MLB free agent predictions: Hanley Ramirez

One of the more interesting developments this offseason passed by mostly unnoticed. Hanley Ramirez, poor defensive shortstop, has reportedly informed teams that they can pay him scores of millions of dollars to be something other than a poor defensive shortstop. That’s a huge accommodation. Think about the subset of teams that would have been interested in Ramirez only as a shortstop. They would have been teams ...

That might be a Venn diagram in the shape of the 2006 Orioles, and it might be an empty set in 2015. If Ramirez wanted to stay at shortstop, his options would have been severely limited.

Now Ramirez will consider third. Or maybe even second, if there’s an extremely brave team out there. Heck, he’ll even consider left field, which brings teams like the Mariners into the mix. Now that his future defensive position is malleable, teams can start getting silly in this, the silliest of seasons.

Silly season! It’s silly season, everyone! If the Astros are kicking tires, it’s silly season, alright. You might laugh at the thought of the Astros paying Ramirez, except a) he would make them better, and b) they’re currently paying most of their players $12.50 an hour, so they have room in the budget. Everyone laughed at the Tigers when they spent through the nose to get Magglio Ordonez and Pudge Rodriguez, too ...

First, let’s look at what we know about Ramirez. He’s probably best at third base. He used to be on a short list of the most valuable commodities in baseball in a pre-Trout world, but he slipped into the land of the average and possibly overpaid. Then the Dodgers acquired him, at which point he rediscovered his bat at the same time he missed substantial time with injuries. Or, to put it simply:

Phase 1: Hanley Ramirez is a young, healthy superstar on a team-friendly deal.

Phase 2: Ramirez is ordinary and surly, and suddenly the deal doesn’t look so hot.

Phase 3: Ramirez is closer to the superstar of yore, but between thumbs and hamstrings and shoulders and obliques, he can’t stay on the field.

But you remember the glory of Phase 1. Oh, how that tempts you. That and the recent signs that nothing has changed with his bat.

He’ll be 31 before the start of the season, so don’t take the injury aspect lightly. This could be the start of a slow disintegration. One minute Juan Gonzalez is making tens of millions and fighting through nicks and bruises, and the next minute he’s on the Royals, fighting Dee Brown and Mike Sweeney for time. It would be one thing if Ramirez missed time because of just one injury, (like the hand, which came on a HBP), but the check-engine, service-needed, and random-squiggly-symbol-that-isn’t-in-the-manual lights have all gone off at various points in the last two seasons. The odds of Ramirez being a force in 2017 might not be great enough for teams to put up with the cost of 2019.

He can still hit, though. Which makes him like two or three guys on the open market. He’ll get paid. Someone will take the risk and enjoy the present. Which team, though?

Without James Shields, I’m not sure how likely the Royals are to enjoy another year of superlative pitching, so maybe fixing the lineup is a moot point. Or maybe it’s a sensible priority. It’s not time for the Royals to spend like the Yankees, but with players like Alex Gordon and Salvador Perez locked up and other youngsters cost-controlled for a while, why not splurge on a true cleanup hitter?

You might argue the money might be better spent on bringing Shields back. I’ll counter with the idea that Hanley Ramirez + Danny Duffy is better for the 2015 Royals than James Shields and Mike Moustakas, and it might be better for the 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 Royals, too.

It’ll never happen, but I like spending other people’s money.

The scuttlebutt has the Giants being aggressive with Pablo Sandoval, enough to make other teams switch to backup options. The Red Sox were one of the other teams that were reportedly hyper-aggressive on Sandoval, but it’s possible that Ramirez would be an even better fit. He’s 0-for-2 in his Red Sox career with two strikeouts, sure, but the Red Sox outscored their opponents 25-3 when Ramirez appeared in a game for them. That means something, right? Right?

More importantly, Ramirez and the Green Monster seem like a great fit. He uses the entire field, sure, but an awful lot of these hanging flyballs at Dodger Stadium could turn into dingers at Fenway. The Red Sox have a protected first-round pick, too, so it makes sense

Oh, right. The Dodgers still want to keep him. That sure changes the calculus a bit.

You know the front office would love to move him to third eventually. They’re smart. They know what’s going on with Hanley in the field and what it might be costing them. But for all of the snark I like to lay on Ramirez as a defensive shortstop, he’s not that bad. Most of the metrics have him grading out as below average, but he’s far from abysmal. The Dodgers could probably live with it for another year.

It’s hard to imagine the Dodgers living without Ramirez’s bat in the middle of their lineup, and it’s even harder to imagine them losing it because they’ve been outbid.

Hanley Ramirez, Dodgers: 6 years, $110 million