davell

We went into 2012 around 110 mill in payroll. We'll go into the offseason with under 36 mill in guaranteed contracts, before arb raises and pre arb guys.

The Red Sox are picking up around 11 mill evidently. It'll be interesting to see what they do this offseason for sure. It certainly won't be a rebuild, just a retool. I'd love to find a way to get Rubby from them.

Rubby has the ability to slide into Beckett's spot and be a TOR guy, may take a bit of time to get his stuff back and innings up after TJS though.

I really don't think the Dodgers give two shits about money. The Puig signing immediately becomes stupid too, because you've got a Crawford/Kemp/Ethier OF signed for another 5 years.

Beckett was good last year. His stuff appears to be down about a mile and a half per pitch. Back effect or is it a definite dropoff forever? Either way, my guess is his numbers spike just because of the move to the NL West.

Beckett has the Saberhagen, good year, bad year thing going for him. I would at least think Crawford hasn't dropped off that badly. Dodgers still have Zach Lee, Dee Gordon, Joc Pedersen and Gould as trade chips to acquire a SS and a TOR starter. My guess is they'll trade for a SS or 3B and sign Greinke over the offseason.

Honestly, I like this supposed deal for both teams. Boston's saving a ton of money and will likely retool immediately. Dodgers get stacked basically. How long does it take a position player to recover from TJS?

Deal being held up because Sox refuse to include Frozen Ted.

No. I'm still hopeful Garza can bring us one. If not him, maybe a deal with Oakland or Atlanta that we could fill needs for in exchange for one. If not that, I suspect guys like Vogelbach, Candelario, Brett, Vitters, Szczur could be parts involved. And while Vogelbach will just be in A ball next year, I do see him becoming a very well thought of guy quickly. Barney could be a valuable piece in a deal too obviously.

Shark, one trade addition for the rotation, Wood or Raley or Rusin as a 5th guy, and hopefully Vizcaino is your 2014 rotation, in my eyes right now. The traded piece being very solid obviously. You'd have Castillo, Rizzo, Castro, Barney, and probably one of Brett, Soler, or Szczur in your opening day lineup. Tons of flexibility payroll-wise obviously and before everyone says most of those guts suck, I'm expecting lwague average out of everyone mentioned. Other than Rizzo, Castro, Shark, and the mystery starter. This group WILL develop guys, it's different than what the Cubs have done previously.

Oh and they outbid the next highest group by like 800 mill or so, to where they didn't have to bother with the final round of bidding.

The group that bought the Dodgers paid CASH for them. Be very afraid. And yes, their new FOX deal is getting ready to hit as well.

Honestly, if the Dodgers take on 60 mill of yearly salary in one deal, I begin to wonder if they'll have a 300 mill payroll in 5 years.

Dodgers have finally embraced the Randy Moss business deal: Straight cash homey.

Pwrsonally, I think next year is the last year we really suck. Although losing some value in a Garza trade stings somewhat. I totally expect a decent young team playing in 2014, with some guys we've traded for as cost controlled young guys being a part of it. And tons of flexibility moving forward.

Dew, I fully expect us to after every name you just mentioned. Jackson probably gets too pricey though, with the lack of SP available, so my guess is we don't get serious on him. The key though during this process is finding more cheap talent that slot into our longterm plans. Maybe Brett or Vitters become a longterm answer, same with some of the pen arms or even a Rusin or Raley as a 5th starter. But the idea isn't to just start looking for good longterm players until 2015 or so. It's to find out how many holes you actually have by a certain point and go from there. My guess is next season will be THAT year. The system will be in much better shape by that offseason and I would fully expect us to be much more willing to sign a bigger FA then, same with trading away prospects at that point. You guys that are against this type of thing are looking at the Cubs and THEIR rate of turning prospects into legit talent. Not teams that have consistently done it. The guys we have now WILL do this. And when 2014 or 2015 comes, I bet we're a bigname FA signing and one teade away or so, from being a very exciting team again.

And then when that trade target is a FA a year or 2 later you let him walk rather than pay him 22M AAV? Because I want star players, and star players prefer to be paid in excessive amounts of money. I want the star players too. Why can't we develop them or trade for them though, instead of signing them to a deal where we're paying them throughout their 30's? And to clarify, I have no issue handing out big money deals whatsoever. I just don't like ones involving us signing guys after they're probably out of their primes or at the tip end of it. And even then, I'd be fine if it's a guy that should put us over the top. But it's a risk obviously. It's just where everything heading. You're damn right, teams are locking their top guys into deals that keep them there until they're 30 or older now. Some of those will become available in trade for various reasons and I'd suspect we'd be very involved in trying to trade for these types. And I have no issue at all in extending guys to keep them from leaving, especially if they're a superstar.

You literally said one post ago that there will always be free agents to sign. In addition to the standard big money teams, we now have the Dodgers to compete with as they spend themselves into an even more hilarious 2nd bankruptcy in the FA market. Along with that every team, good/bad, poor/rich is extending their good players before they hit free agency. A year ago, the '13 FA class was loaded. Now it sucks. So when 2015 comes along and we're ready to take a shot at contending and there are a couple square pegs for our round holes in free agency what do we do? We overpay in the trade market and give up prospects in addition to the cash we'd pay a straight up free agent. You just answered your own question. Hell yes, you pay up for a guy in trade than sign someone to a gigantic contract he won't give you the value for. And why do you do this? Because you can. Your system has tons of guys in it by that point, BECAUSE you've made good on higher draft picks and IFA budgets. And continue to add as many low end FA you trade for other prospects, if it works out. And you try playing some of our younger guys to see if they can become trade pieces or longterm fixtures as well. Just as our FO is doing. And yes, there always be FA. Who says we have to sign the mega deal anyway? Maybe when the time comes, we need a Nick Swisher type to bat 6th for us and can afford a 5/80ish type deal(total example, not anything else). But I don't care whether we ever sign another Soriano type contract and my guess is the FO feels the same way.

I just added the two youngest bigtime FA out there last offseason to our team. It doesn't matter whether or not garza and Marshall are extended or not in this scenario. But it shows you how many holes we STILL would have had. And not nearly the same amount of money available to address them and the class of FA for 2013 is weak as all [expletive]. So it's probably another year we're not making the playoffs. Plus, you've weakened your allotments as well. How any of you see this as a positive move just doesn't equate to me.

Fine, not that I agree, but again, now you've got 3 holes in the rotation and a solid guy that's gone from your pen. So where are getting them from? and even if it frees up 22ish mill, you've still got tons of holes and now you've added 2 more. You're willing to not make the playoffs in both 2012 and 2013 evidently, but winning more games in that timeframe means something. Why? Seriously, I have no idea why someone wants to spend and limit themselves in the future when it's not really helping the present. There's always guys to sign and there'e always guys to trade for. Why do it now before we even give ourselves a legit chance to develop enough collateral to where it doesn't kill the system just to make a Matt Garza trade, for instance.

Long ass post coming, hope it keeps people reading somehow......But I'm going to at least attempt to show what the team looks like if we HAD gone about things differently and tried contending, to show the differences of where we'd be after just one or two seasons and then you can look and see which scenario you'd rather be in. I'm going to use Darvish and Fielder as the guys we added, for arguments sake here, because they honestly seem like the guys the board wanted the most and it also makes my point a bit harder to make than if I used Pujols and Wilson. If we had signed those 2(Darvish and Fielder) it would have changed our outlook on Marshall as well and in all likelihood, we would have given him a new deal. I'll assume 3/16, just as he received. We probably would have locked in Garza as well and I'll hit that one in the middle and figure 5/85, which seems fair. Let's assume the rest stayed the same though. C Soto 4.3 1B Fielder 23(same contract he got with Detroit, 24 for each year after 2014) 2B Barney .5 SS Castro .5 3B Stewart 2.3 LF Soriano 18 CF Byrd 6.5 RF DeJesus 4.25 Total 59.85, plus Pena's deferred money and backups, I'll add 10 mill so it equals 69.85 SP Dempster 15 Garza 9.5 Darvish 5.5 plus 11 per year if I'm assuming we'd count the posting fee as salary related against payroll, which I think seems fair. Assuming we paid 55 mill fee to make it even here. 16.5 Volstad Maholm 4.5 Total of 45.5 mill here plus the Zambrano trade which netted Volstad to be a 6th starter/bullpen arm in this case brings the total salary outlay to 63.5 mill for starting pitching and 133.35 total so far. Bullpen has Marmol, Cashner, Samardzija(who wouldn't have gotten a shot at starting) Marshall, Russell and 3 others to be safe. That's 13.4 mill plus the other 3 guys, who I'll say are a mill apiece bringing the total to 16.4 mill and a 149.75 total salary heading into the season, still not counting us adding Soler and Concepcion, for the dual fronts thing, which brings it to 154.25 as a season opening payroll. That team doesn't make the playoffs. Not even close. Is it close enough though to where it makes them go for it, by adding a SP when Harza goes down? Or is it close enough to where it makes them hold tight and keeps them from dealing away? No clue, but what it definitely does, is it puts you in that 70-75 win area for the upcoming season. So, you've got a middle of the road draft allotment and a middle of the road IFA budget, to go along with a middle of the road farm system and a middle of the road major league team. So, how much flexibility do you have moving forward? C 1B Fielder 23 2B Barney .5 SS Castro 2.5(based on 7/60 rumored deal) 3B LF Soriano 18 CF RF DeJesus 4.25 You've got 48.25 committed, with holes at C, 3B, and CF and a need to try and improve quicker. Again, add 5 mill for backups here and you're at 53.25. SP Darvish 9.5 plus 11 posting is 20.5 Garza 17 if each year is even in new deal Maholm 6.5 sp SP That's 44 committed to 3 guys and you have 2 holes. Not to mention, you need 2 TOR pitchers to be a juggernaut still, because Darvish hasn't proved he is yet and Garza's a question mark right now himself) Bullpen would have Marmol at 9.8 and Marshall at 4.5, plus Cashner, a raise for Shark, but I'll say 3 mill because he's in the pen and maybe Russell gets a mill in arb. Those 5 are 18.8 mill, plus the Soler/Concepcion signings brings us to a total of...... 116.05. And you've got holes at C, 3B, CF, SP, SP and a probable payroll limit of around 150 mill. You've got this draft class, which helped somewhat, but the system is still average at best currently and now you're looking at averpicks and IFA budgets. You've got plenty of holes to fill though and you need to fill some of them with bigtime players that maybe don't cost a bunch, so my guess is Baez would be among those dealt away this offseason. Because you've got a complete ASS of a FA class to choose from. What this does though, is hopefully show how different the direction COULD have been here. Because if we HAD added Fielder and darvish, the general thought here was we would have been borderling contenders. But moves like that, makes you want to keep others as well, so extending Garza and Marshall seemed like the good thing to do in this case and definitely would have been done by the prior administration.. At any rate, that one year and you're locked into quite a bit of money, you still have quite a few holes to fill, you don't have a good farm system and the idea it's going to get better because we're drafting geniuses is all we have to hope for there. Sure, they could take a pause and not sign guys from this FA class and wind up with another 75ish win team for 2013 and wait and try to pick and choose because they already have certain pieces in place. But, you're hindered by the amount of money THOSE pieces are and you have to be much pickier in the process. So what's the use here of adding those type guys last offseason? Seriously? To win 75 games and be "respectable". For what? Because you're probably doing it again the folowing year as well, unless you're just going to put yourself all in with a Greinke and Hamilton addition and backload the [expletive] out of them. Then watch those 2 do exactly what we'd all bitch about in the process of signing them anyway. Hamilton relapses and Greinke gets scared of his shadow. And we're done. 150 mill plus committed basically, if you went that route. The bottom line is we were going to be bad in 2012 and 2013 as well. Possibly longer, depending on how things fall, but it's certainly TBD right now. At any rate, how can anyone not like the idea of having MUCH more payroll flexibility, better draft allotments and IFA budgets, and younger guys getting a chance to see if they CAN become a legit piece to the puzzle, rather than another average ass team that also has very little hope of actually making the playoffs in 2013 even and not nearly the ability to make major trades or signings moving forward? I trust our guys and I'm glad as hell they didn't box themselves in, because it would have been easy to do, if we made big splashes last offseason.

Oh, win? Just win games? Why don’t I strap on my win helmet, and squeeze into a win cannon and fire off into win land, where wins grow on winnies! It's sad how thin the margin is on this being your least coherent point in this discussion. Sorry man, probably because I'm on the same side, but I [expletive] loved it.

Marshall. Barney. Dempster. Cashner. Samardzija. And can you disagree with our FO's decisions on a single one of them?

Would our farm system be any worse right now if we signed free agents this past offseason? Would our 2013 team be better? Well, if we had went and signed Pujols, Wilson, and Cespedes, we'd not have Underwood or McNeil in our system. Two very high upside pitchers. We'd have an extra 50 mill added to our payroll. We'd finish with 75-80 wins. Dropping our draft pisitioning 12-15 spots, same with IFA's. So yes, your system would have been affected and for what? Wins that didn't get you into the playoffs or even close, in all likelihood.

If I were the Yankees, I'd be pissed as hell over that.