Fair Territory: Freddy Peralta/Mets extension soon? Max Fried story, Oli Marmol extended

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Speaker 1: Welcome everyone to the Monday edition of Fair Territory. I'm Ken Rosenthal. Be with you for the next twenty five thirty minutes or so. I am back from ten days in Florida. Ten camps in ten days. It's not quite the MLB network thirty camps and thirty whatever they do now, but I did hit ten different camps. And while I didn't write every day or every about every team that I saw, I did see a lot and part of what I was doing there were interviews for Fox that will be appearing on pregame shows throughout the season, and part of it, of course, was work for the athletic And I ended this tour with the Mets. There's no particular reason for that. I started in Fort Myers, southwest part of the state, went up the west coast to the Tampa area, then went to Lakeland to see the Tigers, and then went east to see the Mets and the Astros. And at Mets camp yesterday, it was rather interesting just seeing the vibe of this team because it is a completely different team almost They are excited, and every team is excited. We understand that even the lowliest teams in Major League Baseball are optimistic at this time of year. But the Mets do have a different feel and a different look about them because they have so many new players. Boba Schet. I want to touch on him a little bit. He is a guy that is in much better shape than he was last year when he was injured and could not train the way he normally does. He's excited about that, he's optimistic about that. I expect a big year out of him. Carson Bench, the rookie who is competing for one of the outfield spots. He's an interesting guy because the Mets see him as someone who if he's not ready right away, they give that job to Mike Takman. He'll at least be ready at some point during the season. And he's a guy with unique back to ball skills as well as unique power. So the Mets have all of these potentially new players. Luis Robert Jr. Of course, is one of the players who is the talk of camp, in part because when you see Luis Robert Jr. On a baseball field, he is a specimen. He can do special things. He is a rare talent. My question with Luis Robert Jr. Are the same questions that we're all asking can he stay healthy? So this is a team that I have written. I am not quite sure it's going to come together the way David Stern's, the president of Baseball Operations an dissipates, but it is going to be quite an interesting journey. Samy and at second, Polanco at first, all of these different things going on. They feel they have more depth than in the past with Biento's and Batty and some others who if they're not starting, can come off the bench. They're going to be a team to watch the entire season because not only do they have new players that have new coaches, they are really kind of starting over on the fly. Now. The guy I wrote about today is of course one of their big trade acquisitions, and that would be Freddy Peralta. And you see the headline right there on my story in the Athletic Freddy Peralta already seems at home with the Mets. Will it be a long term one? And basically in the story I suggest that there's no reason it should not be a long term one. Freddy Peralta is a guy who, when he was eleven years old, came to the United States with his little league team from the Dominican Republic came to New York City. They spent about a month in New York. He recalls throwing a no hitter in the Bronx, and he talked about even last opening day when the Brewers remember opened the Yankee Stadium, and he left forty tickets for family, friends and whoever else might have been wanting to come to the game. He is a native of the Dominican Republic. The Dominican population in New York is the largest of any immigrant group, so he's excited about being there. And of course there's another thing here, another element. He is someone who has a long standing relationship with both David Stearns and Edwardo Brizuela, the top two guys or two of the top guys. Sterns the top obviously, Edwardo also is in the Mets organization, both with the Brewers. Sterens once traded for Paralta with the Brewers. It was one of his first trades, and he signed him to an extension with the Brewers, So this is obviously a guy he likes. Freddy Parolta said when David Sterns called him to inform him of the trade, he could hear him smiling on the phone, or could almost visualize him smiling on the phone, and Stern said the same thing about Paralta. Now, the one bit of news in this story, at least in my estimation, is that Paralta said he doesn't want one of these short term, high dollar deals. He wants something long And we all know that David sterns at least in his tenure with the Mets and even before that with the Brewers, does not like long term, high dollar deals for starting pitchers. So that is something that I imagine they can work out get through, but that is going to be one potential roadblock in the negotiations. One more thing about Paralta. He is one of the most brilliant personalities in the game. I said in the story. He's kind of a pitching version of Aohano Suarez. Aohano Suarez, of course, known for his good vibes only catchphrase, that's Freddy Peralta from a pitching standpoint, and it's only going to help a team that had some clubhouse issues last year. We've talked about them ad nauseum, and if there's a rift to be repaired between Soto and Lindor, Juan Soto, Francisco Lindor. We still do not know exactly what that was. Well, Paralta is a guy that can help do it. So the Mets getting ready. The key for them, like for any team, is going to be staying healthy, and that's one question I have with them. Bashett hasn't been all that healthy. Robert is never healthy. Polanco has had some knee issues in the past. The pitching, of course, that is the number one question when it comes to health and production. We'll see how it all plays out, but that's going to be a team much like San Francisco because of Tony v Tello taking over, that is going to be fascinating to watch, even more fascinating than most clubs on a daily basis. Some other news yesterday from the East coast of Florida and that involved the Saint Louis Cardinals. The Cardinals, of course are rebuilding, but they did something that they should have done because of where they are in their evolution here, and that is extending their manager, Ali marmal Oli. Marvel gets a two year deal for twenty seven and twenty eight with a club option for twenty nine. Obviously, this was his last season under guaranteed contract, and you might ask, well, why is this necessary now? Why not just play out the season. It's a good move by their new president of baseball Operations, Heim Bloom, because it offers stability and it tells Ali Marmal, hey, you're going to be here through this rebuild. We're not going to judge you on wins and losses. You're going to be our guy for the next two and mi maybe three years beyond this one. Now, obviously they could have kept him as a lame duck, but if you do that, it raises all kinds of questions that you don't need to have raised during the year. The big question will be can Ali Marmal see this through to the other side when they come out of the rebuilding plan, And that is going to be where this becomes a real question for the Cardinals. But that's down the line now. Foul Territory is in Jupiter today, Jupiter, Florida, at Cardinals Camp. They're live at eleven am ET. Now. The World Baseball Classic is coming up this week and all of our World Baseball Classic coverage is brought to you by our friends at Fox one My Friends, which is live stream all your Fox favorites together in one place, including all WBC games over the next few weeks. I'll be doing nine of them, and after that the best MLB action all season long. Now, speaking of the WBC, we had a roster move yesterday, probably the last roster move, let's hope, barring any injuries, and it was this Ryan Yarborough, the left handed swingman from the Yankees, kind of a jack of all trades. He is going to be replacing Joe Ryan on the roster, a move that was kind of expected. Joe Ryan had that lower back inflammation last week. Doesn't appear to be serious, but teams are always looking for an excuse to pull their guys out of the WBC, and with Ryan, he just had this little issue. You're not going to want him to pitch. So Ryan Yarborough joins the staff and it should be pretty interesting to see how this all comes together. Their workouts start today in Scottsdale, Arizona. They have a workout today, then they have games exhibition games the next two days against the San Francisco Giants and Colorado Rockies. Then on Thursday they fly to Houston, and on Friday they begin WBC pool plan. Talking of course about Team USA, all of the other teams in this hemisphere will be following the same kind of schedule. There are a number of teams in Arizona that will be playing against major league teams, a number of teams in Florida that will be playing against major league teams as well. So from the WBC through the World Series, to the World Cup, to NASCAR and IndyCar. With Fox one, you get it all live. Start your seven day free trial today offers our subject to change. Download Fox one today and stream the World Baseball Classic live March sixth to fourteenth. Go to foxwe dot com for complete terms and conditions. Fox one streaming. Now. All right, without further ado, Let's get to the inside dish Well Well will Well. I mentioned earlier my tour through Florida, and one of my stops was in Tampa at New York Yankees camp, and there I had something of an idea that I wanted to pursue. It was an idea that I've actually had for quite some time. I really wanted to write it last year but never got to it. But it was a story about Max Freed and Max Freed I remember going back to his days in the minors. I remember talking to evaluators from other teams and hearing that Max Freed was soft. This guy's a big prospect, he's soft, He's not gonna be the guy that everyone thinks, etc. Etc. Didn't write all of that. Hear these whispers all the time, but I kind of filed it away and I kind of thought, Wow, this will be an interesting guy to follow, because he was the number seven pick in the draft by the San Diego Padres. It was twenty twelve. That was the year Correa and Buxton went one two, and he was coming out of high school Harvard Westlake High School in Los Angeles, California. Big time prospect. Now, his career was an interesting one, of course, just from the path he followed. The Padres traded him to the Braves and the Justin Upten deal, and then at that time he was still recovering from Tommy John surgery. So I wanted to ask Max this because Max is one of the most thoughtful guys in the game. He's soft spoken, but he has interesting things to say, and he's someone who I thought would be honest about his journey. Maybe he would have said listen. I never heard that talk and there would have been no story. But when I mentioned this to Max, I said, Max, I heard this. I wonder if you heard it too, and he said, yes, I did hear it. It was a label that was on me soft. But he explained why that was all going on at that time, why that perception might have existed. And it existed, he said because he came out of high school eighteen years old, first goes to the Padres rookie affiliate, which I guess at the time was in Peoria, Arizona, and then his first full season at nineteen years old is in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in a ball with the Padres. And basically what he said was I was a kid, I was a teenager. I wasn't ready for this kind of life. And one of the things that was interesting is he understood, of course that it was a job that he was going to get paid. But coming up in high school, what he said was, you're root for your teammates, You're root for everybody to do well. It's competition, but it's not the same kind of competition. Once you get into pro ball, it's every man for himself. You're fighting with your teammates to get to the next level. You're competing with them on an everyday basis. And he said when some of his teammates would get released, it was rather jarring to him. It was something that he was not really ready for, and all of this kind of played into his head. He had the Tommy John surgery and then he came out of it, and he came out of it the first year pretty well.

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Speaker 2: Twenty sixteen, he missed, the twenty fifteen season, sixteen comes back does fairly well, and then in seventeen crashes two and eleven, an era of almost six And he basically said that at that time he had a conversation with his dad and he said, you know what.

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Speaker 1: I don't know the I'm cut out for this. I don't know if this is going to be my future. Maybe I just need to go to college. What happened from there, well, we all know what happened from there. The Braves called him up even though he was horrible at DOUBLEA because they were rebuilding at the time. They wanted him kind of to get experience and prepare himself to be part potentially of the twenty eighteen rotation that didn't really happen. He was up and down at eighteen, he was hurt a little bit, but in nineteen was his breakout year. And of course we've seen everything he has done since. The tremendous performance in Game six of the twenty twenty one World Series, the three top side, top five side young finishes, the All Star appearances, the Gold Gloves, and of course the record contract for a left handed pitcher with the Yankees eight years, two hundred and eighteen million dollars. So you might ask, Okay, what's the big deal? All major leaguers have difficult journeys. Why is Max Freed so special? He's so special and he was worth writing about in my opinion, because often I believe fans and even media members, writers, broadcasters don't have a full grasp of the difficult journey that some of these guys have. Some come pretty quickly and it's not that hard for them, a very small percentage, but most are like Max Freed, and I like in my job to write about those journeys. I did it a little bit with Alec Bowl in last week of the Phillies. I do it from time to time. Of course, I also do many other things for the athletic with news columns whatever the case might be. But I go back to this often Tim Kirkton. When I first joined the Baltimore Sun, he was the baseball beat writer for the Morning Sun and I was the baseball writer for the Baltimore Evening Son, and we were in competition even though they were owned by the same people. And one of the things that Tim taught me, one of the first things he taught me was the game is really hard. You can never lose respect or appreciation for what the players go through, how difficult it is, how difficult it is to succeed. So stories like that, I think we can kind of apply them to our own lives. When Max Freed says, you got to take one day at a time and you got to just keep believing and going forward, That's the way I ended this story. Words to live by from a guy, a superstar who has had not an easy journey, a difficult one. So I hope you read the story. I hope you enjoy it. It was quite a fun one to work on. And I will say this, Max Freed was incredibly open about this. It was a seven minute interview. I asked only three questions. That's how expansive his answers were And you might say, well, seven minutes, that's not that long when you interview someone. When you're talking to someone, seven minutes is actually a decent length of time. And the fact that I answered, actually asked only three questions, that tells you that Max Freed was thoughtful about this, and he was expansive about it, and he was really good to talk to. So with that, we get ready for Grill and Ken, and that will be next bet.

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Speaker 1: Time now for grilling Ken, the part of the show where you get that grill me, ask me questions. So let's go. Let's get right to them. The first one comes from Shawn Michael in Florida, who says, hey, Connor Griffin Ken had one good game with two home runs. Has anyone paid attention to Kevin McGonagall. He's hitting four hundred. Here we go, everyone needs their attention. We all know who Kevin McGonagall is. Kevin McGonagall is having a tremendous camp. Connor Griffin is the number one prospect in the game. They are both going to get all the attention they ever could want. And Kevin McGonagall, I expect, will be a member of the Tigers at some point this season. I don't know if it's going to be opening Day. It's a little bit different situation than the Pirates have with Griffin. But McGonagall is a guy with, as we talked about with Carson bench, unique back the ball skills. He is a guy that if he's not the number two prospect in the game behind Griffin on some lists, he's right there in the top five. He is someone who can be perhaps as transformative for the Tigers as the Pirates hope Griffin will be. So, Yes, Kevin McGonagall is going to be a big factor. Max Clark, the outfielder, also might be a big factor. McGonagall is an infielder. They've got to decide where to play him and how it's going to work and all that, but the Tigers are going to need him because they didn't do much offensively to enhance themselves in the offseason, in part because they've got these two kids, two of the top five prospects perhaps in the game. They are waiting on them, they are ready for them. They want to clear paths and keep them open for them. But show out. To answer your question, we love Kevin McGonagall too. We love Connor Griffin, who, by the way, now has three home runs. He hit one yesterday, So keep your eyes on both these talented young players. Next question, this one comes from Living Legend seventy two thousand. He says, Hey, Ken, it was very nice to meet Nice to meet you at Astros camp over the weekend. Do you think they'll try to trade parades for an outfielder? Funny you should ask Living Legend, because my next column coming out tomorrow is on this very topic. I will give you a brief preview by answering your question, do I think they should trade parades for an outfielder, a left handed hitting outfielder. The answer that you will see in this column is a resounding yes. The Astros have an imbalance. They have too many players in their infield, not enough players in their outfield, or not enough good players or established players. I should say, these guys are all good players, not enough established players in their outfield, and they've got in the infield a situation where Christian Walker is at first, Jose al Toovey is at second, Jeremy Pagney is at short, in Carlo's career at third, with Jordan Alvarez the DH, where is the room for Iszak Parades? Well, there is no room. Now they can bench guys were not rest guys. They can use the DH on days when Alvarez is in left field. They can play out two ve in left field at times if Parades is capable of playing second base, which is doubtful. But it's a log jam that needs to be resolved, and that is the subject of my column tomorrow. The Peralta and Free Reid stories there today. The story about the Astros and what they need to do is tomorrow. That is an opinion column, so you have to distinguish between the two. All right, let's get to the next question. Next question is, oh, Pigtown Sports, Why is Michael Kopek still a free agent? Good question. He is one of the remaining free agents, along with Lucas Gildo, Zach Lttel, Danny Koolam, Tommy fam I'm not getting to everyone, but I'm trying to mention the ones that come immediately to mind. Kopek is a guy that I believe was on the Athletics Big Board the number fifty free agent. We had fifty top free agents, and he was number fifty. The only reason perhaps he is not a free or not signed to a team now, or maybe the biggest reason would be health concerns. He's had a number of injuries, and I don't know exactly what he's looking for. That's always an issue when it comes to free agents who are unsigned. But the health concerns perhaps would be the reason why Kopek is still out there. I expect, as long as he's healthy that he is going to sign somewhere. I also expect that with Gilido and with Lttel especially, But every year we have players who get hot, who get stuck and remain free agents beyond where they want to be as camp opens. And while Starling Marky signed a minor league deal with the Royals this weekend, Randall Gritchard with the Yankees last week, you still have a few remaining guys out there, all right. Next question, This one comes from Ricky schaff fifty seven to fifty eight, Ken, what did you think of Marte to Casey Hey, Ricky, great segue there. For the Royals who are looking for outfield help, Marte is certainly worth a flyer on a minor league deal. And I talked about the Astros and the imbalance between their infield and outfield. The imbalance with the Royals is greater than it is for any team. If you look at projected war Their infield, particularly with Bobby Wood Junior and Michael Garcia, is tremendous in its projections what it might accomplish, and the outfield not so much. Now they signed Lane Thomas, they traded for forgetting his name, the guy from Milwaukee who has had a really good rookie year. And they are a team that is looking for outfield production and they're hoping Jack Callianode provides some of it. But Marte gives them another option and with that perhaps they can put together a better outfield than in the past. Isaac Collins is the guy I was looking for. Thank you to my producer for Jeremy Myers for helping me with my brain cramp there. So yes, for the Royals who are always looking for outfield help. You remembered they were trying to trade for Jaron Duran for most of the offseason. Marte at least is a guy that is worth taking a look at. All. Right, let's say if we have a next question here. It comes from Carter Hawkins one thirty. I don't believe Cubs GM Carter Hawkins is actually asking me a question, but let's use the pseudonym and go with it. Ken, what would the Cubs have been better off giving show to Iman August twenty two point five million to a top closer like Robert Suarez. Okay, that is a fair question, and certainly you can always wonder about how teams allocate their money, but they were thinking that with Palencia at the back end, they're comfortable with him and they wanted to make sure they're starting pitching was in a good place and in Minaga, it's one year, so yeah, it's a big number for one year. But if they can get him to be what he was in his first season or something close to that, then we'll be talking about something pretty good. So for the Cubs, they were trying to build rotation depth. They transform their entire bullpen. Signed a bunch of free agents to go with Palencia. So we'll see how it all works out and they might have to adjust on the fly, But at the same time, it's something that they're gonna have to just go through the entire season and figure out as they go along. All right, final question, This one comes from foul Territory, our good friends of foul Territory, who asks, how does Vlad Guerrero Junior look this spring? Flag Guerira Junior, he always looks good. And if you read Jason Stark's article about the Blue Jays and their reaction to Game seven and losing it and coming into this season, Blad Junior is quoted in that. It's a quote that actually I got when I interviewed Lad for Fox Sports and he talked about how hurt he was hurt just sitting there in the dugout after Game seven. He said he wanted to sit there and he wanted to be the last one out of the dugout going back to the clubhouse because he wanted to feel it. That man is motivated. That man, as we saw in the postseason, the entire world got a glimpse of what Toronto fans knew. He is not just a hitter. He is not just a power hitter. He is a good defender at first base and above average defender at first base, and he is an excellent base runner as well. Vlagerreo Junior expecting big things out of him this year. Expecting big things as well out of the Blue Jays. All right, I want to thank everyone for watching and for listening. Foul Territory, as we said earlier, coming up at eleven Eastern from Cardinals Camp. Aj Prizinski is live from that camp. Eric Kratz and Scott Brunn also will host We're Back Thursday at our usual time twelve thirty Eastern with Lanorizzo. It will be a WBC extravaganza cause we get ready for the tournament. We'll talk to you then