Teams bidding to acquire Lance Lynn from Texas Rangers have high price tag to meet
In this compacted MLB season, life can come at a team really quickly.
Take the Texas Rangers, who on the morning of Aug. 16 were 10-9 and back in playoff contention. A week later, they hadn’t won again and, ta da, the MLB trade deadline was only a week away.
The Rangers have too many injuries and too many players who haven’t produced and not enough time to make up ground on the contenders. Now, Lance Lynn, the one sure thing the Rangers have this season, could be traded for some potential and a bunch of ifs.
The trade deadline arrives at 3 p.m. Monday, and Rangers manager Chris Woodward is bracing for multiple players to be shipped away to World Series contenders, something this team no longer is.
Lynn and any player on an expiring contract is a candidate to go.
“Like I said before, if I was an opposing team that was in contention to win a World Series, that would be a guy I’d target, but it might be a heavy ask,” Woodward said. “I don’t know. He still has another year, pretty low price, this should be a pretty high asking price for us. I don’t know if somebody is willing to step up and do it.”
Lynn is under contract for 2021, at a club-friendly $8 million. He does not have no-trade protection.
He made perhaps his final start for the Rangers on Saturday, allowing four runs (three earned) in six innings for his first loss of the season. He is 4-1 with a 1.93 ERA after eight starts.
“I’m going to sleep a little bit, come in tomorrow and watch a game, then play some golf on Monday,” Lynn said. “I’ll be all right.”
The Rangers won’t just give Lynn away. They set a high bar last season for left-hander Mike Minor, who also had an affordable extra year remaining on his contract ($9.5 million), and no club met it.
Aside from Lynn’s ability on the mound, his 2021 contract is attractive at a time when owners might not be as willing to spend lavishly in the off-season to upgrade their clubs. Their negotiating stance during the shutdown was that they would be hemorrhaging money to stage a season longer than 60 games, and even then would still be taking a massive loss.
Many teams have laid off employees, cut salaries, implemented furloughs, or all of the above. The Rangers have yet to lay off employees but have cut salaries and furloughed employees.
The risk of COVID-19 shutting down the season and playoffs could also be a factor in a team’s willingness to surrender top-tier prospects for a player who might not get a chance to take part in the postseason.
A selling team takes on more risk because there is no minor-league season and no chance to get updated information on prospects. Some clubs are sharing video of players from their alternate camps, but some are not.
“You don’t have nearly as much confidence as you would have at any point in the past,” general manager Jon Daniels said last week.
He also said that he doesn’t want to just trade away a player for “inventory.” Daniels wants players who have a chance to make a difference.
Those on expiring contracts, rental players, don’t produce significant hauls. That might be even more so this season.
So, a player like Minor or Shin-Soo Choo or Todd Frazier, who for a $1.5 million buyout on a $5.75 million club option for 2021, aren’t likely to yield the kind of player Daniels wants. However, a smaller deal might be better than nothing.
The San Diego Padres sent two prospects to the Boston Red Sox for former Rangers first baseman Mitch Moreland, a free agent after the season. The two players were ranked only 19th and 28th in the deep Padres’ system by Baseball America.
Left-hander Kolby Allard was considered the Atlanta Braves’ No. 12 prospect last season when the Rangers acquired him for a free-agent-to-be, reliever Chris Martin.
Woodward doesn’t want Lynn to go anywhere, but will welcome the young players who come in exchange for him or any other player who might be traded away.
“It’s tough sometimes to get the 18- and 19-year-olds who are five years away,” Woodward said. “But if some of these guys are close and can help us, absolutely.”
This story was originally published August 30, 2020 at 2:19 PM.
