The Winter Meetings: Curb Your Enthusiasm

I wouldn’t look for the Rangers to make a splash during this week’s Winter Meetings in Nashville.  They haven’t made a lot of moves over the Jon Daniels years during the festivities. It’s more of a time for diligence and groundwork.  If you could compare our Winter Meetings to a buffet, our visits would be like stopping at the salad bar. No real splash has occurred and any real big things that we might do would happen afterwards.

If you go back and look at this year’s GM meetings, we were told very little more than there was some groundwork laid and diligence done. Tire kicking if you will. Now there is a possibility that some things that started at those GM meetings could come to fruition during the Winter Meetings. But suddenly all teams are doing what the Rangers have done the last three years. A lot of checking and a lot of misinformation being released to the internets.

What’s up in the air right now? Josh Hamilton, Mike Napoli, Justin Upton, Zack Greinke and David Price. We don’t even know that’s true. On the Upton front, we keep hearing that that Kevin Towers is holding firm on his high price for Upton (Andrus or Profar). It has been my experience as an observer during the last several years that it’s a big game of chicken.  With Josh Hamilton, more and more prognosticators are speculating that Josh will be back with the Rangers. His agent is famously not into letting things play out in the media, but you could sure make a good guess that Josh wants to come back to Arlington and isn’t exactly driving his price way up as of yet. That could happen this week. Mike Napoli appears to have had serious talks with the Red Sox. He wants more years than anyone has offered. Napoli’s story is disappointing in that it doesn’t appear to acknowledge the fact that his price should be lower and even Napoli himself should want a shorter deal to show what he can really do. He’s still banking on his solid year in 2011.

Zack Grienke appears to be in this for the money. You would think that would include the Rangers out. Based on the stories out of Anaheim that Arte Moreno has put the kibosh on spending, they may not play either. The Nationals are interested and so are a couple of lesser market teams. Somebody will probably overpay for Grienke and I hope it’s not the Rangers.

The most intriguing story that has gotten legs in the last two days is the story of the Rays shopping David Price. You would have to think there would be many teams in on this and it becomes a case of who has the best players on the table. The Yankees and Angels don’t have much to offer up and the Dodgers would have to part with some players that they would be probably better off keeping. That leaves the Rangers out in front. But hold on, we have to get back to our main thought process here.

While we need outfield, bullpen and catcher help, I don’t expect much of anything to happen this week. But it’s like one of those crazy domino chain reaction setups. The first team that makes a big move could spark the rest of them to fall.