Kyle Lohse rumors fade away as Spring Training sneaks up

Kyle Lohse’s work with the St. Louis Cardinals is done—once he turned down their qualifying offer on his way to a free agency replete with rumors about new and terrifying profligacy he ensured they’d get a draft pick after he signed with another team, and that was that. Except that it’s now January 2013, and Kyle Lohse hasn’t signed anywhere.

It’s getting so strange out there that the team most often included in the half-hearted rumors still trickling out is still the Los Angeles Dodgers, who appear to have gotten all the profligacy memos and who already have something like seven starters under significant major league contracts.

Teams might well be worried about his ability to perform all the way through a multi-year contract, but Derrick Goold has an exhaustive look at the other possible scenario over at the Post-Dispatch, and it’s worth reading. In short: The very thing that made him so valuable to the Cardinals on his way out the door, that supplemental draft pick, could be scaring off all the suitors who’d have to give that pick up.

Somebody will sign Kyle Lohse; he’s too valuable to end up on an unintended trip through last year’s Roy Oswalt experience. But I would have expected him to go off the market sometime before, well, Miguel Tejada.