Morning Mound Visit: Rays open to trading Blake Snell

Mark Feinsand | MLB.com: The Rays aren’t actively shopping him around, but the team is reportedly open to trading Blake Snell. Snell is owed $38 million over the next three years, and that’s apparently too much for the Rays to afford. If that’s too steep a price for one of the best starters in the game, then maybe Rays’ ownership can’t afford a baseball team.

Craig Edwards | FanGraphs: The deadline to tender arbitration eligible players a contract is December 2, and there are majors questions surrounding players like Kris Bryant, Kyle Schwarber, and Gary Sánchez. The readers at FanGraphs responded to surveys asking what they thought would happen to some of the bigger names on the block.

Alexander Chase | Pitcher List: Evaluating pitchers based on the amount of hard contact they allow has always been dicey, but that might be because we’ve been looking at the wrong hard-hit metrics. Hard hit percentage isn’t as predictive of future success as hard hits per nine innings, so perhaps we should be looking at the latter.