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5 FA signings too obvious not to happen
- Updated: December 3, 2016
Some offseason moves come completely out of nowhere, with little hype or expectation. We saw that just last week when the D-backs traded Jean Segura and Mitch Haniger to Seattle for Taijuan Walker. Right? No rumors, no sources, just tweets from official team accounts all of a sudden.
We’ll see that again this offseason, certainly. But sometimes you get the exact opposite; sometimes the fit is just so clearly, painfully obvious that it’s almost frustrating that it hasn’t happened yet. You look at the two sides, and you just wonder what in the world the holdup is. Let’s help push them together, with five extremely obvious free-agent moves that should happen immediately, if not sooner.
The big-ticket splash: Edwin Encarnacion to the Astros
Every time we run down a list of landing spots for first basemen, the Astros pop up, and it’s not hard to see why. They’ve been extremely aggressive already this offseason, they were reportedly in on Yoenis Cespedes and they’re still being connected to Encarnacion, Mike Napoli and Carlos Beltran. Not only that, their 2016 first base hitting performance, from A.J. Reed, Tyler White and Marwin Gonzalez, was the third-worst in baseball. Adding Encarnacion, projected to hit .256/.351/.494 with 34 homers in a neutral park, to Houston’s lineup would make the Astros among the best-hitting teams in the game.
If Edwin Encarnacion signs with the #Astros… RIP Crawford Boxes. pic.twitter.com/v6vTK52z9Q
— Daren Willman (@darenw) November 30, 2016
If Edwin Encarnacion signs with the #Astros… RIP Crawford Boxes. pic.twitter.com/v6vTK52z9Q
“But it’s too soon to give up on the highly touted 23-year-old Reed,” you might say. It is! That’s what makes this so devious, for Houston. If you sign Encarnacion, your roster is set. You don’t need Reed … and then you can turn around and use him (with others) to trade for a top starter like Chris Archer. The Astros were criticized for not being aggressive enough last year. That’s not happening this year.
The star returning home: Justin Turner back to the Dodgers
The Dodgers were never going to resign Rich Hill, Kenley Jansen, Turner, and Josh Reddick, and they’ve already lost Reddick to Houston. But it also never seemed likely that they’d lose all of them, and …
