srbin84

I know Weaver broke guys in as relievers. Personally, I think that is a bad tactic. As far as him abusing pitchers, it is an opinion based only on the fact that his guys missed a lot of starts and Weaver still advocates the use of a four man rotation today.

Pre-injury, he posted 134, 130, 107, 129 ERA+. That's not too terribly shabby. But his last full season was that 107. The 129 was in less than half a season. Wood, who is a year younger, put up a 133 in his last full season. I still believe you have to try Wood in the rotation when he comes back, as he's still a little younger and has been a little more dominating when able to pitch. I'm not begging for Miller to go to the pen, but I think he's a better candidate than Wood. By the way, for all the Wood and Prior bashing, let's just look at Miller, who has 1 major league season with 200+ innings and is older than both. Ok, the Cubs guys better than someone who is on his third team in three years and just signed a 1 year $1 million. I do think Miller was a great pickup for the price though.

Don Baylor was hitting coach for Cox before getting hired. I can't remember who else was considered for the job around Baylor's hire(other than Gardenhire who I'm iffy on), but the Dusty hiring had no retreads talked about/interviewed IIRC. Baylor is a disciple of Earl Weaver....very Cub like philosophy minus the good the players. Baylor was most decidedly not a disciple of Earl Weaver. Nice try, though. The Cubs offense was based off of hitting home runs under Baylor, and like Weaver, he abused his pitchers. He brought Lieber back from a long rain delay and that eventually caused him to have a serious injury. If you were trying to dispute those two comparisons I made between the two, you haven't done it yet.

So is the answer to never spend money on pitching? That seems a lot more reasonable than saying trade Prior now because 2 years down the road he'll be making a lot of money and there's a chance he won't be healthy. The answer is to trade declining assets if it's reasonable to believe they won't return to form and invest in pitchers you can be confident will be healthy and consistent like Zambrano for example. the example you use takes the conversation completely out of context. you make guys like Z seem a dime a dozen. health and consistency....so pitchers like Maddux are the answer? healthy, consistent, he's perfect! and about trading those declining assets, think you'll get full value for them, or is it reasonable to do a cost benefit analysis and determine it is better to keep them ie. 20 starts of Prior at his current salary is well worth the price? Wood's trade value is nothing. think you can work out a deal that would make NOT taking a risk on him one more year worth it, keeping in mind that you'll have to eat most of his contract, and will get next to nothing in return? is one possible approach having a back up plan of spending about three million - as opposed to the astronomical sum you make it out to be - on servicable starters (Rusch, Miller, Williams) and keeping a stable of capable starters in the minors instead of trading them away (Hill, Guz, Marshall, Ryu, etc.)? So if Prior gets himself into Wood's situation would you just want him to walk as a free agent? What do you want to see the Cubs do with Wood? If we could just pull up guys from the minors that would pitch well right away like a lot of other teams do, I'd feel better about the situation. If we could have gotten Abreu or Tejada, I would have been fine with that as far as the value goes. Let's also not forget Prior has had an ERA around 4 the last two years. Like I said, maybe he was pitching differently to avoid injury or something, but that's another problem. If he was pitching like a very good pitcher, maybe I'd be inclined to cut him more slack, I don't know.

Flanagan and Palmer missed about a combined 80 starts under him and Steve Stone's career ended at 33. The Cubs led the NL in homers in 2002.

So is the answer to never spend money on pitching? That seems a lot more reasonable than saying trade Prior now because 2 years down the road he'll be making a lot of money and there's a chance he won't be healthy. The answer is to trade declining assets if it's reasonable to believe they won't return to form and invest in pitchers you can be confident will be healthy and consistent like Zambrano for example. But isn't Zambrano a pretty big risk considering the high pitch totals he's racked up the past few years? Prior's managed to avoid the high pitch counts over that time, so he may be a better bet going forward. No, I don't think so. Zambrano has a very strong body. Some guys just do, some don't. Look at Randy Johnson. He has insane pitch counts and never gets hurt.

Don Baylor was hitting coach for Cox before getting hired. I can't remember who else was considered for the job around Baylor's hire(other than Gardenhire who I'm iffy on), but the Dusty hiring had no retreads talked about/interviewed IIRC. Baylor is a disciple of Earl Weaver....very Cub like philosophy minus the good the players. I must confess I never saw Earl Weaver manage and I don't remember much how Baylor was, but from everything I've read about them they seem like complete opposites. Sit around and wait for the three-run homer (that rarely came for the Cubs). Pitcher abuse. Sounds like Baylor ball to me. They were opposites however in that Weaver was much more hot tempered.

Don Baylor was hitting coach for Cox before getting hired. I can't remember who else was considered for the job around Baylor's hire(other than Gardenhire who I'm iffy on), but the Dusty hiring had no retreads talked about/interviewed IIRC. Baylor is a disciple of Earl Weaver....very Cub like philosophy minus the good the players.

So is the answer to never spend money on pitching? That seems a lot more reasonable than saying trade Prior now because 2 years down the road he'll be making a lot of money and there's a chance he won't be healthy. The answer is to trade declining assets if it's reasonable to believe they won't return to form and invest in pitchers you can be confident will be healthy and consistent like Zambrano for example.

You're entitled to your opinion, of course, but I see no evidence that he is weak-bodied, frail or brittle. You've done nothing to persuade me. He's a healthy young man who places an enormous strain on his arm in the course of pitching. Is Josh Beckett a wimp because of his blisters? What about Gagne and his multiple elbow surgeries (I believe he's on #3)? Kerry Wood? Jason Isringhausen? Injuries happen. Patricularly to pitchers. No, they're not wimps, they're liabilities at their contracts. Prior isn't at that point yet, but he will be in a couple years. Better to trade him before that happens. Guess what? Every pitcher is a liability in his contract. At any point, a pitcher could blow out his elbow. Pitching, by its very nature, is extremely hard on a human body. Injuries and breakdowns will happen. That's why you invest in additional pitching capability and develop young pitchers as much as you can. The answer isn't just to accept it and spend millions on extra pitchers for the inevitable injuries.

Well, each year his numbers are getting worse and his number of starts just haven't been there. I don't know if he is pitching different to avoid injury or something, but I'm not on board with paying a pitcher 10+ million to make 20 starts with a 3.50 ERA. We just went through that with Wood and now we can't trade him even if we wanted to or could get something valuable in return for him.

You're entitled to your opinion, of course, but I see no evidence that he is weak-bodied, frail or brittle. You've done nothing to persuade me. He's a healthy young man who places an enormous strain on his arm in the course of pitching. Is Josh Beckett a wimp because of his blisters? What about Gagne and his multiple elbow surgeries (I believe he's on #3)? Kerry Wood? Jason Isringhausen? Injuries happen. Patricularly to pitchers. No, they're not wimps, they're liabilities at their contracts. Prior isn't at that point yet, but he will be in a couple years. Better to trade him before that happens.

I think we could find some pitchers who from 2002-2006 have missed comparable time as Prior. If my memory is correct, Jeremy Affeldt has been disabled more than five times over the same time frame and some of those times with merely blisters. There was a time when Beckett was missing time every few months as well. Just because he is healthy now, doesn't mean he hasn't missed time. In fact, Beckett has yet to start 30 games in a season or top 200 IP as a starter. John Thompson also seems to miss a lot of time due to injuries. I'm not sure of the number, but he's currently out now with elbow soreness. There's likely many more, but the fact is, most of the guys who may have a lot of injuries don't have the talent of Prior. Their teams don't count on them the way we count on Prior, so their injuries aren't magnified like Prior's happen to be. But to suggest that Prior misses more time because he's soft or is sitting out and isn't really hurt is pretty ridiculous and assinine. Furthermore if an average pitcher without Prior's talent missed 5 times with injury, he could end up out of baseball as teams would feel the investment isn't worth the effort. That in itself is part of the reason it's difficult to find comparables. Well, I'm more inclined to believe he is weak bodied/brittle. He has a lot of talent and is a great pitcher, but when you average his numbers with the Ruschs and Koronkas of the world, it doesn't look great.

I really don't care about anything other than whether he makes most of his starts or not. If if he isn't, is he missing more time than the other pitchers in the league? Yes. Are most of his injuries considered relatively minor for pitchers by doctors? Yes. Is it the right thing to do to shut him down everytime he has one of these injuries? I don't know. I'm not a doctor. You can't dispute the fact that he misses way more starts and goes on the DL more often than other pitchters. This is bad because it forces us to play bums like Rusch, Koronka, etc. That's bad because it makes the Cubs lose games.

Well, I think it has been made pretty clear that Prior misses more time to minor injuries than any other pitcher in the league. Until someone can present a pitcher who has had 5 injuries like Prior had, I conclude it to be true because I have a pretty good memory of every player and MLB season I've watched and I can't think of any. So whether it is right for the Cubs to shut him down each time he gets one of these injuries or he could have just played through some of them and never had any problems, there is a problem. He doesn't pitch enough.

That's why I picked the Padres. The Dodgers have more injury prone players than the Cubs.

\ I thought Blanco was catching Maddux again?

His last two seasons in Japan were around 30 games short of a full season. I don't know why that is, but other than that, he's played in almost every game of every pro season.

I would have loved to see him play his whole career in the majors. He hit .385 at age 21 in Japan in 1994. He could probably play forever and I bet he would have made a run at Rose's hits record. If you give him 220 hits a season over 20 years, that's 4400.

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=2399706 I know don't really need relief pitching, but I really like this guy.

I think Ichiro could do it.

Too bad Dusty didn't think of it. What? And bat Zambrano in the lead-off position? :lol: I would have batted Z 8th in front of Corey in all of his starts in which Corey started. Zambrano .300 AVG .763 OPS Patterson .215 AVG .602 OPS

So do you wanna do the bet for one year premium goony? 25 starts for Prior.

I linked the 5 injuries above that don't include the Giles collision or the ball to the elbow, which were both freak injuries he had no control over. I know, I saw them (but you didn't have them labeled). I was kind of asking that to hint why he is leaving out certain "strains" or "injuries" to make his arguement look better. Or if he just forgot that Prior started last year on the DL too. Yeah, I don't know. It's not a question of anybody not wanting Prior to do well. We all want that. But when you imply he isn't normal and is soft or weak bodied, no matter what evidence you provide, it's like trying to argue with someone who thinks the world is flat. You're arguing something that can't be proven or disproven, so I'm not sure what you're expecting. "Mark Prior is soft" isn't a fact that has a hard and fast "true/false" answer. It's an opinion. The world is not flat, and that was something that could be proven. Well, I offered the alternative conclusion that he is weak bodied. The proof is that you cannot find one pitcher who has pitched during Prior's career that has had 5 similar injuries to the ones I linked.

I linked the 5 injuries above that don't include the Giles collision or the ball to the elbow, which were both freak injuries he had no control over. I know, I saw them (but you didn't have them labeled). I was kind of asking that to hint why he is leaving out certain "strains" or "injuries" to make his arguement look better. Or if he just forgot that Prior started last year on the DL too. Yeah, I don't know. It's not a question of anybody not wanting Prior to do well. We all want that. But when you imply he isn't normal and is soft or weak bodied, no matter what evidence you provide, it's like trying to argue with someone who thinks the world is flat.