Splash Hits: Sweating the waiver wire

A waiver claim fills out the 40-man, the Royals won't be going to arbitration this year, plus some thoughts on the Hall of Fame ballot.

A few random items as we wrap up the first full week of 2025. Let’s get right to it.

First up, the Royals claimed former prospect Braden Shewmake off waivers from the Chicago White Sox on Wednesday. Shewmake began his pro career in the Atlanta Braves system before heading north in the Aaron Bummer trade prior to last season. He was added to the Royals 40-man roster, which is now at capacity.

Shewmake saw his 2024 season short-circuited by injuries. He was hobbled early in the season with an ankle sprain, struggled in his big league cup of coffee (he hit .125/.134/.203 in 67 PAs), was optioned to Triple-A and then didn’t appear in a game after June 1 due to an undisclosed injury. (At least I believe it to be undisclosed. I can’t find a thing about it.)

At this point, Shewmake’s best-case value is as a utility infielder who can make some contact. The prospect reports on him have evolved from a player who is polished at the plate and could be a 20 HR threat if he added weight to his slight frame to a hitter who has messed with his swing, expands the zone and can’t handle velocity. And he never was able to add that strength, thus, there is no power in the tool box.

Here’s Shewmake with a duck snort off Seth Lugo last year. A cutter on the inner half at 89 mph results in an 86 mph single.

I’m not saying Shewmake should’ve done more with the pitch. It’s a good offering from Lugo on 2-1. But that GIF seems very on the nose for the type of hitter he is.

With Shewmake and Cavan Biggio earlier this week, we have officially entered the “let’s throw some darts at utility players” portion of the winter.

The Royals settled with all their arbitration-eligible players on Thursday.

Kris Bubic - $3 million
Hunter Harvey - $3.7 million
Carlos Hernández - $1.16 million
Kyle Isbel - $1.75 million
MJ Melendez - $2.65 million
John Schreiber - $2.3 million

They previously had reached an agreement with Kyle Wright at $1.8 million.

The numbers are right in line with the projections published last October from MLB Trade Rumors. Given there isn’t what one would consider a standout player in the bunch, this was a fairly routine exercise. Opening Day payroll looks to be around $112 million or so at this point, which is right in line with where they were last year. Is there enough money left to add to the outfield? Given the attendance bump they’re sure to get this coming season after last year’s successes, one would hope. However, there is that nasty business on the renegotiated broadcast deal.

Max Rieper at Royals Review asks a question that’s been rattling around in my head for the last couple of years: What did the Royals miss with Brent Rooker? This comes on the heels of Rooker signing a five-year, $50 million extension with the baseball team formerly known as the Oakland A’s.

There are a lot of sluggers like Rooker in Triple-A, and like him they pound mistake fastballs by sloppy pitchers. They’re also pretty one-dimensional, so they need to hit to have any value. But when many of them get called up, they have trouble with big league breaking balls, like the fictional slugger Pedro Cerrano from the film Major League. This was true for Rooker too. He hit .307 and slugged .613 against fastballs in 2023, but just .141 with a 53 percent whiff rate on breaking balls.

But unlike many of those Triple-A sluggers, Rooker adjusted. This year he hit breaking balls, batting .259 with 13 of his home runs coming off them. Overall he cut down on his strikeout rate, improved his walk rate, and increased both his hard-hit rate and average exit velocity.

It’s doubly frustrating that the A’s and Royals were both teams that could take a flyer on a player like Rooker. Plus, he seems like a good dude. Good for him to be able to cash in. Side note: I understand the A’s are in a unique fiscal situation, but I would not have given him that extension.

The Minnesota Twins are for sale and, according to Dan Hayes at The Athletic, a “robust market” could see a new owner in place by Opening Day.

Owners of the Twins since 1984, the Pohlad family announced on Oct. 10 it would explore a sale of the franchise that Carl Pohlad purchased from Calvin Griffith for $44 million.

Last March, the Twins were estimated to be worth between $1.46 billion and $1.7 billion by Forbes and Sportico, respectively.

When people ask me how to make money, I always tell them to buy a baseball team.

I’ve written in this space many times, but I’ll go ahead and write it again: I really enjoy the debate around the Baseball Hall of Fame. I truly do. The players who are enshrined. The players who are left out. Yeah…I even have time for the process of it all. It’s wholly imperfect, but you know, sometimes perfect isn’t possible. And that, in my mind, is what makes the Hall unique. If there was some formula to induct players, what fun is there in that? The enjoyment for me comes from the debates. (Although in the social media hellscape of today, debate without descending into vitriol is sadly rare.) You have your players. I have mine. Some will overlap. Some won’t. And that’s fine because there is no correct answer in this exercise. It’s about remembering some guys.

As I’ve been looking at the ballot for this year’s class, I’m a little surprised that I struggle to find the maximum of 10 that I would enshrine. I think I would definitely fall into the “big Hall” category of the electorate these last several years, but maybe something is shifting in my thinking.

I don’t have a vote, so I don’t put a ton of time into an exercise like this, but it’s still fun to consider.

Feels kind of straightforward to me. Ichiro is a no-brainer. I’ve long thought Carlos Beltrán is a Hall of Famer and so is Andruw Jones. I’m not a huge fan of relievers and think the bar for them should be set extremely high. Billy Wagner clears it for me.

The one player on whom I did the most research for this exercise was Félix Hernández. His peak ran for about 10 seasons, from 2006 to 2015. More accurately, that was a prime run of durability where he reeled off 10 seasons where he threw at least 190 innings. His true peak began in 2009 and ran until around 2014. In that six-year span, the only pitcher with a better fWAR is Clayton Kershaw. The Dodger lefty posted a 37.3 fWAR. Hernández had 37.2 fWAR. Expand the years to include those 10 seasons where Hernández was a workhorse and this is what you get for leaders in fWAR:

Hernández - 50.1
Verlander - 49.4
Kershaw - 47.1
Sabathia - 43.4

Impressive.

I get that WAR isn’t the end-all-be-all of Hall of Fame discussions. He falls short of those already enshrined in a number of categories, but I just can’t get past the fact that he was, for a fairly extended period of time, one of the most dominant pitchers in the game. As the art has evolved, so should how we look at these guys through the prism of the Hall of Fame. Six times in seven seasons he got Cy Young votes. It doesn’t help that Hernández was pretty much finished by the time he turned 30. He was out of baseball at 33. All that work in his 20s took a toll.

My first thought when glancing at the ballot was, I didn’t see how I could vote for Hernánadez. After looking at the numbers and the stretch of dominance, I don’t see how I wouldn’t vote for Hernández.

Hernández isn’t going to get in this round, but there will be an opportunity to have an extended conversation on his candidacy. That’s good.

I’m a bit surprised at the traction CC Sabathia has, where there’s an extremely better-than-solid chance he gets in on his first ballot. If one casts a vote for Hernández, one should probably do the same for Sabathia. I think both belong. But I can’t help but look at the ranking of starting pitchers by JAWS and see Bret Saberhagen and Kevin Appier hovering in the same neighborhood as Sabathia. David Cone, too. Hell, throw Dave Stieb in for good measure. It feels like there’s a whole generation of starting pitchers who, for whatever reason, are defined by Jack Morris? Can’t say I’m a fan of that.

We could have a discussion that could last for days about players who aren’t in the Hall.

Feel free to chime in to let me know what you think about my pseudo-ballot. Also, be sure to share yours.