The trades, free agents, and rumors of the 2016 Winter Meetings

It’s Winter Meetings time! Oh, what a wondrous time. Every December, the GMs of all 30 rooms get together in a middle school gymnasium and lock the doors. There are fistfights, hugs, drinking games, trades and millions of spent dollars. Oh, you should go one of these years. For now, though, just sit back, and let the transactions come to you.

To prepare you for the week, here are some teams and players who should be of interest. It’s a Winter Meetings preview! Let’s take a spin around the league and see if we can slap some labels on the teams and players who should make this week interesting. Let’s dive right in.

At this point, the Yankees are a balding 45-year-old talking about the time they went to the state championship and threw for 400 yards. Remember that? Remember those days? Remember when they used to have the world in the palm of their hands?

The Yankees to this point have signed Pete Kozma and traded for Aaron Hicks. That’s more Rays than classic Yankees, and when you dig through their page on MLB Trade Rumors, you get sentences like this:

Yankees GM Brian Cashman is downplaying the team’s interest in free agents, writes George A. King III of the New York Post.

Meanwhile, the Yankees were never involved in the bidding, tweets Joel Sherman of the NY Post.

New York “may be laying in the weeds” to make its move

The Yankees aren’t supposed to lay in the weeds of the offseason. The Yankees are supposed to set the weeds on fire and chortle as the poor teams scatter. Instead, here’s Kozma and Hicks. There are no new bobblehead days planned.

Part of the problem is that there isn’t an obvious way to fix the roster with money. Unless you’re not convinced that Rob Refsnyder is the second baseman of the future (and his 2015 trial was superb), the only way to make the Yankees appreciably better is to sit a veteran making millions and throw more millions at a different player. That seems unlikely.

So we’ll see if the Yankees are basically done in the offseason, or if they’re lying in the weeds with a machete.

Assume that the White Sox are quasi-contending behind their rotation and Jose Abreu. Assume that the A’s are going for it, considering their steadfast refusal to deal Sonny Gray and their acquisition of Ryan Madson. Now count up the teams that probably aren’t planning to contend at all in 2016. I have the Brewers, Reds, Braves and Phillies. Maybe the Rockies, though they’re always half in/half out. At most, there are five teams that should approach these Winter Meetings as obvious sellers.

Of those teams, only the Reds and Braves are stuffed with players that other teams might be interested in. The Reds are almost certainly going to trade Aroldis Chapman, and they’re reportedly open to a Todd Frazier trade. Jay Bruce sure looked a lot more interesting last year at the deadline, before his second-half death slump, but power is scarce enough to keep teams interested.

The Braves have Freddie Freeman, even if he’s likely to stay because the combination of contract and injury concerns means he’s not going to allow the Braves to pull off a reverse-Teixeira trade. But they also have Shelby Miller, who is the best pitcher on the trade market who has a semi-reasonable chance of being dealt. Considering the dearth of win-later teams in baseball, the Braves can sit back and let the rest of baseball come to them. If Miller is traded, it will be a trade that will screw up the 2016 Baseball America Prospect Handbook, with someone’s farm system getting ravaged.

Are the Red Sox done now that they have David Price? They’re probably done spending, certainly, but it’s hard to slap an ace on an 84-loss, last-place team and figure that they’re good for 15 more wins next year. There are still ways to improve the rotation, they’ll just have to come in a trade.

Of course, if the Red Sox were going to take a bite out of the farm to help the rotation, they could have done it last July with Cole Hamels and saved themselves some grief. The under-new-management sign isn’t a minor concern, though, and Dave Dombrowski does have a history of using prospects to help the active roster. The problem is finding a team that’s looking for prospects and only prospects in exchange for pitching. Unless the White Sox give up entirely, it isn’t exciting to pick through the rotations of the Brewers and Reds.

Unless we’re overlooking something huge.

Marlins talking to Dodgers, others about Jose Fernandez

That’s the first headline this offseason that made me say, “Zoinks!” in an organic, unforced Shaggy voice. It would be an incredible move for the Dodgers to shift from losing Zack Greinke to trading for Fernandez and signing Hisashi Iwakuma in the same week. There are problems with this scenario, though.

The Dodgers love Urias and Seager, and they love the idea of keeping the payroll commitments down three years from now. They’re already expecting to get Chapman, so that might be as aggressive as they want to be with their prospects.

The Giants need an outfielder and another starting pitcher, and they have about $30-40 million, even after signing Jeff Samardzija. They will be in on everyone, from Ben Zobrist to Yoenis Cespedes to Justin Upton to Wei-Yin Chen to Kenta Maeda to Yovani Gallardo to Mike Leake. And if I have my Giants history down, they’ll come away with Marlon Byrd and Ian Kennedy, which will cheese fans off until October, when the even year Cthulhu will rise and devour us all.

The Giants aren’t going to be a mystery team. They’re going to be the default team. If you hear a rumor about an outfielder, they’ll be involved. If you hear a rumor about any of the remaining pitchers, they’ll be involved. There was even a stray rumor on Sunday that the Giants might have interest in Joakim Soria, which didn’t make sense at first, considering they have a full bullpen. But if they’re exploring trades, the best majors-ready players they could realistically offer (other than catcher Andrew Susac) would come out of the bullpen, so they might be in on all of the relievers, too.

It’s been years since the Giants got to be the star of all the Winter Meetings rumors. The only question is if they can be the star of the Winter Meetings. If they don’t come out of this week with a left fielder and a new pitcher, they’ll have done something wrong.

Laugh at your own peril. I have the power to edit this for the next few years, and I won’t hesitate to use it. What are you going to do, take a screenshot? Ha, I’d like to see that.

Please don’t screenshot these dumb, ill-advised predictions.

None of those will really happen, but the point of the Winter Meetings isn’t to be right. It’s to let the chaos and nonsense wash over you and take you somewhere you weren’t expecting. Happy rumor-mongering, everyone.