Cardinals news and notes: Seung Hwan Oh and the end of the Brandon Moss dream

There aren’t a lot of interesting free agents remaining on the market, so when any player of any note signs, it becomes a big deal at this point. And on Sunday, the Kansas City Royals signed Brandon Moss, who played for the last 1 ¹⁄₃ seasons for the St. Louis Cardinals. The deal is for two years and $12 million.

Considering the beginning of Brandon Moss’s 2016, in which he looked like a reasonable candidate to receive a qualifying offer, his poor conclusion to the season meant that he was relegated to the second or third tier of free agent outfielders (he can also play first base or could serve as a designated hitter—it’s not particularly exotic positional diversity, but it is positional diversity nonetheless).

Especially after the Cardinals signed Dexter Fowler, signing Brandon Moss to a mammoth contract did not make a ton of sense. But his declining value made the possibility of re-signing Brandon Moss as a backup outfielder and first baseman (and pinch hitter) a strangely specific pet cause for several Viva El Birdos writers. Ben Markham wrote about it once. The red baron wrote about it once. I wrote about it explicitly (as in “directly”, not as in “while using tons of profanity”) once and kinda wrote about it again earlier this month because look, ideas are hard, guys.

Anyway, this ship has sailed, and now I need another boring, incremental roster suggestion to trumpet. Searches to see if Alex Avila is still available Aww man, the Tigers got him, back to the drawing board. In the meantime, you should read this post that Ben Markham wrote about a non-Brandon Moss topic, Seung Hwan Oh, and how relief pitching is difficult to predict and how we should have reasonable expectations of him going into his sophomore season in Major League Baseball.