nilodnayr

This might be a reaction to the favorable Marmol results. Its a trend I'm not looking forward to.

But with Dusty as your manager, he'll be starting. Still though, its a value proposition. If the RedSox don't resign Lowell and don't get ARod, I'm sure they'd like Hatteberg for 1B and move Youk across to 3B. Also, if the Dbacks don't want to go 2 years with Clark, I'm sure they'd like to have Hatteberg. In this day and age there are actually smart guys running teams who would what a guy like Hatteberg brings to the table. Unfortunately, the Reds don't have one of those GMs.

I know you are joking, but isn't the cash instead of a PTBNL route a fairly nominal amount of cash. Like in the tens of thousands?

There are still plenty of dopes out there.

Tampa is famous for asking for the world. Tampa is famous for not caving in on their demands. If the Cubs want Crawford, I'm worried about what the Cubs will give up to get him. Although Friedman hasn't really been too active trading, thats a Chuck LaMar thing. Hes the Director of Scouting for the Phils now.

I would rather have Hill than Crawford. Agreed. Hill/Cedeno or Marmol/Cedeno would work for me, albeit even with those two combos, it's a bit hard to swallow. I'm no fan of Crawford's, but I'd do the latter in a second.

Gross. Carl Crawford VORPed 38, while Hill and Marmol VORPed 40.3 and 34.5 respectively. Does some of a players VORP depend upon how good a team he was on? Surely that must matter. Don't think so

Well, Lee, Lilly, ARam, Z, Sori, and Hill all had higher VORPs than Crawford last year.

Fair enough...sometimes the analysis on him gets way overblown though. Count me in CCP's court as well...except I'd play him in CF.

If I'm Andrew Friedman, Hendry won't be able to get ahold of me because I'll be on the line with Ned Colletti.

it was roughly around the same time he was a 26 year old that was pretty damn good at playing baseball His career high OPS is 830. Is that "damn good baseball"? I'm not as high on him as many others, but you have to take into account he's done what he's done by age 25. If you were to take a look at his comparable players through age 25 on baseballreference.com, you'd be impressed (Raines, Yaz and Clemente included). I would say he's been pretty darn good, at least. OPS+ of 105 at age 22, and it's only gone up. He's got some flaws that would probably keep him from ever becoming truly great, but he should be a really solid bet to produce very nice numbers for the next 5-8 years. He'll probably be outproducing Soriano within a couple years at most. Although, thats going to be just as much of Sorianos fault as it is Crawfords.

it was roughly around the same time he was a 26 year old that was pretty damn good at playing baseball His career high OPS is 830. Is that "damn good baseball"? Only 31 points higher than the ML average for LF last year...lets trade the farm and sign him to a $136M extention!!!

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If Gagne can hit .290/.375/.450 and play SS, I'd be all over that. Well he WAS a goalie...meh, hes probably grown out of SS.

Yup, from all that I had read and stats, I made the comparison to this year's Abreu as well. Falls right inline with the ~800 OPS projection.

Thats some hard hitting analysis from the smartest fans in baseball.

See calcs that CCP and I did above... It's kind of hard to figure out which are the right numbers, but it looks like the translation estimates an .831 OPS at age 30. Murton's 26 and has an .810 last year. And he's been much better than that in the 2nd half of each of the last 2 seasons. I guess I'm far from convinced that Kosuke is $9-10m better than Murton (if he's in RF; if he'd be the CF, that's a different issue). Yeah, I got .795 using Matsui as a translator, he got .831 using Matsui and Ichiro as a translator. I think a slap hitter will have a much better translation than a line drive hitter (and the numbers show it). Fukudome is more like Matsui than Ichiro. But, its good to have more sample. Using my prediction as a low end and CCPs as the high end sounds fair. In other words, Matt Murton.

What gives you the impression that all eggs are in the Fukudome basket? How did one report that the Cubs have interest in him turn into now he's the one and only target for the offseason? A) there have been quite a few reports. Cubs have been mentioned more than anyone else B) theres very little mention of other big name FAs

See calcs that CCP and I did above...

Iwamura is going to play 2b and they can use Harris/Zobrist to keep it warm for Brignac. I'm sure they wouldn't mind Hill at all, but they have a handfull of guys soon to break in that are better than Marshall. His value is that hes young and cheap. DRays don't really care that much since he has a lower upside than many of their near ready prospects. Patterson is a poor man (really poor man)'s Upton. Veal's stock has tumbled. I don't see how that deal helps them contend. No one provides value except for Hill for them in that deal.

Rozner said "it was going to increase about 15% to 115M". Ohh and the payroll for 2007 was 100M using prorated bonuses unless otherwise stated according to Cots. So, Rozner's number jives with that method. Its about 108M without Woody right now using that method.

Rozner said "it was going to increase about 15% to 115M".

I agree with you that the system seems flawed. However, you also can't just use on player's experience and call that gospel, either. Ohh, I agree. I was just doing the old "I'm at work and can't spend a lot of time on this, so I'll do it quick and dirty" analysis. However, I think there is something to be said to compare him to similar style players. Obviously a guy who crushes the ball into the ground while he already has a running start down to first is going to have very different translations than a line drive hitter. But I think for all intents and purposes, Matsui's translations give you a pretty decent expectation.

Wow, I have a lot of issues with the statistical analysis used to create those translations. Career lines are pretty pathetic to use. Weighting Hideki Matsui's age 20 (first full year, 843 OPS) season equally with his age 28 season (last full year in Japan, 1155 OPS) is pretty pathetic analysis. Doing so significantly deflates Matsui's real production at the time of league switch and therefore creates extremely inflated translations. So, lets continue on with Hideki Matsui (since I think Fukudome compares better with him than anyone else. Not saying Fukudome is as good as Matsui (hes not), but that they are more comparable players). They list Matsui's translations for his triple slash stats as 97.7%/90.1%/83.3%. Or in other words, batting average translates very well, OBP is close, and theres a decent fall off in power. Well, those of course are looking at career numbers. If you take a look at Matsui's last there years in Japan and compare them to his first three years in the US you get a very different picture. His triple slash translations fall to 90%/81%/74%. By the way, I played around with some weighting the 3 years (on either side), but it really didn't have an impact, so I'm going with back of the napkin straight averages weighted for PAs. So, if you take the PA weighted average of Fukudome's last three years in Japan and apply the translations I found in the Matsui analysis, you predict Fukudome to hit 296/355/440. Thats even being a little bit generous, considering Matsui came over as a 29 year old vs Fukudome as a 30 year old. But I think a 296/355/440 line is pretty much inline with what he will provide over the course of a 4 year contract. Ohh, by the way Murton put up a 281/352/438 line last year and 297/365/444 the year before.

We could probably get away with both upgrading SS and signing Fukudome. I was on the Murton bandwagon for years, and I could probably live with having Murton in RF instead of Fukudome, but at the same time you have to wonder how many chances he is going to have. Every year we expect him to breakout, but every year he ends up on the bench. I'd like to think its just the Cubs org not giving him the opportunity, but he has been our opening day starter the last 2 years and has managed to end up on the bench or demoted to the minors both years. He is basically our Austin Kearns. Good OBP, moderate potential for power, a butcher in the field, cannot stick in a starting lineup. If we can solve our major glaring problem (OBP) by getting one of the top 3-4 OBP guys on the market (behind players like Bonds and ARod) we'd be stupid not to. Fukudome isn't going to OBP 400 in the states. He'll be a 360-370 guy. A smidge better than Murton.