Winter meetings 2012: Rangers freeze brings free-agent, trade market to standstill

As Major League Baseball’s winter meetings neared their end Wednesday, the Texas Rangers were holding up everything.

The most important team at the meetings in Nashville, Tenn., wasn’t the flush-with-cash Los Angeles Dodgers, the desperate-to-compete Seattle Mariners or another franchise outside the Lone Star State. Team executives in both the American and National leagues were waiting on the Rangers before other pieces could fall.

Never would have happened before Jon Daniels & Nolan Ryan. It just makes life fun, thinking about my beloved Rangers clogging up the works. For the entirety of my life, that role has been filled by the Yankees throwing wheelbarrows of dubloons around. There’s even scuttlebutt that they might be moving Michael Young to the Phillies and only have to eat one-half of his contract money, which, oh please let it be so! That would make JD GM of the Year for 2013 all by itself.

And those Yankees? Cue the sad piano music: Yankees can’t even reel in role players like Eric Chavez, Jeff Keppinger and Marco Scutaro in free agency at winter meetings There was a whisper earlier that the hated Yankees might be willing to take MYoung to fill an infield void caused by ARod’s ancient hip and whatever happened to Jeter.