TruffleShuffle

i'm confident there are enough stupid GMs in baseball to get a good return for garza.

ok there are a lot of shocking contracts, but edwin jackson getting a burnett/lackey-type deal would possibly make me pass out from surprise. plus i would sure as hell like to see what stats he's using to compare him to lackey and burnett. those guys had twice as much career WAR as jackson when they signed their deals. plus i'm not sure if it's a great bargaining tactic to say "hey these contracts that, in hindsight, are atrocious? my guy might merit that kind of salary!" but i'm sure what boras is doing is throwing out crazy numbers so that whatever he does end up getting - like 4/50 or whatever - seems quite reasonable in comparison.

Gville cub needed for rebuttal to dew's non-clueless post.

I think the point was that "stop believing espn" sounded pretty comical from someone who told us like a week ago that Chris Peterson would be going to PSU, then edited the post days later when it became obvious that Peterson had no Interest.

can we make it "not during fred's lifetime?" that could be a matter of hours.

yeah good point r-train, sites like rivals and scout exist because nobody cares about college sports recruiting.

fuckin hate that conservative coaching. you have a qb completing almost 90% of his passes and who will be the top pick overall in the nfl, a rb who's piled up almost 200 yards; hey let's put all the pressure on a freshman kicker.

being more fundamentally sound is like 347th on my list of things i want to see from the cubs this year. Depends upon the definition of "fundamentally sound." yeah well i guess if you define it as "better defensively" then i do want the cubs do be fundamentally sound, but the cubs were lousy defensively because they had a lot of old, slow players, not because they didn't get behind the ball properly on grounders or know which base to throw to.

ugh why are you kicking a field goal from the 1 yard line in a game that's a shootout? [expletive] terrible.

being more fundamentally sound is like 347th on my list of things i want to see from the cubs this year.

yeah considering that the sox were barely drawing 20,000 a game during all of september 2011, they'd be rather foolish in criticizing cub fans for not supporting a bad team.

I wonder what Uncle Delonte is getting him for a wedding gift well played by both of you.

right now i'd say these are the things that will hold my interest in 2012, even if the cubs aren't contenders: 1. minor leagues. they spent a lot of money last year and hopefully some of the guys in the low minors will break out, plus they may get some good prospects in return for a potential garza trade. 2. ian stewart - can he be at least a league-average 3b? if so then the cubs made a very good trade. it appears he'll get an extended shot at the job. 3. travis wood - can he be at least a league-average starter? again, probably not a really high impact player but if the cubs can look forward to cheap league-average or better production from him, then that's a nice plus. 4. catcher - will soto be healthy and productive? if so, do they try to deal him with the idea of castillo becoming the starter for the next few years? 5. castro - really, he's fun to watch, but i'm hoping his power and patience continue to improve, and i hope he gets better on defense. if his defense doesn't improve then it could be time to start thinking about him as a 3b or 2b while finding a long-term answer at short. 6. can they find a taker for any of the high-salary guys (soriano, zambrano, dempster) that brings salary relief and/or good prospects? the salary relief is obviously soriano; zambrano and (moreso) dempster could bring back prospects if they have a nice first half. 7. bullpen - can marmol build up his trade value? also eager to see if some of the young guys like beliveau can stick in the bigs. 8. nsbb - how short will the game threads get if the cubs are lousy? how quickly will some people give up on epstein/hoyer? will da bum ever be freed?

i very highly doubt that. ricketts is no idiot, and epstein knows what kind of payrolls you can have with a big-market team and an iconic ballpark, provided that the team is performing well. epstein didn't come to the cubs to have ownership go cheap. the difference between him taking over the cubs and the red sox is that the red sox were already well positioned to win, with varitek, garciaparra, manny ramirez, damon, trot nixon, derek lowe and pedro all in or near their primes. the cubs don't have anywhere near that much talent on the big league squad, and the minor leagues are sorely lacking in players who could put up star-level production, so epstein seems to be "starting over" more than he did with the sox.

The similarities between him and Andy Reid are a tad horrifying for me. i think andy reid is a really good coach and if bielema is the andy reid of college football, then that's pretty damn good. that said, andy reid definitely sucks at clock management.

isn't rendon supposed to be a superior defender at 3b? if he can even play a decent 2b, his bat could be monstrous (like chase utley-type impact) relative to other 2b around the league. i can't see either him or zimmerman shifting to 1b; their defensive abilities would be wasted there. i guess the other possibility would be corner OF, but then you run into werth and harper. i think 2b makes the most sense... the greatest downside being that 2b get injured more frequently than any position on the diamond except for catchers.

i have to wonder if what happened with cassel would make teams reluctant to deal a high pick for flynn. cassel came from a similar situation (strong performance on a team loaded with offensive weapons, though he played most of the year whereas flynn has had just a couple of games in relief). cassel's performance for kc has been pretty mediocre. i suspect a lot of teams will be asking if flynn's big numbers were mostly due to playing on a really good, well-coached offense.

i can't imagine that psu would stay in-house given that the defensive coordinator who preceded bradley is (allegedly) a serial child molester, but i suppose if you offer the job to 50 people and none of them want it, maybe you have to go with bradley.

i'll just go ahead and insert my annual lament that none of the hapless teams that fired or will fire their head coach (jacksonville, st louis, bucs, chiefs, maybe colts) will hire marty schottenheimer as head coach. say what you will about his playoff record, but the guy has consistently turned bad teams into winners.

rendon and harper should be regulars in the bigs by 2013.

well those coaches should definitely be fired then, since most little guys with no power stop drawing walks when big league pitchers figure out they can't hurt them with the long ball, whereas most big guys with lots of power do a lot of the walking.

that's all well and good, but who is to say who the "best players of all time" are? we all agree that babe ruth, ted williams, cy young, etc are hall-worthy. but how where do you cut off? let's say ron santo is the 12th-best third baseman of all time. that means he's better than 99.9% of all third basemen who have made the major leagues, which is pretty damn great and quite obviously qualifies him as one of the best players of all time at his position, but he's also not as good as mike schmidt, a-rod, eddie mathews, chipper jones, etc. does he make your hall of fame? and i sure as hell hope there's not a push to make stats a qualifier for the hall of fame, lest we end up with 42 year olds hanging on to bump up their warp3 by another half point to reach Hall standards.

Well, they did beat Tennessee, which ended up being the only one that really mattered in the grand scheme of things. i have a hard time assessing a team that lost to the colts and jaguars as a "good team"

yeah i also thought drabek was a little overrated. frankly i think he ends up in the bullpen long term.

i guess it depends how you define star level production. hard for me to think of a perfect comp - something like victorino, but with a little more pop, lower batting average and more K's... or chris young with less pop but a better batting average, or bj upton with a few more walks. those are all nice players and great value while under team control... i guess borderline stars who will make an all star team every now and then, rather than guys making "quite a few" all star games.