FRIDAY AFTERNOON UPDATE: We told ourselves we were only going to deal with transactions during the winter meetings, which ended Thursday afternoon. But some things are too big to ignore, so with the news that free-agent outfielder Jason Heyward has chosen the Chicago Cubs (first reported by Gordon Wittenmyer of the Chicago Sun-Times), we’ve added an 11th transaction.
The 2015 MLB winter meetings included one trade so big you could write a whole column about it. In fact, I did.
The winter meetings didn’t include the largest free-agent contract (by annual value) in major league history, but the Arizona Diamondbacks did make Zack Greinke’s signing official during them.
These weren’t the most active winter meetings of all time. Officially, 45 players changed teams between Monday morning and Thursday afternoon, the exact same number that moved at the 2014 meetings.
Some deals were small. Did you know the Oakland A’s traded pitcher Evan Scribner to the Seattle Mariners in exchange for pitcher Trey Cochran-Gill?
Perhaps that has a significant impact on the 2016 season, but right now we’re guessing it won’t. So we’ll stick to what we’ll call the 10 impact deals (some in combination) of the 2015 MLB winter meetings.
If there’s another deal announced Friday, don’t blame us for missing it. The meetings ended Thursday afternoon.
So here we go.