Nine Innings of Inside Baseball An irregularly recurring feature, where your host breaks down some of the hottest stories inside baseball. Rumours, gossip, analysis and reporting, brought to you whenever I have enough time and nine things to say!
Spring training is about to start and everyone's engines are raring to go! Strap yourself in for nine innings on the biggest FA signing of the off-season, the biggest trade of the off-season, last year's champs and next year's hopefuls.
1. Alfredo “Savage” Salazar was, of course, this year’s most fascinating free agent. Hot on the heels of Tuna Baca’s arrival, the question on many minds was whether the 23 year-old Salvadoran would break Baca’s record for the highest ever one-year salary.
Looking back now, one can only laugh and laugh and laugh that the question was even asked. Not only did Salazar demolish Baca’s first-year salary with a $68,000,000 payday in 2025, but his total contract came out to nearly double the value of his fellow EBA alumnus over the same term. Salazar has utterly smashed each and every salary record possible. With subsequent salaries of $60,000,000 and $50,000,000 in years two and three, slowly dropping down to a low (a LOW!) of $20,000,000 in years five and six, the Salary of Salazar has prompted some existential questions about baseball salaries: Association Commissioner Matthew Rectenwald has publicly mused about the possible need for a cap on single player salaries, with various executives around the game chiming in as well.
At least six teams were known to have bid on Salazar’s services: Yellow Springs, Madison, Vancouver, Havana, Greenville and New Orleans. My understanding is that Havana, Greenville and New Orleans were only ever peripherally involved, and that Madison’s offer -- the $249,000,000 behemoth that finally won the day -- was well past the amounts that even the Vancouver Mounties were willing to put up. The ball was then in Yellow Springs’ court, as newly appointed General Manager Ron Collins had to make a decision on whether to match Madison’s monster offer.
2. Based on Collins’ previous public statements it was hard to imagine him passing on the opportunity. Of course, we now know that the Nine elected to pass on the matching. This begs the question, I think, of whether Collins knew all along he didn’t plan to pony up the big bucks needed to stay in the game and was posturing in order to stick Madison with a bigger bill and financially hinder a division rival for the next decade. Maybe I’m attributing overly devious motives to Collins, and the final contract simply ended up being more than the Yellow Springs pocketbook could handle. Looking at it, one has to wonder: where does the value emerge in this contract? It’s likely that it will take five years for Salazar’s production to pace his paycheque, when his salary drops to a measly $20,000,000 for the last couple of years (the final season being a player option which he may well decide to void in hopes of another big payday), before he really represents value-for-money. At that point, of course, he may have lumped or suffered some sort of career-affecting injury, or even just developed an injury history leading him to miss twenty or thirty or fifty games annually. Staring this kind of a contract in the eyes has to be enough to put the fear of God into any GM, no matter what the quality of player.
Salazar is billed as a center fielder, and split time between center and left in Europe, but is likely to spend most of his time in America playing in the corner outfield. He’s shown tremendous ability in left field across the pond, but at some point the fact that he’s a right-handed hitting left fielder has to at least introduce the question of whether he’ll be able to live up to the hype. Certainly, I wouldn’t bank on him to outperform Luis Baca over the next decade. I can only imagine that Ron Collins is tremendously pleased with the relative value of that contract now: over the next five years, Baca will earn a reasonably reasonable $89,000,000 while Salazar rakes in $229,000,000. You may disagree with my assessment of Baca as the superior player, but certainly you can’t argue that Salazar is two-and-a-half TIMES better? Right?
3. One last note on Alfredo Salazar. I have to imagine that Savage will experience a great deal of culture shock coming to America, even beyond the usual language barrier (though I have to imagine that the native Spanish speaker, who has spent the last four years learning any number of Belgium’s national languages – German, Dutch and French – while playing in Brussels, must find it extremely frustrating to now be forced to add English to the list). In the entirety of his European career, Alfredo Salazar earned a little over one million dollars, all of which would have been docked fairly heavily under the Belgian tax system. In 2025, he’s set to earn a similar figure every three days of the regular season.
Enjoy the hookers and blow, Savage.
4. Congratulations to the California Crusaders on their Landis Memorial Championship, the franchise’s first since the 2002 season when RF Sadarahu Oh, Jr. led the club to the promised land on the back of his full-season .997 OPS.
GM Ted Schmidt took his team to the Landis with the lowest ever championship team salary recorded under the current salary cap, a feat that has to be considered remarkable. Between the club’s youthful roster and their financial flexibility going forward, the Crusaders have to be considered a candidate to add to their silverware in the next few years. Imagine this team if their Luis Baca offer hadn’t been matched by YS9 a year ago! While such an acquisition would have likely precluded picking up Doug Glover mid-season, it would definitely make them a more chilling threat in years to come.
Speaking of Doug Glover, Ted Schmidt reversed his position at the time of the trade by announcing the club has elected to execute the Team Option for the final season of Glover’s deal. Despite slowing down his production in the postseason (Glover’s playoff OPS was about 150 points lower than the figure he posted for California in the regular season), the veteran third baseman impressed the California front office enough to earn $17,000,000 this year and, likely, $15,000,000 in 2026 – a player option year that Glover will now have the opportunity to execute. Pledging this much money to a player in the twilight of his career goes against Schmidt’s overriding philosophy – pay for future performance, not past production – but in this case, the opportunity to retain elite offence in a weak FA year was too much to pass up. Best of luck to Schmidt, Glover and the Crusaders in 2025.
5. The Buffalo Bison surprised the baseball world a month ago by announcing their impending move to Havana, Cuba. While travel and commercial restrictions between the two nations have been slowly but surely being removed (thanks in large part to two-term U.S. President Bernie Sanders, who will be leaving office this January), the expansion of professional baseball to the communist republic is the most high-profile shift in relations between America and Cuba since the Bay of Pigs. Both governments have vowed to ensure the timely approval of all visas and work permits necessary for the Sugar Kings and their MBBA rivals, but only time will tell whether the country’s bureaucracy is up to the job.
Adam Dee has been retained as the club’s General Manager despite a lack-lustre three season stint in Buffalo, and immediately made it clear that the organization was determined to improve markedly in order to retain the interest of their new market. Fan interest had slumped to record lows in Buffalo after seven straight losing seasons, a fate the Cubans are eager to avoid. It was obvious that the Havana Sugar Kings were anxious to jump-start their new ball club’s anemic offence.
6. In fact, the word on the street is that Havana was very near to a deal with the Huntsville Phantoms that would have sent premiere pitcher Jon “City” Chandler to the Yellowhammer State. According to parties intimately involved with the discussions, the package going back included three major league starters, a top prospect and a considerable amount of cash; the deal eventually fell through at the eleventh hour with both organizations getting cold feet. While the would-be blockbuster was not to be, the mere fact that the Sugar Kings are willing to discuss moving Chandler, one of –if not the – most valuable young pitchers in the game, shows that Havana means business. Judging by their utter inability to generate offence over the past half-decade, I wouldn’t rule out Sugar Kings’ interest on any batting talent that may be on the market.
GM Adam Dee told me that a true baseball trade – ML talent for ML talent – was very hard to make happen, which is something we’ve seen for a long time in the MBBA. Teams are either tearing down or tearing it up, and nobody seems interested in lateral moves to shore up weaknesses at the expense of major league strengths. It was this lack of traction that led to Dee’s second big trade, easily the 24/25 off-season’s biggest swap.
7. Havana shipped two offensive prospects, 19 year-old catcher Hank Brewer and 24 year-old 1B/DH Jack Gulliver, to Las Vegas in exchange for a package including all-star CF Benjamin Franklin Pierce and all-star 3B Hunter Eisenhower, who are now the club’s two top position players. They also added a nice, cheap reliever in the unfortunately nicknamed Austin "Bitch" Chavez.
The Sugar Kings have had a number of conversations including Jack Gulliver, who’s concerningly underdeveloped considering his advanced age as a prospect (and a right-handed DH to boot). Brewer had been largely off-limits in earlier discussions, but when Dee saw the opportunity to plug two high-end players into his lineup and have a significant head-start on next year’s top free agents, he pulled the trigger. If the upcoming off-season is anything like the last one, it’s easy to imagine Havana locking the pair up for significantly less than they would receive on the open market.
“It was a high price to pay, for sure. We really believe in our prospects, but we found ourselves in a place where we were about to waste all of Jon Chandler’s most valuable seasons due to a lack of a supporting cast and this is the beginning of putting one in place. Look at what happened with Mike Swanson in Buffalo: we had eight or nine years of the best pitcher in baseball, most of those cost-controlled, and only made the playoffs three times. It was essentially a world-class talent wasted, and we’re determined not to do that with Jon. This is a pitching core that needs to be allowed to compete.”
8. Also in play is Leon Sandcastle, the seven-time All-Star acquired by the Tucson Cactus in 2023 in their own attempt to leapfrog the competition. A combination of injuries and a lack of a supporting cast of his own has kept Sandcastle from achieving greatness in the desert, and the Cactus has made it clear that they’d be willing to move him for the right return: five or six pieces, including at least two elite prospects. A few days ago a move appeared imminent, but with no news coming out since then it’s believed that any transaction that may have been lined up as fallen through. I can only guess at who was involved, but some of the teams that missed out on Salazar may be interested in Sandcastle: almost certainly the superior player, signed to a friendlier contract. Of course, it’s going to take some serious assets to bring him in, whereas Salazar cost nothing but money. Yellow Springs have those kind of assets though, and might be convinced to go for it and give Luis Baca some support. Huntsville are also worth noting: they’d have a hell of a time putting the money together, but Kyle Stever is among the savviest GMs in the league and I wouldn’t put it past him; CF hasn’t been a position of strength for the club, and you know they’re willing to do almost anything to get past the Barnstormers for a second Landis shot.
Another thing: despite his tremendous success in the league, Sandcastle has found himself playing for three different teams and, likely, will soon join a fourth. That kind of mobility is rare among superstars; is there something in Sandcastle’s makeup that leads to his frequent changes of scenery? Nobody I spoke to was willing to criticize the center fielder, but it does seem to raise some questions.
9. Speaking of elite center fielders, Emilio “Sunshine” Rodriguez is set to return to the field in Spring Training for the first time since early last June. Omaha’s biggest pickup a year ago, the seven-time all-star was supposed to propel that powerhouse to their first championship of the modern era. Things started out pretty well, too: an OPS of .941 and a ZR of +5.9 through 63 games are nothing to sneeze at. Of course, it all went off the rails when Sunshine tore his posterior cruciate ligament, sidelining him for nine months. Incredibly, losing the moustachioed monster barely slowed the team down at all.
Omaha still ended the season at the top of the Johnson League, first in runs scored and second in runs against, despite missing the man who was arguably the most significant batter AND fielder. They still won the Doubleday Series against Huntsville in seven games, and while they eventually rolled over to the went-on-to-win-it-all Crusaders they certainly had nothing to hang their heads about. And now they’re getting another chance! The team retained every single significant piece from a year ago, and now they’re hoping for a full season performance from Sunshine. If they get it, watch out. Hell, watch out either way.
Thanks for reading. I'll be back a little while down the road, and as always my inbox is open for any comments you'd like to make -- either publicly or anonymously -- regarding the goings-on in the Monty Brewster Baseball Association.
