Yoenis Cespedes Going To Japan With A’s As Center Fielder

Here we see Cespedes’ first major-league home run, off Shawn Kelley on Thursday:

Here we look back on Cespedes’ first home run in the Dominican Winter League:

What follows is going to be very poorly written because I was one of the people on the West Coast to wake up at 3am for live season-opening baseball. Please be forgiving, and I promise I’ll try to be better starting tomorrow not tomorrow because the next baseball game in Japan is an hour earlier than the first one was. I can’t tell if that’s a step in the right direction or a step in the wrong direction. That is the no-man’s land of the night.

Now, with the regular-season opener behind us, Cespedes has one game of major league experience. It’s not fair to scout a player based on one game, especially when it’s his first meaningful game in a new country at the highest level of competition, but it’s also not fair to scout a player based on a few minutes of YouTube footage, so the way I figure, if we can do one, we can do the other! What you’re going to see are .gifs of every single pitch that Yoenis Cespedes saw on Wednesday. There will be no .gifs of him playing defense because I don’t recall him doing anything noteworthy on defense. He’s probably a fine defender.

Coco Crisp will deal with the change and try to be the best left fielder he can be. But as he tells Bob Nightengale, he would’ve made a different decision as a free agent had he known what would happen in Oakland.

Don’t misinterpret this as sour grapes. Crisp seems to be dedicated to the A’s, and he seems to have the right attitude about his situation. He’s just being honest. Had he known he wouldn’t play center in Oakland, he wouldn’t have re-signed with Oakland. Now that he has re-signed with Oakland, and now that he knows he won’t play center, he’ll make the best of it.

In the middle of February, the Oakland A’s caught a lot more people off guard by signing Cuban ballplayer Yoenis Cespedes to a four-year contract worth $36 million. Among the people they caught off guard was Coco Crisp, who didn’t feel like he should move to accommodate Cespedes, also a center fielder. Susan Slusser:

Well, despite Crisp’s words, it seemed a foregone conclusion that he’d be bumped to left. Cespedes was the bigger investment, after all, and Crisp has 216 games of major-league experience in the corner. The only question left to answer was whether Cespedes would make the A’s immediately out of camp, or go to the minors for a spell. Slusser’s got the news:

Coco Crisp used to be an excellent center fielder; in 2004 and ‘5 and again in 2007, his performance in the outfield was among the best in the majors. Some of that came in left field, but the required skills are roughly the same in left and center fields.

* According to FanGraphs’ Ultimate Zone Rating, he saved roughly 69 runs in those years.

Yoenis Céspedes. You might first have seen him in the World Baseball Classic three years ago, or in that crazy promotional video a few months ago. And you might have guessed that he worries more about his style than his substance. But SI.com’s Joe Lemire spoke to Peter Bjarkman, an expert on Cuban baseball who has met Céspedes, and Bjarkman says otherwise: “He’s really a levelheaded, dedicated young ballplayer.”

So that’s good, anyway. But how well will Céspedes actually play? Lemire:

It was Monday that the Oakland Athletics came out of nowhere to sign Yoenis Cespedes to a four-year contract worth $36 million. I mean, I’m sure Cespedes kind of saw it coming, since he was involved and made his own decision, but most everybody else figured that Cespedes would end up with the Miami Marlins. Or if he didn’t end up with the Miami Marlins, he’d end up with a bigger spender than the A’s.

But he signed with the A’s. The toolsy, athletic Cuban outfielder signed with the A’s. And while Cespedes isn’t the sort of player you imagine when you think about Moneyball (the book), Ben Lindbergh at Baseball Prospectus argues that Cespedes is a Moneyball-style addition:

Who gets bumped now that Cespedes is aboard? Crisp is the only real center fielder on the team, and ranks below Cespedes in terms of contract value. That leaves a fight for the remaining corner outfield spot.

Seth Smith is a career .275/.348/.485 hitter, but that line comes with multiple caveats. For one, Smith can’t hit lefties at all: nearly all of his production over the years has come against righties, a group he’s hit .290/.364/.518 against in 1,210 plate appearances. Flailing against lefties is preferable to the other way around, given there are far more innings thrown by right-handed hurlers, but Smith has never shown much of a bat outside of Coors Field, either. He’s a career .296/.366/.559 hitter at Coors, and has hit just .257/.332/.418 on the road. His 2012 home line, if anything, will be worse thanks to the pitching-friendly environment of Oakland.

All along, there was one question:

(1) How good is Yoenis Cespedes going to be?

Yoenis Cespedes is a physical exam away from officially being an Oakland Athletic. That’s a decision he has made on purpose. MLB.com’s Jesse Sanchez spoke with Cespedes to get a little insight into his thought process.

On signing:

Let’s get back to Cespedes. At ESPN, Christina Kahrl presents “Things to ask about Yoenis Cespedes.” There are a lot of things you could ask about Yoenis Cespedes. What is his favorite color? What is his second-favorite color? What was the color of his childhood bedroom? But Kahrl narrows it down to three:

Click through for responses and commentary. A glimpse:

Remember this? That was November. Last November. For a time last November, this was Oakland’s outfield depth chart:

Center Field

Ryan Sweeney

It’s a fantastically risky move for a limited-budget team like the A’s to sign Cespedes, bordering on gloriously unhinged. This is the kind of move that a GM talks an owner into when he thinks he’s just going to get fired at the end of the season anyway. But Beane just signed an extension. He has an ownership stake. He isn’t going anywhere. Not sure who he listens to in the scouting department, but whoever it is, they sure like Cespedes an awful lot. They think he can hit, and that he can do it right away. On a four-year deal for a chunk of money, there isn’t time to futz with him in the minors.

The rotation for the A’s:

Yet somehow, the A’s. The team that hasn’t done anything this winter except trade good starting pitchers for ... well, now it’s hard to remember. We just know the good starting pitchers are gone. We also know that Billy Beane seems to have placed a higher value on Cespedes’ talents than all those other interested teams. Must be all those crazy numbers we saw in the movie. Except the crazy numbers really don’t tell us anything at all about Cuban outfielder/defectors.

Might this be a move based purely on ... scouting?

Yoenis Cespedes’ agent made a promotional video and put it on YouTube. You might have heard about it. In it, Cespedes either bench-pressed an ‘81 Trans Am, or someone hilariously dubbed over his voice and pretended that he was upset his food was going to the cat. Not sure. My anti-virus program automatically shuts down anything playing Christopher Cross, so I couldn’t finish the video. But I’m told it was really something.

Which is cool. I guess. That would be a really valuable player. But I’m still hoping for a few 50/50 seasons, with an outside chance that he shoots yoga fire out of his nostrils whenever he’s especially focused. That’s what YouTube promised, anyway. YouTube wouldn’t lie to me.

Yeah, that rumor never really made any sense, unless Yoenis Cespedes is some kind of baseball hipster. Based on this picture, from Juan C. Rodriguez, we can say with a high degree of certainty that Yoenis Cespedes is not any kind of hipster.

That’s Cespedes arriving at the Miami airport. In Miami, he’s going to meet with the Marlins. And according to this report, also from Juan C. Rodriguez, the Marlins are - unsurprisingly - believed to be the favorites to sign the outfielder:

I’m going to level with you. I started writing this update because I saw a Rotoworld tweet reading:

“Very interesting!” I thought. Then I went to the source. This is the source. From the source:

I don’t know if the White Sox are interested in Yoenis Cespedes, but you won’t get an answer out of Kenny “Tight Lips” Williams:

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Look, I don’t want to be a zealot about this, but I can’t believe that we’re still writing about where Yoenis Cespedes is going. First, the news, from Ken Rosenthal:

There’s a city with the biggest population of first- and second-generation Cubans in the country. In this city, there’s a team that’s frantically spending money to build attention and goodwill as they enter a new ballpark. This team has a hole in center field. On the market is a Cuban superstar who plays center field. Let’s not think this through too hard.

Cuban outfielder Yoenis Cespedes is a free agent. Fantastic! And fantastically exciting for the Miami Marlins, who recently volunteered the information that they would be “aggressive right to the point of stupidity” when it came to trying to sign him. Now the Marlins can try to sign him!

Oh, but wait, what’s that? There are whispers that Cespedes doesn’t want to play for the Marlins? That doesn’t really make any sense, but okay, I guess that’s new information we have to keep in mind. Maybe he’ll go somewhere else. Maybe he’ll go to the Cubs.

Tuesday night, we heard from sources that Cuban outfielder Yoenis Cespedes had officially been declared a free agent. Earlier Wednesday, we heard from sources that Cuban outfielder Yoenis Cespedes had not officially been declared a free agent. Now - still on Wednesday - we hear that Cuban outfielder Yoenis Cespedes has officially been declared a free agent.

Jesse Sanchez, again:

Cuban outfielder Yoenis Cespedes has gotten his Dominican residency. The next step is for him to be officially declared a free agent by Major League Baseball. Tuesday, there were reports that Cespedes had been declared a free agent by Major League Baseball. Haha, jokes! That’s totally not true.

Jesse Sanchez:

Earlier Tuesday, we learned that Cuban outfielder Yoenis Cespedes had been granted residency in the Dominican Republic. From there, all that was left was for Major League Baseball to declare Cespedes an official free agent. At that point, the bidding would be able to begin.

Well, here’s Dionisio Soldevila. Dionisio Soldevila has something very interesting to say:

Jesse Sanchez:

It’s close. The moment that Cespedes becomes a free agent is almost agonizingly close. This moment was probably supposed to come ages ago, but Cespedes is allegedly the sort of talent for which teams will have patience.

It’s January 23. Cuban outfielder Yoenis Cespedes still isn’t an official free agent, even though it feels like we’ve been waiting for ages. Any time now. Any time now.

Cespedes will become a free agent at some point. Then the bidding will begin. Who will be in on the bidding? Ken Rosenthal indicates three teams appear to have the most interest: