So a few things have happened...
Rather than accept 15.8 million for one year, Marco Estrada has opted for $26 million over two years. You know, ten million dollars is a decent amount of money. More than I've got.
Three - count 'em, three! - players have accepted their teams' qualifying offer. The trailblazer was old chum Colby Rasmus, who will return to Houston. Brett Anderson did likewise in Los Angeles, and Matt Wieters may have upset the Orioles' plans by choosing to stay in Baltimore.
Two pretty interesting National Leaguers are coming to the junior circuit. This pleases me. I'll get to see lots more of the utterly fabulous Andrelton Simmons, who's just an amazing defensive player. He's probably the best defensive infielder the game has seen since the heyday of Ozzie Smith. And the Red Sox traded a big chunk of their farm to obtain Craig Kimbrel. Kimbrel's career so far looks roughly equivalent in terms of quality to that of Mariano Rivera.
Kimbrel is 27 years old (the same age Rivera was when he became a closer) and he's coming off a pretty fine season in San Diego - he saved 39 games with a 2.58 ERA, striking out 87 batters in just 59.1 IPT. The Red Sox will surely take that. But here's the thing - this was by far the worst of Kimbrel's five full seasons. By a mile. It will be interesting if he's declined to Merely Very Good or if he'll get back to posting numbers that suggest he might have some kind of secret cheat code to this here baseball game. At any rate, Mariano Rivera certainly had seasons as a closer that weren't as good as what Kimbrel did last year.
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