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It requires a TON of begging and hoping he's a ring chaser, basically. BTW, I wouldn't think it's an either/or situation when it comes to the PG's and Young/Delfino. I think it's probably a situation where they'd like to add both. Again, by begging and playing up the "we're a contender" card. Personally, I don't see it working, but I guess I'm glad they're going to try. I think they can sign and trade the unguaranteed contracts for him, can't they? Then the Suns would be able to just drop them. You lost me. He's saying that the Suns could do a sign and trade with the Bulls for Nash for something like Brewer+Watson+first round pick. That allows Nash to get an 8 million a year contract, and then if the contracts stay unguaranteed the Suns could drop Brewer and Watson with no penalty. So Nash gets his money, the Suns get a first round pick out of the deal, and the Bulls get their player without losing anybody they were going to keep. The problem is the Suns would probably demand the Charlotte pick in that scenario. That's the only sort of scenario where I see the Bulls having a chance for Nash though. There are contenders that can give him playing time but not money (Miami, OKC). There are fringe contenders that can give him both (Indiana, Portland?). He could decide to stay with that amazing training staff in Phoenix. The Bulls are kind of stuck in between some of those groups. The playing time picture is cloudy, the money without a sign and trade isn't that great, and they probably can't be considered quite as good of contenders as teams like Miami or OKC. Edit: If it's just Korver that could be traded that way it becomes harder. The Suns would actually have to value Brewer or Watson in that scenario to want to keep them (of course if they got the Charlotte pick they'd probably be ok taking on excess expiring contracts).

Here are the top 10 in P/PA from last year and their minor and major league strikeout rate (I didn't include Fukudome since he doesn't have minor league statistics): Curtis Granderson- 18.9% minor league, 22.1% major league Jayson Werth- 20.1% minor league, 24.5% major league Bobby Abreu- 18.5% minor league, 18.3% major league Carlos Santana-14.8% minor league, 19.2% major league Jose Bautista-19.8% minor league, 19.4% major league Jamey Carroll-9.6% minor league, 13.7% major league Mark Reynolds-23.2% minor league, 33.1% major league Dustin Pedroia-8.6% minor league, 8.6% major league Brett Gardner-16.6% minor league, 16.8% major league Kevin Youkillis-18.4% minor league, 18.4% major league Brett Jackson has a career 24.8% minor league strikeout rate (close to 30% in AAA). Some of that is due to his patient approach, but it's unusual and not very encouraging for his rate to be so high, and to have such a spike against more advanced pitchers. where does adam dunn fall, though? but anyway, we'll make a bet. if jackson hasn't had a relatively productive major league career in 10 years, i owe you a coke. Here's Dunn's numbers: Adam Dunn-18.2% minor league, 27.9% major league I have no idea if Jackson will be productive or not. To do so, he'll likely need to prove that his AAA strikeout rate was a temporary high and not a trend. Even Jackson's cumulative 24.8% rate I could only find one player in MLB today that had a higher strikeout rate in the minors (Jack Cust, and that was not an exhaustive search so there could be a couple more).

Here are the top 10 in P/PA from last year and their minor and major league strikeout rate (I didn't include Fukudome since he doesn't have minor league statistics): Curtis Granderson- 18.9% minor league, 22.1% major league Jayson Werth- 20.1% minor league, 24.5% major league Bobby Abreu- 18.5% minor league, 18.3% major league Carlos Santana-14.8% minor league, 19.2% major league Jose Bautista-19.8% minor league, 19.4% major league Jamey Carroll-9.6% minor league, 13.7% major league Mark Reynolds-23.2% minor league, 33.1% major league Dustin Pedroia-8.6% minor league, 8.6% major league Brett Gardner-16.6% minor league, 16.8% major league Kevin Youkillis-18.4% minor league, 18.4% major league Brett Jackson has a career 24.8% minor league strikeout rate (close to 30% in AAA). Some of that is due to his patient approach, but it's unusual and not very encouraging for his rate to be so high, and to have such a spike against more advanced pitchers.

i can't imagine that he'd be up with the big club before september, so it will actually be nice to have him stay at one level, so we can see if this is just a hot streak or the result of real adjustments. seems like every other year he gets hot for like 3 weeks, the cubs spaz out and move him up a level. And even if this turns into an extended streak, there will be worries that it is PCL-fueled. i wouldn't worry too much about that. yeah, the PCL is a hitter's league, but iowa isn't a hitter's park and the average ops in the league is probably around .775. people really overstate how much the PCL inflates numbers, except for teams like albuquerque and las vegas. It's still a huge difference from all the other leagues. Iowa is 11th right now in OPS out of 16 with a .765. They'd be leading the Southern League by 45 points, the FSL by 3 points, and the Midwest League by 14 points. To look at it another way, the median OPS in the PCL is .777. The median in the majors is .720, in the Southern League it's .700, in the FSL it's .685, and in the Midwest League it's .686. And it's not just a Triple A effect either as the International League median is .696. The numbers from the PCL shouldn't be ignored, but it's really hard to adjust PCL stats because the league is so different than all the others.

It is. He does kinda have a good point on how ridiculously low Lebron's fouls per minute/game are and how he's likely not having fouls called on him that should be. At least he's getting multiple fouls called against him in the Boston series. Against Indiana he didn't even foul out of the series (5 total fouls in 6 games). In his defense though, for how active he is on both ends of the court he is excellent at being fundamental and not fouling. He should have more fouls than he's getting, but he's not a high foul type of player.

I love the skip you had in there. Refusing to acknowledge one of those years, but not being blatant about it. That's well done :-)

The report the other day was that Golden State was trying to complete a trade before the lottery started to make sure that didn't happen. They want the pick so badly that they're willing to give something up just to protect against the chance that they may lose it. Of course time is running out if they want to do a deal like that.

That's pretty incredible what the Spurs have done. They have the best system in the league. The Pacers have 2 lottery picks on the current roster with only 1 of them being a starter, and the highest pick on their roster was #10 overall.

I like this. I'm still interested to see how baserunners are handled (the potential issues that arise from a replay overturn are a lot worse in baseball than they are in football IMO) but if they can somehow work out a consistent system for that then this should be helpful to the sport.

First, I want to mention Garza's fielding. Is anyone else concerned that he has lost the ability to throw to first base on a bunt attempt? This isn't just a matter of him being a poor fielder in general (which he is) but the last 4 or 5 starts he clearly has no confidence in that throw. He started by throwing a ball into right field at way too high of a velocity, and then for a couple starts was trying so hard to not throw hard that he was bouncing the ball (including one hilarious throw where it went about 10 feet in front of him) and now yesterday returned to throwing it 100 miles an hour nowhere near the bag. I'm guessing it will get solved at some point, but it's always concerning when players lose the ability to do simple things they could normally do in their sleep. We've seen players get the yips before (although it's rare), and it's a hard thing to get out of. As for the rest of Garza, we're probably looking at the lowest part of his value this year after the 5 HR given up in the last two starts. But right now his peripherals don't look that good. His HR rate will likely come down, but it seems likely he won't get anywhere close to his nice HR rate from last year. He still has been a ground ball pitcher, but less than he was last year. The strikeouts are a little down, the walks are slightly up, and his BABIP is probably going to get a little worse. A nice pitcher still, but I would want a decent discount to possibly sign an extension at the moment to account for the possibility that last year is as good as it's going to get for him.

Hill did bunt right back to the pitcher who easily got the out at 2nd.

Gasol's salary is way too high for the Pacers anyway (even though he is a fantastic player), and Sessions is on the same level as Hill/Collison. I think Houston/LA could possibly work out a deal that wouldn't involve the Pacers in this scenario. The Pacers would possibly have interest in one of the Houston PG's, but I can't think of anything they'd want to send out that would be equal value.

The salary structure prevents any team from way overpaying for Hibbert. He's probably a 10-11 million type player, and the max salary another team can offer him at his experience level is 12.92 (which with raises ends up as 4 years and around 55 million). I see the Pacers matching even if somebody offers that. Now if somebody decides to overpay Hill, I could definitely see the Pacers letting him go. But I think they will try to retain him if the price doesn't get too outlandish, although I'm not sure if they see him as the starting PG next year or not.

Well it's probably also a problem to get Deron to choose Indiana over the same offer in Brooklyn, Dallas, etc. On a related note, isn't there an ongoing rumor that the Pacers and Eric Gordon have mutual interest. They obviously have the cap space for him but do they have the aforementioned revenue for him? Well, Deron has at least claimed that he doesn't care about market but just about which roster can help him win a title, and the rumor is that he doesn't like Dallas for that very reason. Indiana with money definitely gives him the best chance for that over the other reasonable options. But I don't know if I believe the lip service, and it doesn't matter anyway since the Pacers don't have the revenue. On Gordon, it would be really hard to get him. One, he's a restricted free agent and the Pacers owner doesn't want them chasing after restricted free agents as a courtesy to the other owners. The Pacers likely won't have the revenue to go max with him (although his would be less than Deron's), and you would have to think New Orleans would match anything less (they might even match a max in desperation). Plus, there's the question of where you play him. They don't really want to trade Granger after the loyalty he's shown the franchise in helping them get through the dark years, and they have too high of hopes for George to trade him. Nash might be a more realistic possibility as the Pacers have the combination of money/title aspirations to woo him, and he will come off the payroll before their money really gets tight. But I don't know how much either side has interest there.

Oh well. Good season Pacers. They played their 2nd best game of the series tonight, but so did the Heat. I so wish the Pacers had money. They could easily have the cap space to add a max level player to this current core (such as Deron Williams), but they don't have the revenue to support a player like that. So they'll probably re-sign Hill and Hibbert and try to add a 3rd big and a scoring guard off the bench instead. That will help because their bench was a huge disappointment all year long, but the real key for them is to still have Paul George get stronger and dribble the ball better in order to effectively use his size and athleticism.

Guys who can be gotten from clubs for next to nothing whenever we need them are literally the definition of 0 WAR. You're right. But I'm talking about the next level up. Players who are undervalued by their club because of limited upside, or being blocked by better players, or being out of options. They tend to get waived or traded for very little. You don't always have those types of players available to you, but they are available so often that if you are considering a free agent, it would be relatively difficult for you not to be able to find a very cheap alternative that can be a little better than replacement level.

didn't he get 4/36? and don't we assume 5 million per WAR? unless one of those is wrong, he'd have to flame out pretty hard to not be worth the money. That forgets two things: 1) Free agency is necessary, but inefficient. 5 million per WAR compares to other players who were bought in free agency. And every dollar spent in free agency is not spent on pre-FA players, who are a lot more efficient. 2) The scale starts to break down as you get to worse and worse players because they become more and more replaceable. There are lots of players who will likely be 1-2 WAR players if just given enough playing time that can be gotten from clubs for next to nothing. For example, that is what the Cubs have in Tony Campana. So not only does Cespedes (if he's a 2-2.5 WAR type of player) not give a 2 WAR upgrade from his minimum salary replacement, but he also complicates the team's ability to acquire a true star for that position if it ever becomes available. And the 7-14 million average to above average types of players have more trouble being traded for any value as the Cubs have seen with several players the last few years. So if he's going to take time to figure it out, he better become a star or he likely isn't worth it.

A) They didn't methodically build up his innings. B) The Cubs minds? Seriously? The fact that it may not have cross the minds of the reckless, foolish, overmatched dolts that ran the Cubs makes me wrong? The consensus on Cashner at draft time was he was a reliever. The Cubs thought they could make him a starter and they did a piss poor job of trying to convert, or reconvert him back into one, let alone one who a reasonably smart person would think could make 30+ starts with 200+ innings in a season. What would you have done differently? He had the oblique injury to start 2009 and then the Cubs built him up slowly. Then in 2010 he was averaging 6 innings a start before moving to the bullpen. Would you have kept him in AAA until they had to shut him down because of innings in 2010? (which probably would have been about a month before the minor league season ended) Would you have given him any chance at the major league roster in 2011 even though he still wouldn't have been able to throw more than 165-175 that year? You're acting like his move to the big league pen was a way to limit his innings rather than them wanting a setup man. Cashner wound up throwing 10 more innings that year because of it. The goal of 2010 should've been to have him ready to take a near-full slate in 2011. You stretch him to 140-150 in 2010(if he kept pitching like a freak in AAA, you give him a taste of the big leagues, 5 starts or so, and shut him down. But as typical with the Hendry era he was a reactionary, saw a hole, and thought hey this guy used to relieve let's do that, future be damned. No, I said earlier that they moved him to the bullpen too early in 2010. I would have had no problem him throwing the last part of the year in the bullpen in 2010. If they had gotten to mid-July and had either 4 starts with him left before shutting him down or 20-25 innings out of the major league bullpen, I think there are advantages with either choice. The way they did it though put him another year behind in getting to a full workload because he just didn't get enough innings in 2010. I just disagree with the assertion that moving him to relief for a while and then putting him back as a starter is reckless. There's nothing inherently reckless with that choice, but they would have had to shut him down way early in 2011 because of how early they did it.

A) They didn't methodically build up his innings. B) The Cubs minds? Seriously? The fact that it may not have cross the minds of the reckless, foolish, overmatched dolts that ran the Cubs makes me wrong? The consensus on Cashner at draft time was he was a reliever. The Cubs thought they could make him a starter and they did a piss poor job of trying to convert, or reconvert him back into one, let alone one who a reasonably smart person would think could make 30+ starts with 200+ innings in a season. What would you have done differently? He had the oblique injury to start 2009 and then the Cubs built him up slowly. Then in 2010 he was averaging 6 innings a start before moving to the bullpen. Would you have kept him in AAA until they had to shut him down because of innings in 2010? (which probably would have been about a month before the minor league season ended) Would you have given him any chance at the major league roster in 2011 even though he still wouldn't have been able to throw more than 165-175 that year?

I still wouldn't trust Trumbo, but he has been significantly better not only in results (where he has been very lucky with a BABIP of .389) but peripherally as well. He's on pace for a good season. There very well could be improvement there that has been masked by his strange lack of power in 2009 and his dismissed PCL fueled stats of 2010. But there's still enough confusion in there that I wouldn't trust him with the most important offensive position on the field. But he could very easily be a productive player for the next few years.

No. No, no, no. You can't make that statement. Pitchers have to prove they can handle a workload before you can pretend there is no reason to believe they cannot. Cashner had very little workload under his belt when he was drafted. He had very little workload as a professional before being moved to reliever on the big league club. He'd done very little as a pro when they handed him a starting job. If spending 1 year as a college reliever doesn't bring up durability concerns, spending 2 years as a juco starter hardly makes the case that you can do. Being a starting pitcher at the major league level is hard. You have to start quite a bit before anybody can have any reasonable faith in your ability to do it over a substantial amount of time. You don't start at a baseline of "the guy can handle it", you have to wait until he does a lot more than Cashner did in the minors before that becomes the assumption. Hmm, that's a more fundamental question you brought up. You're basically saying that you believe pitchers should have a minimum amount of innings in the minors before being handed a major league job. I'm not sure I agree with that, but I can see your position. Anyway, this thread is about Samardzija. And I would say as most have 150-170 innings. And to how he suddenly figured out his control, I have no idea. But it's been about 1 calendar year since he did it, so it certainly looks like he can keep it together at this point.

You are making completely unsubstantiated assumptions here. Since when does a guy making it through a college season as a starter make it obvious he can do it in a major league season? There was nothing obvious about his ability to handle the workload. In 2009 he made 24 starts, but he only averaged less than 4 and a third in those starts, so he was hardly anywhere close to actually handling a full starters workload. You can rack up 100 innings before the all star break in the majors. There were questions both about his ability to be effective in 6+ inning stints, and whether he could actually last for 6 innings every 5 days for 6 months. Let's rephrase that. There was no reason to believe that Cashner couldn't handle the workload. Spending 1 college season as a reliever doesn't automatically bring up durability questions that aren't present with other pitchers. I do agree with you on one thing though. They made a mistake on bringing him up to relieve. But the mistake wasn't that they yo-yo'd him, but rather that they did it so early. They should have timed it where he could have finished the season in the bullpen, but still got his inning progression in from the previous year. Instead, the oblique injury caused him to not get enough innings in 2009. In 2010, he went into the bullpen too early and didn't get enough innings. And 2011 of course had the major injury. But the problem with going to the bullpen in 2010 wasn't that he was more risky as a result, but instead that they would have to shut him down so early in 2011, and that's always trickier to do in a major league rotation.

He was a college reliever who needed to be stretched out cautiously if they had hope of turning him into a major league starter, and 30-something starts into that process (when they were typically 3.5-5 inning starts) they abandoned it for a bunch of 1-inning relief innings. Then tried to make him a major league starter right after that. It was reckless. It should be noted that the big question on Cashner coming out of college was not can he handle the workload of a starter, but whether he could be effective as a starter. It was obvious he could handle the workload because he had been a starter for all but one year of his amateur career. Even the questions now are more about whether the time needed to build him back up to a starter is worth it since the injuries in 2009 and 2011 set him back. But by the end of the year in 2009 and the start of 2010 before he came to the majors, Cashner was handling a full starters workload. And the main reason he wasn't at the start of 2009 was the oblique injury, not the 1 year he spent relieving.

Hansbrough upgraded to flagrant 2 but not suspended, Haslem suspended 1 game, Pittman suspended 3 games. Not quite right IMO but much closer than I expected. (I would have given Hansbrough a flagrant 1 since he made a play on the ball, I was iffy on whether to suspend Haslem but probably given him one in the end especially since he got to play in game 5 when he should have been ejected, and Pittman should have had the book thrown at him). Looks like Miami will really go small next game since they basically have Anthony and Turiaf left up front. It sounds like all the Pacers will play, but Granger especially is still pretty hurt and others are somewhat hurt as well. I'm guessing Miami will win because of a big performance from LeBron, but we'll see.

Do you see Castro as a 30+ home run hitter with a decent amount of walks without significantly raising his strikeouts? That is probably what it would take to get to .900, and while I think it's possible for Castro to get there, I don't see it as being very likely. The power will almost certainly improve as he gets into his prime and hopefully some walks will follow, but that's a large jump for him to take. Why couldn't the strikeouts rise in conjunction with a rise in LD%? You would expect Castro to lose a little bit of LD% as his rise in power. With a few exceptions, most power hitters are not big line drive hitters. Part of that is structural in the way things are classified-if I'm not way off I think every home run is classified as a fly ball, so those hitters who are hitting 30 home runs are already in a little bit of a hole. And plus the swing change used to generate that sort of power also contributes to a loss of line drives. Plus right now Castro hits a ton of ground balls and his BABIP's have been continually higher than his LD percentage would suggest. That will change as he starts hitting fly balls to get home runs. Of course, those home runs will help inflate his OPS without changing his BABIP as well.