Welcome to the first Stock Watch of the new decade!
We've got a little less than five weeks before spring training gets going with the first full-squad workouts. The hot stove season seems to be about 80 percent complete, judging by the rate of transactions in the books so far. We've been pretty light on trades this winter, so perhaps a blockbuster or two could still jumble things. But at this point, it feels like if we were going to get some kind of projection-altering trade, it would have already happened. But one hopes that feeling is wrong, because trades are fun.
Meanwhile, there are enough quality free agents remaining on the market that you could still field a credible team out of them. That group is headlined by Josh Donaldson, but other unsigned veterans such as Marcell Ozuna, Yasiel Puig and Nicholas Castellanos could bolster any team's outlook. Still, potential rosters for the coming season have come into sharp enough focus that we can start to assess how much things have changed (if at all) since the Washington Nationals put a bow on their first championship on the night before Halloween of 2019.
That's the essence of what Stock Watch is all about -- seeing how the landscape has shifted since we previously checked in. We chime in with various themes through the run of the series, which is generally from January through September, to align with events on the calendar. Today, we kick off the year with a straightforward look that is as much a set of power rankings as anything.
