Tampa Bay Rays News and Links: New Owner(s) coming to Florida?

• Right-handed slugger, and former center of quite a few rumors to the Rays, Byung-Ho Park has cleared waivers without being claimed, and is assigned to the Twins Triple-A club.
• This rumor came out of nowhere and was sort of just thrown out there by Marc Topkin

• Wild developments are going on south of the Tampa Bay area, where Jeffrey Loria is rumored to have a “handshake agreement” worth $1.6 billion to sell the team. A lot of the finer details are still unknown, even who is on the other side of this agreement. The New York Times are reporting that the Kushner family might be the ones in talks to purchase the Marlins. The Grey Lady goes on to report:

Neither Jared Kushner, who married Ivanka Trump in 2009 and is a top White House adviser, nor Charles Kushner, the family patriarch who spent over a year in prison for illegal campaign donations, tax evasion and witness tampering, is participating in the effort, these people said.

$1.6 billion is a large amount of money, and would be quite the return on investment for Loria who purchased the Marlins back in 2002 for $158 million.

• Bill Chastain has a short season preview for the Rays, detailing how the team plans to “get back to their roots” with a boost in pitching and defense.
• Yesterday, we shared an article about Matt Wieters and the teams who could sign him. Today, I wanted to share a piece from Jeff Sullivan at Fangraphs on why he thinks it’s no big mystery why Wieters is still on the free agent market.
• Also on Fangraphs, Travis Sawchik argues that asking better questions is the key to teams being better innovators.
• This is from a few days ago, but well worth the read: Ben Lindbergh takes a dive inside how teams are fighting to keep ahead of the curve, in the age of rapidly expiring secrets.