The Morning Report 1.7.2016 | Mike Piazza Elected to the Hall of Fame, Tommy Tanous to Replace Paul DePodesta, Cespedes Playing 2nd Fiddle to Justin Upton

Michael Papandrea | Empire Writes Back- Long time New York Mets catcher Mike Piazza has been elected to the baseball Hall of Fame by accumulating 83 percent of the vote from the Baseball Writers Association of America. His offensive stats alone were probably good enough to get him into the Hall. He had 427 career home runs and a .308 career batting average. As for his defense, people often overly criticize him on how poor he was, but realistically, he was a fine catcher. In terms of throwing base runners out, he was one of the worst, however, his strong suit behind the plate was blocking balls and framing pitches.

(Chris Soto: Congrats to Mike Piazza on his overdo election into the Baseball Hall of Fame. He is likely to be enshrined as a New York Met making him only the 2nd Met, besides Tom Seaver, in the HOF. It's too bad that him and Griffey Jr. were the only ones elected this year; I thought for sure we were going to have 4 with Jeff Bagwell and Tim Raines joining them but they lost too much ground at the end.)


Michael Baron | Just Mets- The Mets appear inclined to promote DePodesta’s replacement from within as the Mets are likely to promote Tommy Tanous, their current scouting director, to the head of player development and amateur scouting. This is probably the most logical move the Mets can make, and certainly going with someone in-house who knows the system that’s in place and the people involved in that system is wise as well.

(Chris Soto: Tommy Tanous was basically Depodesta's right hand man. Anywhere Depo went, Tanous was right there with him as his shadow. He probably know just as much about the organizational plan and structure as Depodesta did so the pain felt from losing Depo shouldn't be that significant. One big difference is that Tanous did more physical scouting then Depo did so, in all honesty, Tanous might actually have a leg up on Depo when it comes to who he thinks the best players in the 2016 Draft class are.)

HOT STOVE REPORT (courtesy of mlbtraderumor.com)

• Per Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports, The Miami Marlins are in heavy negotiations with the Texas Rangers about a trade surrounding OF Marcell Ozuna and either SP Chi Chi Gonzalez or SP Nick Martinez.
• With OF Alex Gordon off the Free Agent market, interest in fellow OF'ers Justin Upton and Yeonis Cespedes seems to be picking up. However, most of the chatter from organizations continues to be more about Upton than Cespedes leaving most to believing that Cespedes is now going to have to wait for Upton to sign before getting legitimate offers. The Alex Gordon 4yr/$72M deal is believed to have depressed the value for both players.