SAN DIEGO - Catcher Ted Simmons, who played in the shadows of Johnny Bench, Carlton Fisk and Gary Carter, will join the three backstops in the Hall of Fame in July. Simmons, who caught at least 150 games in eight different seasons, was voted into Cooperstown by the Hall's Modern Era Committee Sunday at baseball's Winter Meetings. The Modern Era Committee, one of four rotating committees that considers various periods, also voted in Marvin Miller, the pioneering union executive that led the...

SAN DIEGO - It's not unusual for the Nationals to hold a position of prominence at the Winter Meetings, given all the prominent players they've employed and/or pursued over the last decade, but they've never held a position quite like this. The Nats front office reported to the Manchester Grand Hyatt on Sunday night not only as the recently crowned World Series champions but as the team that now has two of the most prominent players available on the free agent market. If Gerrit Cole is the...

Will the Orioles be busy at the Winter Meetings in San Diego that begin today? No doubt they will. But will that work and various meetings lead to actual moves? That is what we are waiting to find out. In recent years, the Orioles have often come away from the Winter Meetings with a Rule 5 pick - some years more than one - but that is usually it. This year the Orioles were busy in the week leading up to the meetings. They acquired five minor league pitchers in separate deals for Jonathan Villar...

SAN DIEGO - Major League Baseball's Winter Meetings are this week at the Manchester Grand Hyatt, a 15-minute walk from Petco Park, home of the Padres. It's an event where reporters and pundits take a kernel of corn and in seconds turn it into a jumbo bag of popcorn. Trade rumors are what make these meetings beautiful. But some years, such as last December in Las Vegas, there was more speculation than action. The podium in the press room stood most empty. Little happened. This December, if the...

SAN DIEGO - There's a certain rhythm to the annual Winter Meetings that is spliced with interruptions. The breaking news and hastily arranged press conferences, though the Orioles usually don't get to the podium and aren't likely to be the center of attention this week. Executive vice president/general manager Mike Elias will meet daily with the media in the late afternoon, local time, which means filing late stories before wandering the lobby again. The usual managers luncheon has been...

The Washington Nationals agreed to terms on a Major League contract with right-handed pitcher Kyle Finnegan on Sunday. Nationals President of Baseball Operations and General Manager Mike Rizzo made the announcement. Finnegan, 28, joins the Nationals after seven seasons in the Oakland Athletics' Minor League system. In 2019, he went 3-2 with 14 saves and a 2.31 ERA (13 ER/50.2 IP) in 42 relief appearances between Triple-A Las Vegas and Double-A Midland. Finnegan's 14 saves led Oakland's Minor...

SAN DIEGO - In their quest to refortify a bullpen that was in a constant state of change all season, the Nationals have signed Kyle Finnegan to a big league deal, taking a chance on a 28-year-old right-hander with a big arm and eye-popping minor league numbers this season but zero big league experience. Finnegan has spent the last seven years in the Athletics' farm system, a former struggling starter who made the conversion to reliever in 2016 and enjoyed a career renaissance in the process. A...

The entire baseball world today makes it way to San Diego, where on Monday the 2019 Winter Meetings open for business. As always, the focus will be on free agents, many of them key members of the Nationals' championship roster. But the odds of Stephen Strasburg or Anthony Rendon signing this week probably aren't great. Agent Scott Boras is still in the preliminary stages of a courtship process with several franchises that could drag on well into the winter. So perhaps the more likely...

One thing that would certainly aid and maybe hasten the Orioles' rebuilding efforts would be seeing some of their young pitching prospects move on to have big league success. Along those lines, the Orioles added five young pitchers to their organization in the last week. Last Monday they acquired lefty pitcher Easton Lucas from Miami in a trade for infielder Jonathan Villar. Two days later the Orioles picked up four young right-handers from the Los Angeles Angels in a trade for starting...

Mike Elias engaged in his first Winter Meetings as the person in charge already looking ahead to the following year's trip and the opportunity to concentrate on the roster. The chance to handle the more common tasks in a setting that at its most complimentary can be classified as manic and disorienting. The Orioles didn't hire Elias as executive vice president/general manager until the third week of November 2018 and he was preoccupied in Las Vegas with finding a manager and trying to stamp...