Nightengale: Greinke's next move leaves teams in limbo
- Zack Greinke is the finest free agent pitcher in a woefully thin market
- The baseball world is revolving around Greinke
- The Rangers, Dodgers and Angels are interested in Greinke
NASHVILLE -- The three veteran general managers began talking in their hotel suites, moved into a restaurant, shifted to the back of a bar, then wound up in a lonely hallway Thursday morning, with vacuum cleaners humming in the background.
Kevin Towers, Jon Daniels and Andrew Friedman didn't get to bed until 6:30 a.m Thursday, hoping to pull off a blockbuster trade between the Arizona Diamondbacks, Texas Rangers and Tampa Bay Rays.
Yet when they departed the Opryland Hotel at the conclusion of baseball's winter meetings, the only acquisitions they took home were the heavy bags underneath those eyes.
They can spend the rest of the offseason fantasizing about all of the trades they want, but baseball's hot stove league will consist of nothing more than a pilot light until one man makes up his mind.
The name is Zack Greinke. He's the finest free agent pitcher in a woefully thin market.
And right now, the entire baseball world is revolving around him.
Nothing will happen until Greinke says it does.
The Los Angeles Dodgers let him know a week ago they are ready to make him the richest pitcher in baseball history. The Texas Rangers are ready to anoint him as their biggest pitching star since Nolan Ryan. The Los Angeles Angels are ready to give him all of the beach-front property he wants.
Yet after being with three teams the last three years, he now is confused about where he wants to go next.
Baseball executives are left wondering if he wants any part of Hollywood, Magic (Johnson) or Disneyland. Maybe he's not satisfied with the accountants' explanation about the difference in state taxes from California and Texas. Or maybe he just doesn't want to go to any of those three teams and is too polite to say no, waiting for another team to magically emerge.
But until he makes his decision, nothing is going to happen.
The Rangers can't sign 2010 American League MVP Josh Hamilton until they know about Greinke. They're not going to pay $250 million for both players. Their preference is to sign Greinke, trade infielder Michael Young to the Philadelphia Phillies for prospects and fill Hamilton's void by trading for Diamondbacks right fielder Justin Upton.
But the bottleneck Greinke created would make the San Diego Freeway blush at rush hour.
Until the Rangers have an answer about Greinke:
The Seattle Mariners won't know if they can sign Hamilton.
The New York Mets can't explore trading Cy Young Award winner R.A. Dickey to Texas.
The Rays can't trade starter James Shields to the Kansas City Royals.
The Cleveland Indians can't trade shortstop Asdrubal Cabrera to Arizona.
And Michael Bourn, whose holidays were ruined by the Minnesota Twins after they dealt Ben Revere to the Phillies and Denard Span to the Washington Nationals, has no feel for the Mariners' desires until they're done with the Hamilton tango.
This uncertainty is enough to leave general managers aghast.
"Timing is everything,'' Dodgers GM Ned Collettti says. "Timing is what I think most people are struggling with. If you're trying to move one player in order to sign another player, in order to trade another player, and to line up a lot of people in the same place at the same time to say yes. …"
And it's a matter of Greinke simply saying "yes" to someone — anyone — before the real offseason game can begin, setting off a domino effect that will reverberate from coast to coast.
"We're trying to get something done," Daniels said. "We've made proposals. We've been engaged. It's not talk. We want to make deals. We don't want to sit here every day and talk about the idea of making deals."
It might have taken five days of meetings, yielding three trades involving major-leaguers and no free agent receiving more than $40 million, but finally, we understand why.
Mr. Greinke, if you don't mind, can you please hurry up?
The baseball world is waiting.