Rob

Don't forget to tip your dealer.

Google having some issues...

Is Mike Trout CF eligible? I thought the wiki had him at DH and RF.

I can't see him keeping the BB% up that high when big leaguers realize he can't do any damage to them. For some reason, I see the big league version of him looking like James Loney with more walks and strikeouts.

Drop Francisco Lindor ($100) Add Corey Seager ($75)

I still hope he's traded to San Francisco.

He didn't hit the open market. We don't know what the market would have been. We only know what he actually settled for, whatever his reasons.

There have been more studies than I care to count about lineup construction. They've pretty much all found that conventional lineup construction wasn't optimal. Gone are the days of a speed guy first, a contact hitter next to move him over, and then power guys. The general consensus now is just that you want your best hitters to have the most plate appearances. There's still some tweaks to be made -- it can always make sense to break up lefties if they're vulnerable to lefty relievers. And we're thinking that speed now makes a bigger difference near the bottom of the lineup -- where getting yourself into scoring position matters more because those hitters are less likely to drive you in by hitting home runs. So I see where Counsell is going with this.

PMing bench players shortly.

As a 41 year old adult, I am still just sad at being left out of the fun.

Guessing you posted an unfinished draft instead of the completed article?

Of course, the five teams that are too high are outspending the proposed ceiling by more than the 12 teams that are below the proposed floor are underspending. So if all the teams on the bottom spent up to the floor, and all the teams up top spent down to the ceiling, we'd see a net decline in salaries league-wide. Not exactly appealing to the players union.

Presuming that this deal is as small as we all think it will be, I think this is a fine addition. There's a reason the Dodgers gave him nearly 500 PA last year. His .287 wOBA is a far cry from his xwOBA of .330. Might as well give him a month's worth of spring training plate appearances and see if there's anything left in the tank. I don't think he's a good player anymore, but he's a capable enough backup with at least a sliver of hope for something more.

This explains why the Ricketts family would finally welcome him back into the fold after all these years. Sosa is pedophile rape friends with their best buddy, Donald Trump.

There's a lot of reasons Realmuto's production could crater over the next 3 years. On opening day he'll be a 35 year old catcher who has logged a metric ton of innings behind the plate in his career. He's never really been protected by getting time at 1B or DH. His speed and power have dropped in recent years. Etc... That said, he's put up 2.0, 2.0, and 2.1 fWAR in the last three years -- including one season where he only logged 99 games. Before that, he was routinely putting up 4-6 win seasons. With a little health, a solid sub, and a marginal return to form he could put up a single season that's worth near that whole $45 mil. And even if he doesn't $45 mil isn't what it used to be in this game. He's probably worth nearly that with something approximating standard age-related decline. I think it's a reasonably solid risk, and for a team like the Phillies seeing their window of contention closing -- it's a risk they absolutely had to take.

Is being willing stand up for his beliefs moral if the beliefs themselves are not? It's not just "I support a regime actively engaged in ethnic cleansing (a.k.a. genocide), kidnapping foreign leaders, extrajudicial killings which are 100% illegal under international law, etc..." He's just saying he's unrepentant about his belief in those things. Standing up for those beliefs doesn't show character. Character would be questioning the validity of those beliefs - being willing to admit he was wrong. That would be character. As is, he's just a jackass. And the Cubs are better off without attracting the attention.

There's a reasonable argument to be made that the COVID-shortened 2020 season significantly impacted his chances. That was his age 29 season, sandwiched in between a bunch of seasons where he put up 4-7 fWAR. And he put up 0.6 in 2020. If he's a close call for people (and I imagine he will be), there's going to be a number of people willing to assume his career numbers should have been sufficient absent a global pandemic, and those people will vote accordingly. Honestly, I anticipate that argument being used as cover frequently as writers navigate what to do with the modern crop of starting pitchers who lack the traditional counting stats. So as that argument becomes more commonplace, I think more people apply it to Arenado. I think he gets there, even if it takes a Veteran's Era committee to make it happen.

Where am I? Do I know the person? Are they trustworthy? If it was a friendly coworker at my office, that's one thing. If I'm alone in a subway station after 2 a.m. and the person offering me the dollar bill looks like a meth addict, I'm going to exercise some caution. There's a decent chance the bill is a fake or covered in something gross. Also - I'm not sure an analogy about a very low-risk situation (worst case is probably lose an amount of money nobody cares about) versus a deal involving tens of millions of dollars worth of production is a fair analogy.

That's dumb. If you're overwhelmed, you first consider if you're missing something. Is there something wrong with the players being offered? Is Nico more valuable than we thought? If he's more valuable than we thought, should we see if there are other teams who value him this highly, and if they might offer a package we like better? I know we live in a society where everybody's attention spans have been broken and we all want instant gratification. But this is supposed to be a professionally-run team. So let's not criticize them for thinking before acting.

When he enters the market, he's going to be 29 years old. And he's clearly a guy who has already made the best of his potential -- nobody's paying a premium hoping to unlock anything extra. The question then becomes what his production is likely to be worth. He's coming off a stretch of 4.3, 4.5, 3.9, and 4.8 win seasons. To make the math easy, let's say teams think he's a 4.0 win player going into the 2027 season. He's approaching the age where production declines, and the typical rule of thumb is to subtract about 0.5 fWAR per season. So we'd expect his production to look something like this [albeit probably not this consistent]. 2027 - 4.0 2028 - 3.5 2029 - 3.0 2030 - 2.5 2031 - 2.0 2032 - 1.5 2033 - 1.0 2034 - 0.5 2035 - replacement level I'm not sure what the current $/fWAR figure is. But for math's sake, let's call it $10 mil per fWAR. He's producing 20 fWAR in that time. So in theory at least, you could be okay signing him through 2035 for a total of $200 mil. All of that is full of caveats, though. Much of Hoerner's value comes from two things that public data is a bit behind the curve on. First is his defense. We're usually the publicly available datasets that say he's awesome, and he passes the eye test. But teams have proprietary tracking data (ball, player, weather, etc...) which gives them a better picture of what his precise defensive value is. There could be a gap. Potentially even a large one. The other place from which Hoerner extracts a fair amount of his value is the positional adjustment. 2B is a tough position, and fWAR gives him extra credit for playing a tough position on the defensive spectrum. But there's been a lot of noise lately that the positional adjustments being used in these calculations are based on pretty old data, and that it's probably time to adjust the adjustments, so to speak. The expectation is that the gap between tough positions and easy positions has shrunk, and the adjustment is too high. Again, I am sure that teams are using their own proprietary formulae for this sort of thing -- so they may value him a bit less due to that. All that said -- that's about what Hoerner should be paid. Not about what he will be paid. He's the classic type of guy that causes a disconnect between people who write the checks and those who look at the stats. An average hitter without much power whose sole claim to superstardom is a slick glove at a position other than SS or CF. Teams will be worried that one leg/back injury is going to tank his defense and he doesn't have other standout skills to fall back on. So I anticipate him getting paid significantly less than what he's probably worth. And whoever gets him will likely be happy with the outcome. All that to say, I'd guess if he keeps up the production during his walk year he's probably looking at something like 5-6 years and maybe $100 million or $125 million.

Extend Hoerner. Trade Shaw to San Francisco. Not because I think we match up well in a trade or anything -- I just think it'd be funny to make him live in San Francisco.

Technically, that falls under #1.

There are two types of pitchers: (1) those who have had Tommy John surgery; and (2) those who haven't had Tommy John surgery... yet.

He's below average. But not late-career Jermaine Dye levels of bad out there.

Yeah, as someone a little low on Imai and high on Gallen (at least compared to the rest of the board), I don't think I see the difference between them as being worth an extra $100M over an additional 4 years. To the budget-conscious Cubs, I can definitely understand the Gallen flirtation. I'm still short of endorsing it, though. [That would depend on specific contract terms]