d brought his hands forward. Getting back to his old stance seems to have done the trick. Three Fall Ball games remaining and just like in Spring I already know I’m going to miss some of the kids when this season is up. Should be good pizza party weather from here on out.
Enjoy your weekend and link what I missed!
Note: I’d like to use this off season to boost up the team here at CtPG, starting with our social media feeds. If a poster or two could help get our site and content into the world it would be greatly appreciated and it would help us snag more interviews and promos. So please, please consider helping us make this a better site for all of us.
