Free Thursday: Dylan Cease, Gerrit Cole and (Much) More

So much stuff happening… so let’s move up our weekly Free Friday roundup, and we’ll return to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow….

Dylan Cease to the Padres

It turns out that Padres general manager A.J. Preller still has some surprises in him. For the last few years, Preller has been pushing the San Diego Padres into entirely unexpected headlines—they outbid everybody for Manny Machado, they made that wild, mid-season deal for Juan Soto, they signed Xander Bogaerts to that big deal when they didn’t seem to need him, they traded for Yu Darvish and then locked him up in a long-term deal, etc.

After last year’s historically disappointing season and the death of beloved Padres owner Peter Seidler, though, it seemed like Preller and the Pads would have to take themselves out of the game for a bit. They traded away Soto. They shed a bunch of payroll. They did not get too involved in the free-agent market. The Padres still have a lot of talent, but with the Dodgers getting Park Place and Boardwalk this offseason, it sure seemed that Preller and Co. would hold back a bit and hope for the best.

No! That’s not Preller’s style. On Wednesday, he once again jumped the line and traded three of his top 10 prospects to the White Sox for pitcher Dylan Cease. We’ll talk in a moment about the line he jumped, but first let’s talk about Cease. He finished second in the Cy Young voting to Justin Verlander a couple years ago, despite leading the league in walks. Last year, he was not as good, as his control actually got a little bit worse, plus batters loaded up on his knuckle curveball and were not quite as baffled by his electrifying slider. Still, his stuff is Elite, Capital E, and in that pitcher-happy San Diego ballpark, he’s absolutely a threat to follow Blake Snell’s lead and win the Cy Young Award.

Of the prospects the Padres dealt, the best appears to be pitcher Drew Thorpe, who actually came over to San Diego in the Soto deal. We’ll get to that irony in a moment. Thorpe was absolutely fantastic in his first minor league season after being a second-round pick of the Yankees. In high A and Class AA, he went 14-2 with an 0.983 WHIP and a 182-38 strikeout-to-walk. (those 182 strikeouts led the minor leagues).

Thorpe’s pitching arsenal, though, has made him one of the more argued-about prospects in baseball. He’s 6-foot-4, but his fastball tops out around 93, and he generally works at 91. How do you lead the minors in strikeouts with a 91-mph fastball? Well, you throw a killer change-up. Some scouts adore him; Baseball Prospectus has him as the No. 45 prospect in the game. Some scouts do not; Keith Law doesn’t have him in his top 100, and actually ranks Samuel Zavala—an outfielder also included in the Cease deal—above Thorpe. It might be telling that Thorpe has been traded twice in one offseason. Then again, those dominant numbers might tell the true story. As always in trades, we’ll know much more later.

Will Cease return to form in San Diego? (Ron Vesely/Getty Images)

Happy Thursday! This post is free so everyone can enjoy it. Just a reminder that Joe Blogs is a reader-supported newsletter, and I’d love and appreciate your support.

Gerrit Cole Is… Well, Something or Other

If I have this right—and there’s a good chance I don’t have this right—Yankees ace Gerrit Cole has undergone an MRI, a CT scan and X-rays on his right elbow, and nobody has any idea what they show. He’s ready now for what the Yankees are calling “more advanced testing.” I didn’t even know there was any testing more advanced than an MRI, but, in case I haven’t made this clear in my previous writings, I’m not a certified doctor. That is to say, I did not go to medical school. That is to say, I still have no idea what doctors are even looking for when they pull out that tongue depressor thingy.*

*Do doctors still use the tongue depressor thingy? Is there something more advanced than that now? Is that what an MRI is?

What we do know is that the Yankees say that Cole will miss Opening Day and will be out for an “extended period,” which appears from context to be a month or two, since there’s some hope he will return in May or June, though nobody really knows, because nobody even knows what’s wrong with him. Or, anyway, nobody’s saying what’s wrong. There appear to be no tears, but nobody is even sure about that.

It sure seems—based on how basically every other story like this ends—that this is all leading, eventually, to Tommy John surgery, but maybe it isn’t, maybe rest and rehab will do the trick. Again—and I think this is important to say, just to avoid confusion—I’m not a doctor.

Wherever it leads, the Yankees are certainly in something of a lurch coming into their all-in season, and that’s why, over the last couple days, it seemed all but certain that they would be the ones to cut that deal with the White Sox for Cease. The Yankees have already smashed through the luxury tax/salary cap ceiling, a place that young Steinbrenner clearly doesn’t like being, so they do not seem in the mood to spend the enormous dollars, plus enormous penalties, that it would take to bring in Blake Snell or Jordan Montgomery. Cease was the more financially prudent option.

But the Yankees drew a line in the sand on hard-hitting prospect Spencer Jones, and the Padres snuck in and snagged Cease. Funny thing: Jones, like Thorpe, is another much-argued-about Yankees prospect. There are scouts I know around baseball who believe that Yankees prospects are just about always overhyped, they believe that many people get super-excited about Yankee prospects’ upsides without being honest about their limitations.

Spencer Jones hit the ball harder than anyone in the minor leagues last year, and stole 43 bases. And he has a bazooka for an arm; he was a two-way player at Vanderbilt. At 6-foot-6 and a growing 235 pounds, with tools that boggle the mind, it’s easy to start imagining him bashing home runs in the outfield with Aaron Judge, especially with the way he’s been bashing the ball during spring training.

Maybe that happens. It’s also worth pointing out, however, that in the minors last year, Jones did hit .267/.336/.444, and he struck out 155 times in 117 games. Again, you have the split opinion—Baseball Prospectus ranks him the 33rd best prospect in the game, Keith Law doesn’t have him in the Top 100. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. The White Sox pulled the trigger, the Padres got the ace, and the Yankees are now left to decide just how much more money they want to throw into winning this season.

Is Aaron Judge OK?

The Yankees, we all know, are not exactly transparent when it comes to injuries, but the latest news about Aaron Judge seems to be good. Maybe? He was dealing with some sort of abdominal strain, and it was bad enough that he did have an MRI. That report came back “clean,” whatever that means, but Judge is still aching, apparently now it’s his oblique, which I’m sure is connected somehow to the abdomen, but, in case I haven’t mentioned it before…

Anyway, Judge seems to think he will be ready for Opening Day—maybe even ready to play in spring training games before that—which is as good of news as anyone is willing to release.

Hey, if you feel like it, I’d love if you’d share this post with your friends!

Joe Flacco is Going to the Colts

The 2023 Browns season was such a surprising delight… and Joe Flacco was the big reason. I have come to grips with the unfortunate fact that as a lifelong Cleveland Browns fan, I can’t fully quit the team because of their cynical signing of Deshaun Watson. But I also was unable to get fully on board with them; I simply could not root for Watson, and so the games where he was the starter left me cold, even when they won.

Then, Watson got hurt, and a couple of backups stumbled around, and then Joe Flacco arrived, a total middle-aged Dad with the arm of Zeus. And suddenly, it was like I was 15 again. I felt free to put my whole heart and soul into the Browns, and Flacco was shockingly good, and the Browns won some games, and they went to the playoffs, and even though it all fell apart there in a not-unexpected way, I will always be grateful to Flacco for making me feel that way again.

Now he’s gone to the Colts, and the Browns are again relying entirely on Watson—who, it must be said, might not even be a good quarterback anymore—and 2024 just got a whole lot less interesting.

I’m Coming to Cleveland!

I’ll be in Cleveland on Sunday, March 17, 11 a.m., at the Beachwood JCC, talking some baseball (and whatever else comes up). Tickets are $12. The Beachwood JCC is less than 10 minutes away from where I grew up, so, you know, this will be a super-fun homecoming.

Then, next weekend, I’m in Cincinnati, first on March 23, 7 p.m., at Joseph-Beth Books, and then I’ll be picking up my CASEY Award for WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL on March 24 at 2 p.m.

Lots more stuff coming up in the next month or two!

Joe-Pourri!

Just finished this week’s PosCast, and on there Mike and I talk about what has to be the most exciting part of Pirates’ super-prospect Paul Skenes’ game—he seems ready to bring back the starting pitcher mustache. If we’re being honest, Skenes’ mustache game is not yet elite, but he’s still so young, and he reminds many mustache scouts of a young Jack Morris. We can only hope. Tonight at 7 p.m., by the way, you can watch Skenes face Orioles super-prospect Jackson Holliday, along with a bunch of other terrific Baltimore hitters…

Pretty excited about Atlanta’s Spencer Strider developing a curveball. He was already absurdly dominant; you give that guy another pitch and I don’t know how anybody hits him… Very excited about seeing pal Joey Votto sign with the Blue Jays. Joey really does believe he’s got something left, if he can just stay healthy, and Toronto is just a perfect landing spot. It’s home. It’s a good lineup (despite last year’s struggles). It’s a playoff contender. Let’s go!… Juan Soto is slugging .958 with four home runs in nine spring training games. That means exactly nothing, of course. It also means everything. I’m thinking this might be the year he reminds us of Ted Williams again.…

I obviously don’t understand the NBA and its numbers nearly as well as I do baseball, but it sure seems to me that Cleveland’s Donovan Mitchell is having an MVP-contender kind of season. I’m not saying he should be the league MVP—he has missed seven games recently with injury—but I’m saying that when he’s healthy, he’s almost always the best guy on the floor, and he makes the Cavs SO exciting and good. And when he’s not, the Cavs are just not very good.… The indispensable Paul Lukas over at Uni Watch reports that the Cardinals and Phillies have road uniforms where the shirts and pants don’t exactly match. I’m sure it would be possible for the MLB uniform changes to be more disastrous, but it’s getting harder to imagine how.… The Spurs, because of the nightly thrills of Victor Wembanyama, have to be the most watchable putrid team in basketball history, maybe in sports history.…

Novak Djokovic got upset by 20-year-old Italian Luca Nardi at Indian Wells this week, one of the biggest upsets in recent tennis history. (Nardi is ranked 123rd in the world.) Nardi idolizes Djoker; he spent his childhood falling asleep under a Novak poster. I watched the match; Novak definitely did not play well—and he had a meltdown at one point, which was unfortunate—but Nardi absolutely played out of his mind, particularly on the big points, and you have to give it up for him… I didn’t fully realize just how much the whole LIV golf thing has blown up my interest in golf. Then I realized that the Players Championship, which is an event I usually anticipate and get pretty excited about, started today. I was completely unaware.…

Hockey fans can tell me if Alex Ovechkin still has a real shot at breaking Wayne Gretzky’s all-time goal record. It sure seems to me that the dream is dying. Ovechkin is, at the moment, 54 goals behind Gretzky. You look at the last two seasons—with Ovechkin scoring 50 goals in 77 games two years ago and 42 goals in 73 games last season—and it seems like the record is not only possible but inevitable. But this year, the puck just hasn’t been going in the net for Ovechkin. He has just 18 goals in 61 games—and while he did go on a bit of a goal-scoring run in early-to-mid February, he has only two in his last 10 games. And he’s turning 39 in September. He has two seasons left on his contract, and you’ve got to believe that at this point he’ll play as long as can play to break the record. But I don’t know.…

And finally, a little story from the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City. Last week, a package arrived in the mail—it was a baseball bat. But it wasn’t just any baseball bat; it was the fungo bat that Frank Robinson used in Cleveland after he became the first African-American manager in MLB history. How cool, right?

But the story gets better… because do you know who sent the Negro Leagues that bat?

Yep, it was my all-time hero, Duane Kuiper.

I really do have the greatest baseball hero ever.

JoeBlogs Week in Review

Monday: No. 26: Kansas City Royals.

Monday: A Lifetime of the Oscars.

Tuesday: No. 25: Pittsburgh Pirates.

Wednesday: No. 24: California Angels.

Thursday: You’re reading it…

Friday: Stay tuned!