Moves will come. Just not yet, apparently

Team news

[LA Times] Have Padres, Diamondbacks given up trying to keep pace with Dodgers? – Maybe the Diamondbacks can unload Montgomery and replace the offense lost by departing free agents Christian Walker, Joc Pederson and Randal Grichuk. They could trade from their outfield depth, moving either Alek Thomas and Jake McCarthy, both of whom are under team control through 2028. Diamondbacks general manager Mike Hazen sounded a lot like Preller when assessing the winter meetings with reporters. “A lot of meetings, didn’t really get much done,” he said. “But there’s been progress made in some conversations in some areas, so we’ll see what happens. Wasn’t necessarily expecting anything to happen here. We’ll carry those conversations forward.”

[SI] What is Jordan Montgomery’s True Value in Today’s Market? – The projections, while considerably better than his 2024 results, are still a far way off from a level that would justify his salary in 2025. It’s always possible that Montgomery could rebound all the way back to his prior form. This is baseball, after all, not a computer simulation. But for the Diamondbacks, if they wish to trade him, they are going to have to absorb a minimum of $8 million, and perhaps as much as $12 million to move his contract. No other team is going to value Montgomery at his full contract, or even close to it.

[Arizona Sports] Diamondbacks executive Cory Hahn named Trailblazer of the Year by Baseball America – Hahn was honored as Baseball America’s Trailblazer of the Year for his unwavering commitment to positively impact those around him, the baseball outlet announced Thursday. Hahn, who is currently one of two assistant directors of player personnel, has spent 10 years under the club’s baseball operations umbrella. The 33-year-old (who recently celebrated his birthday on Wednesday) had his baseball career abruptly ended in 2011 as a freshman at Arizona State University. He slid headfirst into a base, critically injured his C-5 spinal cord and was paralyzed from the chest down.

[SI] Report: D-backs Sign Taiwan Pitcher Chung-Hsiang Huang – The reported bonus for the right-handed pitcher is $500,000. According to a source, the deal with Arizona is pending a medical examination. This bonus uses up the remainder of their International signing bonus allotment, leaving none of that money wasted. Huang recently played in the 2024 WBSC U-23 Baseball World Cup in which the 19-year-old gave up just one run with six strikeouts in 3.1 innings. He’s been clocked at throwing 155 kph or roughly 96+ mph, which is a big fastball that will certainly play in the minor leagues and above. It would give Arizona a vital starting pitcher that can throw above 95.

And, elsewhere…

[MLB] These 12 players will be looking for big walk years in ’25 – Zac Gallen, D-backs. Seasonal age in 2025: 29. It’s not that Zac Gallen hasn’t been good the past couple of seasons — he has a 3.54 ERA (122 ERA+) over that span — it’s that he hasn’t been as good as he’s shown he can be. In 2022, the right-hander posted a 2.54 ERA over 184 innings while leading the NL with a 0.91 WHIP and leading the Majors with a 5.9 hits-per-nine-innings ratio. Gallen was sidelined for some time with a right hamstring strain in 2024, and he’ll look to not only have a healthy ’25 campaign, but one that is more reminiscent of that fantastic ’22 performance in the final year of his current contract.

[Front Office Sports] The Billion-Dollar Player: MLB Nears Unprecedented Contract Milestone – There is perhaps a meaningful clue on the timing. Commissioner Rob Manfred is looking to fundamentally retool the league’s media strategy to have a broad batch of both national and local rights available in 2028 when current deals with ESPN, Fox, and TNT Sports expire. Once that is resolved, team owners will have better clarity on future revenues. By that point, MLB will also have gone through another round of labor negotiations with the MLB Players Association, and a clearer road map should also exist on the sport’s economic framework for at least the back end of this decade. Given the salary escalation just in the last year, though, some owners also may not want to wait on those developments—just as Cohen clearly didn’t in a deal with Soto stretching through 2039.

The Evil Within (2017)

Rating: B

Dir: Andrew Getty

Star: Frederick Koehler, Sean Patrick Flanery, Dina Meyer, Brianna Brown

This film feels like it was made over a 15-year period, by a meth addict with mental issues, and considerably more money than sense. There’s a reason for that: because it was. The writer-director was a grandson of J. Paul Getty, founder of Getty Oil, and in 2002 began to put considerable amounts of his own money into a film production, then called The Storyteller, and inspired by Getty’s childhood nightmares. Another inspiration was… uh, the Son of Sam killings, in particular, David Berkowitz’s claim he received orders from a talking dog.

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