Throughout the offseason, the CBS Sports MLB experts will bring you a weekly Batting Around roundtable breaking down pretty much anything. The latest news, a historical question, thoughts about the future of baseball, all sorts of stuff. Last week we discussed Pete Alonso's future. This week we're going to tackle our favorite moves of the offseason.
What was your favorite move of the offseason?
R.J. Anderson: Favorite big, but not top-of-the-market move: the Diamondbacks adding Eduardo Rodriguez. They needed to beef up their rotation, and I would describe him as being underrated, despite spending most of his career in Boston. Favorite smaller move: I'll go with the Twins adding Steven Okert in the Nick Gordon trade. He had a down season, but I can see him spamming his slider en route to being a big part of that remade Minnesota bullpen.
Matt Snyder: The Orioles trading for Corbin Burnes. They desperately needed to address the top of the rotation here in this window of contention and had so much position-playing prospect currency it was silly. I had gotten to the point that I was worried Mike Elias was just a prospect hugger and wouldn't actually go for a World Series win, instead content to just pile up prospect ranking (faux) trophies. Instead, he dealt prospects for what looks like a one-year rental for a bona fide ace. Not only that, he didn't even really touch the upper tiers of his prospects. Maybe he's still hugging a bit, but maybe this means they can dip into those again for another frontline starter this summer to keep pushing toward a World Series championship.
Dayn Perry: I'm going to take the easy way out and say Shohei Ohtani to the Dodgers. In an era when too few teams try to put the best team possible on the field, the Dodgers, a veritable regular-season dynasty for much of the last decade, went out and signed the best baseball player in the world to a record-setting contract. Meanwhile, Ohtani, the most famous baseball player in the world, gets to flash his skills for one of the sport's iconic franchises and, barring the unimaginable, get his first taste of playoff baseball in MLB.
Mike Axisa: "Best move" and "favorite move" aren't the same thing, right? I thought the best move was the Yankees getting Juan Soto. They had a glaring need for an impact bat and they got one of the two or three best hitters in baseball. I think the Yankees needed someone like Soto more than the O's needed someone like Burnes.
As for my favorite move, I'll say the Braves getting Chris Sale. The money works in such a way that they're paying him basically nothing in 2024 (the Red Sox are covering it), and they don't need him to be an ace. They just need him to match up with Bobby Miller or Ranger Suárez or whoever in Game 3 of a postseason series. Vaughn Grissom was capital-B Blocked and the Braves turned him into a veteran player who still has a chance to be an impact starter. I thought that was a really smart and creative move in an offseason short on difference-making free-agent starters.