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Amnesty Boozer. Brewer, and Korver all have team options I believe they can decline to free up space. The Bulls can free up about 10 million of space by amnestying Boozer, cutting Brewer, Korver, Watson, and not re-signing Asik. But then they only have 6 players on the roster so they would have several holes to fill with that limited space. If they just amnesty Boozer, they would be able to use the full mid-level exception instead of the mini one they'll be able to use now by being a taxpaying team. Of course that's also 47 million out of the Bulls pockets for a player who wouldn't be playing for them anymore. And if they did use the full-mid level exception, they'd probably be looking at jumping back into the tax the very next year to re-sign Gibson.

Did you miss the part where I mentioned he was worth 5.2 WAR in 2004? Let me know if LaHair ever sniffs that. To be fair, that 5.2 WAR is largely because of his incredible fielding numbers that year, which is either extremely flukish or more likely just plain wrong. His UZR/150 in 2003 was 2.8. In 2005 it was 6.5. In 2004 it was 30.7. He's only had 1 other year where it was even double digits! (excluding 2009, when he only had 50 fielding innings all season). That's why there's such a huge discrepancy between fangraphs and baseball reference for that year. BR has him as a good defensive player that year, and only has him at 2.7 WAR for 2004. That's probably closer to what Patterson was that year, with a possibility of up to a 3.5 or 4 win player. But he almost certainly wasn't anywhere near a 5 win player. It's very fishy to have a player coming off a major knee injury have by far his best defensive season of his career, which is what the fangraphs numbers would indicate.

Butler is heading to the A-10 in 2013 to replace Temple.

You wouldn't be surprised if we get Hamels, Jackson and Rizzo are solid MLB players in their first year, shark progresses, and whatever else he had in there? Damn, gimme some of that optimism! Signing a FA? Not unusual. Two highly touted prospects being at least serviceable their rookie seasons? Not unusual. A talented pitcher maintaining or improving on the success of what (ideally) is a breakout year? Not unusual. Yes, but even if each of them have a 75% chance of happening, the odds of all of them happening are not good. So if you need all or nearly of them to happen to reach the goal, there is a problem. That's all too many ifs means in that context, which is hardly a meaningless statement. And of course some of those are not a 75% chance (signing Hamels for example is nowhere near that).

The real problem I have is with the 15 morons that voted neither of them first. Include the 8 idiots that didn't have Pops in the top 3 and the 18 fools that didn't have Thibs in the top 3. I could accept arguments for Vogel or Hollins. The Rivers and Karl votes are terrible. ETA: Why did Monty Williams get a second place vote?? The problem for Vogel is the timing in which he took over last year. He did most of his best coaching work last season when he completely transformed that team both in style and playing time mid-season. But he didn't coach nearly enough games to get much consideration for the award. This year, it's been a much easier coaching job for him. He's had a mostly healthy roster, and the only things he's had to do was to get them to all buy into the team concept and work in the four new additions. He's done a fine job this year, but he hasn't needed to be exceptional. I might give him the coach of the last year and half award if there was one, but I think third should have been about his ceiling for the Coach of the Year award. Popovich was the right choice IMO. Bird could very well get Executive of the year though.

Think of how awesome KGs column will be in a year. "Barfight, anything is possible!" There's a perverse part of me that hopes the Bulls amnesty Boozer and sign KG. Just to watch the backtracking. That and I'm afraid we dump all our cash in extending him for far too long (i.e. more than 1 year) Just for clarity's sake (since this is the second time in a couple days somebody's mentioned amnestying Boozer) but the Bulls aren't going to have much cap space even if they do amnesty him. They have 48.8 million committed between Deng, Noah, Rose, Hamilton, Gibson, Butler, and 500,000 of Korver's contract. So they could have up to 8-12 million in space, but that would involve waiving Korver, Brewer, Watson, not re-signing Asik. Since they are very unlikely to waive Watson and almost certainly not going to waive Brewer either, amnestying Boozer gets them under the luxury tax but that's about the only benefit for next year. It might help clear some space for the two years after that depending on what the Bulls decide to do with players like Asik and Gibson.

Yew, he was terrified of shooting. Didn't shoot terribly when he did against Miami, but I think he did against Indiana or Atlanta. He was 19-39 against Indiana including 10-17 from 3. And that was mostly a bad game 5, he had made 8 of 10 3's in the first 4 games. It looks like against Atlanta he had a couple good games and a few poor games, and then against Miami he was pretty nonexistent.

A quick look at the last 2 playoff teams: the 2008 Cubs had at least 12 players on their playoff roster who were in the organization at the beginning of 2006 (I couldn't find the full roster). The 2003 Cubs I didn't doublecheck any individual player, but when looking at the playoff roster I'd guess about 6 were in the organization at the beginning of 2001. It makes sense that the next Cubs playoff team should be a higher number than most both because that seems to be the philosophy of the front office, and also because the Cubs farm system is filled with quantity right now that should be able to fill up those spare parts of a major league team. But it really depends how many spare part for spare part trades they make, and of course how many years it takes to get in the playoffs.

I don't know why the NBA wanted them on Saturday (are there any scheduling conflicts for either arena?) but once they were it was pretty obvious they were going to be the first game. Miami-New York was obviously going to be the ABC game, Dallas-Oklahoma City had to be the late game, and TNT has higher priority than ESPN so they were going to pick Chicago over airing the series none of the networks want in Indiana-Orlando (and that's with good reason).

It's not like the last day of the NBA season is that important anyway. Several teams resting starters and several other teams actively tanking. This year, it is a really boring day. The Knicks need a win to clinch the 7 seed, but they play Charlotte. The Grizzlies need a win to clinch home court advantage over the Clippers, and they play the hobbled Magic. Denver needs a win to get the 6 seed, and they play hobbled Minnesota. It would be a big surprise if any of those teams lost, and the only other race is Atlanta/Boston HCA (and tiny things like Chicago clinching HCA in the Finals).

What a yawner of a game. Neither team looked like they cared very much. The Pacers certainly didn't as they let the bench play most of the minutes and didn't even bother going back to the starters in the 4th (and of course they sat out two players as well). The Bulls look like they also played their bench a little more than usual as well although not as much as the Pacers. I wish they hadn't scheduled the only Bulls trip to Indiana for the last game of the season.

It sounds like the Pacers are going to try a little harder to win than they did Monday (when they sat 3 starters and chose to let 3rd stringers start in their place just so the bench could continue playing together). I think they're still choosing to rest Granger though, and I doubt they'll push the rest of the starters that hard either. If the Bulls try at all tomorrow night they should cruise.

Soto at his worst is a slightly below average starting catcher (he was below average most starters last year in OPS and especially in OBP, and all his raw numbers and metrics have him as very close to average defensively). The scary thing with him is that he is starting to lose his upside. His 2008 and 2010 were both great. His 2009 was mostly due to bad luck. Last year was his first year where he really regressed and this year has continued that trend. Should the Cubs be looking to replace him? Not unless they think Castillo has a solid shot to be an average catcher or better himself. But the odds of the Cubs seeing the 2008-2010 Soto anytime soon seem to be fading.

Too much garbage in WAR. You trust the defensive metrics for catchers and 1Bs? I sure don't. LaHair will out-OPS Soto. You could just take the defensive metrics out of the equation (and baserunning too if you want)...just add their offensive, replacement, and positional values together. That would be more accurate than just using OPS in this case since the positional value of catchers is so, so much higher than 1B, while not having to worry if a strange defensive number significantly impacted their WAR or not. Soto's peripherals continue to be worrying though. That BB/K ratio which was a major problem last year has just continued so far this year.

I am way out of my league at this point. To speed it along (sorry exile) I'll go ahead any pick anyway. The Colts could use a receiving TE, so I'll go with Ladarius Green, TE out of Louisiana-Lafayette.

Torreyes is another guy who is showing increased walks so far. He only had 15 walks in the U.S. the last 2 years in 386 AB's (he had 23 in Venezuela). Now he has 6 already this year with 45 AB's. He also has 6 K's, which is way up for him too. Plus he's already had 5 extra base hits compared to only 17 last year.

I keep reminding myself that Rizzo is *still* young for the league. Yup. Only 3 weeks older than Vitters in fact.

Delaying free agency and super 2 are different concepts that it seems like people are lumping together. If it hasn't happened already, in the next few days the Cubs will have delayed Jackson's free agency for another year. The Super 2 date isn't usually until late May/early June depending on the year, but that's about when a player hits arbitration, not when a player is allowed to get to free agency. So in the case of Castro, the Cubs held him down long enough to delay his free agency, but not long enough to avoid him being a Super 2. So he'll start arbitration after this year, but he'll have 4 arbitration years so he will have been in the majors almost 7 years before he hits free agency.

I think Campana's arm is seen as a little better than that. Average to maybe a little below average, but not so bad that teams are actively looking to take extra bases like Pierre. And that's really all you need in CF, where there tend to be less close plays where a better arm would make much of a difference.

Agreed with all this, except Byrd and Campana are equivalent defenders(Byrd might actually be better), but that's mitigated by Byrd's value being tied to the time that he can spend on his new team's roster this season. Thank you for pointing out Byrd's defense which is still good to very good, and that Campana's defensive value is still unknown at this point. It will be interesting to see how the metrics grade Campana this year. I know last year UZR thought he was just amazing defensively mostly due to amazing range numbers, and with his elite pure speed that makes at least some sense. But it's hard to gauge how accurate that is without some extended time out there.

I think this deal makes a lot of sense even if the Cubs got essentially nothing but maybe a million of salary relief. Campana gets a better look by the new management to see what he has, there's no question of where Byrd goes when Jackson is ready. And Campana's speed and defense will likely be more valuable to this year's Cubs than Byrd's rapidly declining bat anyway. As for Byrd possibly being able to raise his trade value, you could flip that around and say that Campana will help the pitcher's trade values because of his elite defense in CF. I don't see Byrd's value increasing to get real legitimate pieces anyway-at best you would get a lottery ticket at the deadline if things went well.

I might be crazy, but I think I'd rather play Boston than Indiana. I know Boston has played well lately, but I think I'd still rather see that series than playing Indiana again. In a vacuum, I'd probably rather play Indiana. But the idea of Boston making things tough for Miami or even bouncing them intrigues me. Did you mean that in a vacuum you'd rather not play Indiana? The but confused me since obviously if you get Indiana, you get the benefit of Boston playing Miami too. That wouldn't be an either/or. Both teams have been playing well down the stretch. Since March 17th, Indiana is 16-4 while Boston is 14-5. Boston obviously has the wealth of playoff experience as a group while Indiana's new guys are the only ones with significant playoff experience (West, Hill, Barbosa, Amundson). I'm trying not to be a homer, but I'll say Chicago would want to avoid Indiana for one big reason. Both Boston and Indiana have roughly equal chances of upsetting Chicago (if push came to shove, I'd say as I did last week that Indiana has a little better chance against Chicago while Boston has a little better of a chance against Miami, but that's irrelevant to this point). But with the Bulls having so many guys already with nagging injuries, having such a bruising series against Indiana would be a huge detriment to the Bulls being healthy going into a potential Miami series. Hopefully not from anything dirty, but those will be highly physical contests between two long, physical type teams. Playing Boston might give just as long of a series, but the wear and tear from those games will likely be less. Honestly, I'm not terribly afraid of losing to either Boston or Indiana if the Bulls are at full strength. Obviously a big "if". For me, we've seen the Bulls vs Indiana series last year, and I didn't find it to be so compelling that I want to see it again. I understand that opinion. Just giving you a reason you don't want to face Indiana even if you are 100% sure you will beat them. They'll take a lot out of your tank going forward. The second point I don't understand as much. This Indiana team is dramatically different from last year's version. They run their offense differently, they have 2 new starters and 2 key bench players that are new. Whether last year's result was compelling has very little to do with this year because other than the name on the uniform and a couple of key players, the team they'll be facing is dramatically different. Of course there's some satisfaction in knocking out the Big 3 for the last time, so I can see why a Boston series might be more entertaining in that way.

I might be crazy, but I think I'd rather play Boston than Indiana. I know Boston has played well lately, but I think I'd still rather see that series than playing Indiana again. In a vacuum, I'd probably rather play Indiana. But the idea of Boston making things tough for Miami or even bouncing them intrigues me. Did you mean that in a vacuum you'd rather not play Indiana? The but confused me since obviously if you get Indiana, you get the benefit of Boston playing Miami too. That wouldn't be an either/or. Both teams have been playing well down the stretch. Since March 17th, Indiana is 16-4 while Boston is 14-5. Boston obviously has the wealth of playoff experience as a group while Indiana's new guys are the only ones with significant playoff experience (West, Hill, Barbosa, Amundson). I'm trying not to be a homer, but I'll say Chicago would want to avoid Indiana for one big reason. Both Boston and Indiana have roughly equal chances of upsetting Chicago (if push came to shove, I'd say as I did last week that Indiana has a little better chance against Chicago while Boston has a little better of a chance against Miami, but that's irrelevant to this point). But with the Bulls having so many guys already with nagging injuries, having such a bruising series against Indiana would be a huge detriment to the Bulls being healthy going into a potential Miami series. Hopefully not from anything dirty, but those will be highly physical contests between two long, physical type teams. Playing Boston might give just as long of a series, but the wear and tear from those games will likely be less.

And now Howard is having surgery and is done for the year. Just stay in that 6 seed Orlando. They haven't been playing horribly without him, but I don't see it very likely at all that they can beat Indiana 4 times without Howard. And I certainly don't them to drop to 7 and give Miami a free series (thankfully their magic number is only 2 to avoid that).

Couldn't you time one of those intentional walk pitches pretty well for a steal of home? Right handed batter so the catcher is already off the plate, soft tosses, pitcher up next with 2 outs. Seems like a pretty solid time to give that a try.