Tomase: Ranking Bogaerts’ potential landing spots, with a clear No. 1 originally appeared on NBC Sports Boston
The Red Sox have already declared Xander Bogaerts their No. 1 priority of the offseason, but the decision no longer rests solely in their hands.
Bogaerts has officially been on the market for nearly a month now, and with baseball’s winter meetings set to kick off next week in San Diego, the push to secure his services should intensify.
The question that makes Red Sox executives and fans sweat is who plans to express legitimate interest. Recent reports (including this one over the weekend from Marino Pepén) have generally identified five teams as contenders, with a sixth, the St. Louis Cardinals, on the periphery.
Let’s break down that quintet in order of likelihood. Should Bogaerts choose any one of them, there will be some explaining to do on Jersey Street.
Minnesota shocked baseball by signing All-Star Carlos Correa to what amounted to a one-year deal last winter, and the Twins reportedly hope to retain him long-term. It’s hard to imagine they have the resources to make that happen, however, since he will be seeking at least $300 million.
And that’s where Bogaerts enters the picture.
According to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Bogaerts is Minnesota’s fallback. The Twins have periodically surprised us over the years in granting massive contracts — in addition to Correa’s three-year, $105.3 million deal, they gave homegrown catcher Joe Mauer a $184 million extension more than a decade ago — but it’s hard to see how the Twins would appeal to Bogaerts.
If they spend big at shortstop, they won’t have the resources to build a team around him, and Bogaerts has already proven with a below-market extension in Boston that he values winning at least as much as money. There will be better opportunities to win elsewhere.
4. Chicago Cubs
This is not one of them. The Cubs are in the early stages of a rebuild, and play in a marginally tougher division than Minnesota alongside the Cardinals and Brewers. But the Cubs have some factors working in their favor.
One is familiarity, since president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer was a Red Sox executive when Bogaerts signed in 2009, and other assistants include ex-Red Sox exec Jared Banner, as well as Bogaerts’s former teammate, Craig Breslow.
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