Tracer Bullet

Hyde's victim doesn't want to pursue charges so the case is closed. Nice.

Maybe it would make sense to only allow trades after keepers are set. How would that make any sense for the people that can take on points and are receiving the star players? I've also made trades for guys in specific point ranges in the past so that I could squeak under the 2000 point limit. I'll still contend that there's no quicker way for bad teams to get star players than to clear their team of points at the deadline, then trade pennies on the dollar during the offseason to take on the points of the star players. Let's look at this from the point of view of the bad teams instead of the good ones. If they're not allowed to make trades for good players after the season, they are going to head into the draft with the same lousy team they ended the year with. Sure, the draft will be a bit deeper, but they only have one of every sixteen picks. It actually makes it MORE likely that rich teams will be able to pick up the good players they had to cast off the previous year instead of having them be distributed to the teams in need. Which works as long as the owners actually do trade for pennies on the dollar instead of dollars on the dollar. That's a good point too. And you can't really do anything about that. Not to open old wounds, but I was pretty pissed when raw traded to put himself just over the limit on the eve of the deadline and bailed out an owner faced with dropping a bunch of points bc he hadn't been paying attention in the off-season. I thought the Ramirez and Headley deal was just horrible. As usual trades look different in hindsight but that whole scenario was created by a simple mistake in math and/or exemption limits and a guy getting lucky. If there are other trades where someone willfully over paid in the off season it must have been before I joined. I'm pretty comfortable with what I paid this offseason even if Cain didn't pitch like an ace.

I'll start by saying none of my trades would have changed with the rules being discussed. I'm planning to keep Felix, Ramirez and kinsler if at all possible. I never planned to keep such elite studs as Nathan, Rios and Markakis. I told each manager when trading that I wasn't looking for keepers and so I wasn't offering elite prospects. But I wonder what ills we're trying to cure. Do we want fewer trades during the year? Stopping trades after the season isn't going to get you there. If I am out of it and I'm holding more points than I can keep (projected obviously) then why wouldn't I trade those points to good teams during the season? At least I can get something for them. Even if my team is so bad that I'd have to keep Rios, I might prefer to trade him for a prospect or exempt keeper and draft him again in the 4th. Or do we want fewer trades in the off-season? The rule will accomplish that. But it won't help balance the teams any. Speaking from experience, last year I added 3 SP and a C with an exemption left by trading picks in lower rounds than those players would have ever gone in the draft. I could do that bc I had only 1 viable keeper and traded the rest away during the prior season. That's not the only way to build a better team and I obviously had luck (good and bad - if Teix doesn't get hurt in ST, I don't draft Davis). But it's a logical way and has worked for several teams lately. But as abuck said, effort is the biggest part of building a good team. Effort and luck, I think. So getting managers to be involved and stay involved is more important than trying to stop teams from trading to get better. At least, that's my perspective.

Maybe that's what's happened in the past, I really don't know. Based on the end of season standings available at cbs, that maybe that isn't true. The 3 worst teams last season: Calvinball, NSBB, Theocracy. The three best teams right now: Calvinball, Theocracy, NSBB. The worst team at the end of 2011 was truffle. He's been in the hunt the last two years. Bazingas had the best record last year, had to sell off some keepers and had some bad luck, now he has one of the worst teams. I do remember reading about Tim trading for Halladay one year and then trading him to truffle after the year for a top pick or something, but I can tell you that the market for the #1 draft pick was not high last year. I think teams are realizing that the difference between the top 5-7 picks isn't that important unless there's a FA like Darvish that's a clear #1 pick. I honestly think that replacing managers before they're allowed to destroy their own teams like NCCF and Karen did is the bigger issue. The reason I was trading away my entire team last year, and the reason Owls should be doing that this year (and I'm assuming the reason truffle did it when he took over) is because the team was so terrible, there was no point in competing with the crap you have on your roster. Teams start to lose interest, stop paying any attention and making horrible trades (like Cy Young Lincecum for former prospect Dom Brown, too bad sneaky wasn't around for that one) and by the end of the year, they walk away and leave their team in shambles. Maybe a cap on the points you can trade would work. That might give teams an incentive to trade for the #1 pick if a great player is made available due to the cap. I'm not sure if that's a good idea or a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

Well he's safely in the top 7 so that's pretty much semantics. it can't be semantics when we're talking about numbers. we know what numbers mean. it would be arguing over semantics if someone said sano was an elite prospect and someone else said he's only near-elite and then we had to hash out definitions for those terms. are you sure about that?

It is sort of a bummer when you lose nearly every week your first year bc you took on a [expletive] team but nonetheless have a legal lineup every day and get called out for not trying to win then do a total 180 your second year and get called out again.

"You can disagree but you know you are wrong." Sweet lord that is perfect.

SP apparently feels your trade was "fair"

I'll only defend myself to say I don't think I have any close personal friends in the league. I live in the same metropolitan area as the owner of the Owls and I've met him twice in 2 years, and just once before he traded me Kinsler the first week of the season. He's a good guy, but he isn't someone I talk or text with regularly. He didn't trade me Kinsler b/c he was giving up on his team or b/c he was doing me a favor. It was the first week of the season. Cozart and Kinsler has scored roughly the same amount of points this year, so I'm not sure that's been such a huge advantage. Kinsler is the only guy on that list I added before this week (which I lost) and I've had the best record since week 4, so obviously my trades haven't had a great deal of impact up to now. I don't know what the beef is with the other trades I've made. It's not like I was the only guy gunning for King Felix or Hanley. Also, SP traded away Braun (pre-suspension) for Gausman (who wasted an exemption and is now getting his ass beat in AAA) in a move lots of people openly questioned. Chuck defended the trade with: "he made the offer," which was to say, "I didn't lowball him; he lowballed himself." So it seems that one can evaluate players differently than others. I've only been in the league 2 years and only read back through some trades from 2011 when I first started to get a sense of player value, so I don't know how common mid-year trades are. But this a keeper league where non-keepers are of little value to teams outside the playoff picture in August and September. So I don't see why the market for a 4th-round OF like Alex Rios would be that high, for example. In October, I'll drop him for nothing. I've been on both sides of these trades in my 2 years as I was selling off everything last year (I traded Phil Hughes for a prospect pick last July - PHIL HUGHES). I enjoy it b/c it gives teams that are out of it something to do midseason and allows them to turn it around more quickly by adding cheap assets. It also gives contending teams a choice to mortgage the future and go for it now or keep their prospects and exempt players. I can understand if it's not everyone's cup of tea, but I don't think it's surprising that there's an active trade market in late July. fyi, my team when I took over in 2012. If this ain't some [expletive], I don't know what is. I'd contend that active trading is significantly better than letting managers get their teams to this point. Martin, Russell C NYY Huff, Aubrey 1B SF Johnson, Kelly 2B TOR McGehee, Casey 3B MIL Aybar, Erick SS ANA Francoeur, Jeff RF KC Gardner, Brett CF NYY Hamilton, Josh CF TEX Crisp, Coco CF OAK Collmenter, Josh SP ARI Davis, Wade SP TB Harrison, Matt RP TEX Hudson, Tim SP ATL Norris, Bud SP HOU Adams, Mike RP TEX Rivera, Mariano RP NYY Guerrero, Vladimir DH BAL Duensing, Brian RP MIN Karstens, Jeff SP PIT Castro, Jason C HOU Morales, Kendrys 1B ANA Conger, Hank C ANA Romine, Austin C NYY Anderson, Lars 1B BOS Green, Grant SS OAK Mier, Jiovanni SS HOU Villar, Jonathan SS HOU Jackson, Brett CF CHC Brown, Domonic RF PHI Alderson, Tim SP PIT Chatwood, Tyler SP ANA

WS champion, Sid Bream?

If you post a link, please summarize the content. Didn't he do that with the thread title? The thread title says the preference is to extend Shark. The hyperlink says they're listening to offers. The point of the thread doesn't appear to be to elicit discussion but to drive page clicks to the poster's website/article, which isn't really what we do.

If you post a link, please summarize the content.

I [expletive] hate the giants and it's all Will Clark's fault. Against Cain, Bum, and Lincecum too. Good series in a lost season.

CC "mercifully went away on his own?"

It's not exactly considered giving up when you use him as one of the center pieces for a front end pitcher. Now if anyone lost in this deal, it was the Cardinals who traded Chris Perez for a few unseless months of DeRosa not too long after. As he used it, "giving up" pretty clearly means "trading away."

alamo gets calvinball's 2nd round prospect pick

He wants a piece of Kristin.

Then he'll have a sub-.300 obp and only mojo will care. He's a pitcher. Thanks capt obvious

Then he'll have a sub-.300 obp and only mojo will care.

I didn't single you out as the anti-law guy. imb, tt, probably others, have been very vocal about not liking him b/c he's an [expletive]. I get that. As I said above, I saw two posts in a row by you effectively saying law was going to take whatever side angered cubs fans and that made no sense to me.

You're getting weird with this uhh it's weird that you'd pick me as the guy to single out with this, since i've made maybe a couple references about him. search posts with "law" by me and there are 2 results about him over the last year, and the only insulting one was this post. search "klaw" and only one comes up.... again from a year ago. i may have made a couple remarks recently that don't show up, but i don't understand why you're associating me with this. btw: on the first (only) page of those results you can twice see me saying i like keith law. I said that bc I was reading latest posts on tapatalk and 2-3 in a row were you saying law would make his opinion whatever angered cubs fans. imb is def weirder about law generally. I just didn't understand your bent since I haven't seen law particularly anti-cubs. More than that, law thinks he's smarter than everyone else about prospects (and food and board games, apparently). So the idea that he'd let a fan base's feelings for a player sway his opinion struck me as odd. The complaints are that he's unnecessarily jerkish, not that he trolls cubs fans.

Same for me, please

Agreed. I was hoping for Whitley. So was this guy http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxlc2xd3791qk7pano1_500.jpg Nice

You're getting weird with this

He's always seemed like he'd be a fun guy to hang around with. But the way they're talking it's like he's dying. Must have been a clubhouse leader far more than I realized.