Fair Territory: "Meh" teams on the fence, Phillies & Giants W’s, Should Rangers shop Corey Seager?

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Speaker 1: I see the Rangers wanting to get back into this thing. Whether they can or not, I have no idea, but they are not going to concede easily. Welcome everyone to the Monday edition of Fair Territory. We are live this morning, and we have a little more than five weeks until the trade deadline. It is time for teams to start deciding who they are, and we're going to start off today talking about a number of teams that really probably don't know who they are just yet. I'm calling this division the med Division because these are teams that are just kind of slogging along. They're not that good, they're not that bad, They're okay. We're not going to include every possible team in this record range range of where these teams are right around five hundred for the most part, because we can't get to all of them, first of all, and some of them don't really apply here. The Red Sox are a team that's already made their big move. They're kind of going forward. The Guardians are a team that generally doesn't do much. Not too worried about them right now. If they sell, it's Carlos Santana, okay, whatever. And then the Angels. The Angels don't qualify for any playoff discussion until we see a lot more. But let's look at the teams in the Med Division and we'll go through these teams and then at the end of this conversation we'll get into a little Mets, Phillies and Red Sox Giants. All right, here is the Med Division again, right around five hundred, all of them, the Reds forty and thirty eight, the Diamondbacks thirty nine and thirty eight, Mariners thirty nine and thirty seven, Kansas City thirty eight and forty. Are you sensing a theme, Texas thirty eight and forty, Minnesota thirty seven and forty, and a team that probably doesn't even belong in this grouping not good enough, but we'll talk about them, the Atlanta Braves at thirty five and forty one. We'll start with the Reds because to me, they are quite an interesting team. They've brought in Terry Francona, They've invested in this club. They want to win. And tomorrow night we're gonna see after only thirteen minor league starts, hot pitching prospect Chase Burns, a guy who was the second overall pick in the draft last year. He's going to make his debut against the Yankees. You see him right there. Now. This is a team that, in my view and in the view of a number of executives that I've spoken to, could be aggressive at the deadline simply because they've tried to do some things. So the Reds are a team to watch. Perhaps on the by side, the Diamondbacks kind of the opposite. Now they're three and a half back in the wild card. They're a team that has lost so much to injuries. Corbyn Burns and Justin Martinez, an AJ Puck, these guys are all down for the season. Gabriel Moreno currently on the injured list. They just signed James McCann. He's going to join them. They had lost another backup catcher as well. So they're a team that you've heard Mike Hayes and their general manager speak they want to go for it, they want to buy. I just wonder if by the deadline they'll still be in position where they say, Okay, we're still good enough to go grab a wildcard and maybe get hot. I'm not seeing it, but cheers to them for not just conceding and saying, hey, let's get rid of Merrill. Kelly and Zach Gowan and Josh Dale are No, they're trying and they're playing okay. Still the Mariners, now here's a team that over the weekend got Logan Gilbert back. Finally, the rotation is mostly intact now it's except for Bryce Miller, who is on the IL. They are a team that has not pitched as well as we normally would expect, yet they've hit better than they normally do. This is a team that offensively isn't usually very good. They're thirteenth though in runs per game, pretty good above average right now, in large part because of Cal Raleigh. So if you're the Mariners, you're having this magical season from Raleigh, maybe one of the great seasons by a catcher in Major League history, you don't want it to go to waste. We know what they need, first baseman. Most logically, they dfad rowdy t les recently. We'll see how aggressive they are and how they play over the next five or so weeks. The Royals and the Rangers, these are two teams that are quite similar. Great pitching, awful hitting. The Royals have been looking for an outfield bat going back to the offseason. That's when, of course they pursued Anthony santan Dare. They still need that. Kaglian Owen's an interesting guy and we'll see if he can contribute the way Nick Kurtz has started to contribute with Sacramento. And they have, of course Bobby Wick Junior and Salvador Perez and Pasquentino the core of a good offense. I with throw Mike hel Garcia in there as well, but they need more. And all this wishful thinking about them trading Seth Lugo, I don't see that happening. This is a team that is going for it. Barring a collapse, they're going to continue to go for it. The Rangers I cannot figure out. Entering yesterday there were twenty six in runs per game and second in eer. They're dealing with some injuries right now. The two offseason acquisitions, Jake Berger and Jack Peterson both on the injured list, and then you have on the pitching side, Valdis still out, Bradford's still out. Molly tell Tyler Molly, they need those guys back, and they need to somehow get it going offensively, especially at home, where they have not been a very productive offensive club. I don't expect the Rangers to concede easily, and even if they do, I don't know how much they would have necessarily to sell. But this is a team that has been so far a huge disappointment. All Right, Finally two other clubs to discuss, and this one might be the most intriguing of all. The Minnesota Twins. What has happened to the Twins? If you've noticed over the last I don't know, two and a half weeks or so, they've kind of fallen apart. And this all coincides with Pablo Lopez going on the injured list. They've lost thirteen of seventeen and in nine of those games, I'm sorry, in seven of those games. Seven of the seventeen games, they've given up nine or more runs. It's astonishing. They're pitching has fallen apart. They're giving up an average of seven and a half runs per game in that time. They've got some interesting pitching to deal if they're willing to do it. Guys like Joe Ryan, Jon, Duran, Griffin, Jacks, they all have two years beyond this one. They would have extreme value in the market. The Twins are for sale. How will that affect them? Who knows. But this is a team to watch over the next coming weeks. Rocco Baldelli, if you remember, was on the hot seed earlier this year. I don't know that you can put him on the hot seat for all this, but I would be surprised right now if they're not taking another look and saying, okay, where are we going here? Not just with Roco but with the team in general. And finally, the Braves. The Braves last week played the Mets really tough. They had lined up schwellenback, Sale and Strider. They had a good series against the Mets, and what happens, Sale gets the fractured ribcage. And now you look at them, they're thirty five and forty one. They are well out of it in the wildcard race. I believe this margin is seven and a half games right now. It's difficult to imagine them being a playoff team without Sale for a while, however long it's going to be, so I don't know exactly how this is going to go for them. Alexanthopolis has not generally sold. I don't expect him to sell. He already had announced before the sail injury and now the point is moot that he wasn't trading Chris Sale. There'll be a question about whether he would trade Sean Murphy the catcher. Murphy's on a good contract. It's not kind of how the Braves roll. They like having two everyday type catchers, Drake Baldwin the rookie of course, being the other. Right now, so the Braves are in a funny spot. Can they compete and get back into a competitive position. I don't know. Albi's been terrible, Michael Harris the second terrible offensively. With both guys, they can sell Azuna at the deadline if they want and get something for him. But this is going to be a fascinating team to watch too, because they simply have not looked like the Braves of old, to say it mildly. And this week they played the Mets. It's a huge series for them, obviously, if they want to get back to five hundred, get back to a place where they're doing better. But right now it is not happening for them. All right, So that is it the med Division, And again it's not complete. I might not have every team. Don't hit me with your whatabouts. These are the teams I was talking about today the teams. I picked teams that are kind of in this funny place when it comes to the deadline, which again is more than five weeks away. All Right, Two really interesting series over the weekend as well, Mets Phillies. That was one. I was there Saturday in Philadelphia for the middle game of that series. Each of the games in this series was kind of a blowout. Phillies won the first one ten to two, Mets won the second eleven four. Phillies won last night seven to one. Great performance by Lozardo. They did some good things offensively in this series. But with this series and the next one I'm going to talk about this decides nothing, absolutely nothing. The Phillies going into this they were two and ten for a while there. Remember they had at two and ten run now they're nine to two. Since then, they've played much better, even without Bryce Harper, who could be returning this week. So good for the Phillies. They seem to have straightened it out. They are a team with a powerhouse rotation, incredible depth that they have. They may be in position to trade a starter, not talking about one of the big ones the veterans, but maybe Mickabel the kid. They may be in position to use one of those starters in the bullpen going forward. Who knows Andrew Painter is coming. They're really interesting from that perspective. Obviously they need bullpen help, maybe a right handed hitting center fielder as well. Met's kind of in an opposite spot right now. They're starting pitching, which was so good for two and a half months, kind of in a funny place. Senga is on the IL, McGill on the IL, and they just have not been the same type of rotation. Manaiah is one start away from coming back on his rehabilitation assignment. Mantas is coming back tomorrow. Who knows what that's going to look like. He had a thirteen EUA and triple A. So the Mets have got to figure out their rotation, and as Will Simon writes today in The Athletic, maybe get another infielder as well. All right, So that's Mets Phillies. The other interesting series again, another series that decided nothing but was quite fascinating for many perspectives was Red Sox Giants, and it was Ralphaeld Devers against the Red Sox. The Giants win two of three good performance by them. It looks like Devers might have the same kind of effect on their offense that Kyle Tucker did on the Cubs, kind of makes everyone around them better. And I've seen some chatter online from Red Sox fans how we're sick of talking about the Devers trade. Well, guess what We're gonna be talking about the Devers trade for a long time for a lot of reasons. One to see how Raphaeld Devers performs, how he ages in this contract that was obviously a concern. And two to see how the Red Sox reinvest the money that they saved when they shipped I don't know, two hundred and fifty million remaining or so over to the San Francisco Giants. I expect that we're going to see the President of Baseball Operations, Craig Breslow, active at the deadline with some of those savings. It's kind of the point, right, they're going for it, and Breslow has said, listen, wait to see what we've got. So the Red Sox are a work in progress. The Giants, too are a work in progress. Could use another bat. The Dever's trade is something we'll talk about, like the mooky bets trade for quite some time. So there you have it, the med Division, the two most interesting series of the weekend, and we'll be right back after this with the inside dish ftfan.

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00:12:47
Speaker 1: Well.

00:12:48
Speaker 2: Well, well, well, time.

00:12:53
Speaker 1: Now for the inside Dish, the part of the show where I talk about maybe a story i've written, a trend in the game, something else going on. And this week I've got really something incredibly sad to discuss. And you might have seen over the weekend we lost Scott Miller, one of the great baseball writers of our time. He passed away Saturday, pancreatic cancer. It's something we was dealing with for some time. He was sixty two, and this was a big shock to a lot of people because Scott had kept this quiet. Very few of us knew, and even the ones who did, we always saw him as so relentlessly optimistic, even with this horrible disease, and he was that way pretty much to the end. Now. You might have seen Scott recently. He came out with a book, Skipper, Why Managers Matter and Always Will on May thirteenth. The next day he was on foul Territory. That was May fourteenth, And this was I don't know, just over a month ago. Scott had covered Aj Prasinski as a player for the Saint Paul Pioneer Press, and I remember texting Scott before he went on FT and I said, Scott, you know Aj doesn't read, and Scott kind of laughed. We were just texting back and forth, and he said, oh, I never thought Aj could read either. What I had was a rookie with the Twins. We had a good laugh over that. Now you saw the outpouring from baseball writers on x Saturday after hearing this news. There's one baseball writer after another mentioning how much this hurt, how much we all love Scott, how he was always just so generous and upbeat and kind. Now, baseball writing the community is very close, and yeah we're competitive, but it's the kind of business, like a lot of businesses that really the only people who understand what's involved are the people who are in it. And in baseball writing, what is different about what we do well, the hours, the deadlines, the travel, the noise because it's public, the noise from readers, the noise from editors, the noise from players and managers and executives we cover. It's kind of an unusual job, especially with the amount that people work, and those who do the job over the years, as competitive as they might be, there's a bond that forms and that's pretty much all of us. There were a couple of outliers that maybe you don't want to talk to, but pretty much we're all, if not friends, certainly having mutual respect for one another. And there's a photo of Scott second from the left there with me and Jim Leland and Tim Brown. Tim now retired as a daily writer, it still writes books. Wrote the book with Eric Kratz that's from the twenty fifteen World series. So I wasn't as close with Scott as some other writers. Bob Nightingale and him were like brothers. Jason Stark and Jerry Krasnik. Jerry used to work for ESPN New Works for the Players Association, also very close with Scott, but certainly Scott and I were friends. We kept in touch over the years, and Scott recalled this and I didn't. But two thousand and one World Series, the Jeter home Run off, Young Young Kim, the one that made him Mister November, the Extra Ding walk off, we were to in the press box at the old Yankee Stadium, and you saw that photo from the twenty fifteen World Series. There were various moments like these over the years, all these moments, all these crazy games, and all these good times. And I mentioned on X going back to nineteen ninety six, I mentioned that Buster only that year was the Oriels beat writer. I was the calumnist for the Baltimore Son. We worked together and Buster left for the New York Times, and at that point, obviously the Baltimore Sun had to hire a replacement. Scott Miller and Joe Strauss were the finalists for the job, and Scott Miller was a guy that Buster favored. Buster really liked him. I've liked him too, of course, but I thought at the time Joe was the better choice. And I'll explain why in a minute. Now. We weren't the ones making the decision, obviously, but we would talk to the editor as we'd express our opinion. Now, the reason I favored Joe is actually testament to Scott, because at the time the Oriols were chaotic, Peter Angelos was meddling, the team had a lot of big personalities. There was a lot going on. I thought we needed a beat writer who was kind of relentlessly cynical, who would not take anything at Fay's value, who would just always keep going after this team, be a real digger and Joe that was him exactly. And when we lost Joe in twenty fifteen, he also passed away from cancer. And he was a great beat writer in Atlanta, in Baltimore and Saint Louis, I wrote about Joe and I wrote that he was the kind of reporter who would sense both a left wing and right wing conspiracy at the mere mention of a strained hamstring. That was Joe Strauss, and ultimately we did hire him. Now, Scott was the guy that you saw described on X, the guy that was just an incredibly nice and decent person. Now, I don't want this taken wrong. Scott was not soft in any way. In fact, he wrote a number of stories over the years that were incredibly probing and nuanced, and stories that had an edge. His book, the one that just came out that I highly recommend. It has an edge, It has a point of view. It's about how managers are getting kind of diminished in today's game and that they shouldn't be. So the way Scott went about it was different than the way Joe went about it, and Joe was maybe a better fit at the time, at least in my opinion. I might have been wrong about that. Scott went on to great things, of course, Bleacher Report and CBS Sports Line, actually CBS Sports Line, then Bleacher Report, and then The New York Times, and then of course writing a couple of books as well. And years later after all this went down, it must have been about twenty years. I carried a little bit of guilt with it, because I know I had recommended Joe, and Scott was my friend too. I felt badly about it, and I eventually told Scott, and by this time Scott was well on his way to being one of the most distinguished writers of our time. And he kind of laughed and we just kind of had a good discussion about it. It's not the kind of thing where he held a grudge or should have held a grudge. Everything turned out fine. All of our paths, our careers, take these unexpected turns, and you do your best to just keep going. And Scott did that, and he did it in a remarkable way, and he forged a path that was his own and uniquely his own. And again he wrote some things and Tyler Kepner, his former teammate at New York Times, basically tweeted his whole archive from the Times. If you want to go look at it. He wrote some really great things. So as you saw, he was one of the most universally admired and respected writers in our business. He was universally well liked, hard to do in any walk of life. So, as I said on Fox on Saturday, our hearts go out to his wife Kim and his daughter Gretchen and Scott Man. We love you, brother. We'll be back after this with Grill and Kin.

00:20:04
Speaker 2: If you're a card collector, even if you're not, and you just want to find a new way to collect, Arena Club is the spot. AJ just opened up a slab pack he screen recorded on his phone so you can all see what he just experienced. Take us through it.

00:20:15
Speaker 1: And it was simple.

00:20:16
Speaker 3: I just clicked on which slab pack I wanted, clicked by now boom, bought it card. Little pack starts spinning, you hit open and then it goes all psychedelic on you. It's a little fun and then the card appears and I got a Robin Yelt Rookie card.

00:20:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, you did it. Awesome.

00:20:32
Speaker 2: And then right after that experience, I saw the little buy back and you said, hold on to this.

00:20:38
Speaker 3: Now, hold on is robbin me outs in the Hall of Fame. He's not getting any more rookie cards. So I'm gonna stick with it for a little bit. See if the price might start just going.

00:20:46
Speaker 1: Up a little bit.

00:20:47
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00:21:04
Speaker 1: Slash foul all right, time now for Grill and Ken. And like last week, we're also taking questions from chat BBCC. That would be Chat BCC. It's a free chat app. Go to foul Territory dot chat. It's totally free and join the conversation. All right, let's get to your questions. We've got some good ones here we go. Brad Barber asks which division leader has the easiest path to their division crown. Brad, I don't normally say this, but I think this is pretty easy. And it's pretty easy because the Detroit Tigers have an eight and a half game lead in the American League Central, and I ask you out there which team is going to catch them? I know the Tigers had a tough weekend against the Rays, but my goodness, the Twins are falling apart. The Guardians, they're just kind of drifted along. Here are the White Sox, and the Royals just have not played to their capability. So I would say for sure it's the Tigers that have the easiest path. The Cubs are in a good position in the ANL Central, and we all expect the Dodgers to win the National League West, but the Tigers have sprinted out and I don't expect anything different to happen in the AL Central to make them. I don't know a second place team, all right. Next question, This one comes from Oh my goodness, Eric Kratz, Eric who asks does can know if the balls are different this year? Now? Eric, I often tease aj Prazinski for not reading what I write. I just accepted at this point he's not going to read anything I write. I often tease him for not reading at all. And in this case, we had a story in The Athletic a couple of weeks ago, not by me, by Eno Saras and Evan Drelik, in which they clearly demonstrated that the ball is different, that it's not traveling quite as far, not traveling the same way. There's more drag. Major League Baseball confirmed this. So Eric, you know the answer to my question. If you just wanted to get on the show, that's cool, and we welcome you to the show. Eric, But you know the answer. Read the Athletic. All right. Next question, let's get to it. See what we have here. This one comes from Aton Hayne, who asked, ooh, could you see the Rangers trading Corey Sieger like the Red Sox did with Devers. He has six one, six six years, one hundred and eighty six million remaining, so the number of teams that might want him is small. Curious your thoughts, Aton, I had not looked at it like that, in the sense that, well, if the Red Sox could do this with Devers, maybe the Rangers could do this with Seeger. I don't know that they would. I don't know that they would even consider it. Remember, they won a World series just two years ago with Corey Seeger a huge part of what they were doing, and also in the Red Sox case with Devers. The one positive part for the Red Sox here was they simply did not dump the money. That wasn't all they accomplished here. They got back pieces and the two best pieces Kyle Harrison, who could be a solid starter for years to come six years control and the prospect, the outfield prospect, James Tibbs. I don't know that the Rangers could do that, get rid of Sieger's money and get that kind of return. The Red Sox in their case, had a willing taker. It made sense for the Giants they could not get a big slugger any other way. I don't know if things will line up just the same way that it did for the Red Sox and Giants in this trade. So Seger is interesting. We can go through a list of teams that would need Seeger. He has a no trade. He would have to approve it. I just don't see it happening again. I see the Rangers wanting to get back into this thing. Whether they can or not, I have no idea, but they are not going to concede easily. And in this expanded world we live in with the postseason being expanded, the world's the same size as it's always been. With an expanded postseason, it's very difficult for teams to concede and say, hey, our season's over. You do that if you trade Corey Seeger. All right. I want to thank everyone for their questions, thank you for watching, for listening. We will be back Thursday, our normal live show on Thursday twelve thirty Eastern. Myself Alana Rizzo. Have a great week everyone. Some big series on tap, Cups, Cardinals, Mets, Braves. Let's go.

00:25:26
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