SaorsaDaonnan

It would be a mistake to conclude from this that Kerry and Sarah do not intend to spend significant time in the Chicago area in the future, and even if we knew that they did not have plans to stick around it would be impossible to infer from that that Kerry will not be with the Cubs next year. On its own, the datum you mention is compatible with many possible cases. It is possible, for instance, that the Woods are moving to another home in the Chicago area for any of a variety of reasons: their current home is starting seem like it will not be large enough as their child (Justin Dean, born '06, according to wikipedia) gets older, another child might be on the way, they are beginning to feel that too many people know where they live, they would like a newer home requiring less maintenance (Lou was quoted in several papers as saying that their home flooded a couple of days ago), or any of a million other reasons having more to do with normal human life than with the status of Kerry's baseball career. And, even if it were somehow clear that this decision represents an expectation on the part of the Woods to be with another team or out of baseball entirely, it is not obvious that that expectation would be their preference. Needless to say, it is also very possible for preferences of this type to change over time, so that even someone willing to believe that the potential sale of the home licenses speculation that the Woods plan to leave Chicago would still have to grant that the predictive power of a current intention of that sort is questionable. If they did expect to relocate, any number of possible reasons might be responsible for their plan: an expectation that the Cubs will not offer a contract next year, a plan for Kerry to retire at the end of the year if he makes no progress this season, ect. Expectations of the type I just listed are contingent upon future conditions which may or may not come to pass: no one knows how the rest of the season will go, how the Cubs front office will feel about Wood this offseason (not least because there is a chance that different personnel will inhabit it), nor how frustrated Kerry will feel. Far too many circumstances are involved: the situation is impossible to model. So, to conclude from the fact that the Wood's current residence has been placed on market that the Woods will not be affiliated with the Cubs next season would not be a responsible inference, and it would not be particularly compelling to learn even that the Woods do not expect to be in Chicagoland next year. Although it is not unreasonable to wonder about Wood's future, this "news item" does not make a substantial contribution to our understanding of the situation. I end with a brief discussion of an example: Nomar Garciaparra in 2005. As the 05 season wore on and fans began to wonder more urgently about whether Nomar would stay, it was reported in several local papers (pioneer press, if I recall) that Nomar was building a house in the Winnetka/Wilmette area. At the time, several fans insisted that this constitued inside knowledge about whether Garciaparra would stay. They were quite incorrect.

Unless the CSN crew somehow didn't have a 3rd base or a home plate camera, their failure to put up a replay inside of 15 or 20 seconds is inexcusible. The fact that they never showed the obstruction at all* is enough to make one wonder if they knew what had happened but decided to sit back and enjoy the carnage. Maybe they hate Hawk and DJ as much as we do. *I've only seen the youtube video, so if they showed it in the bottom of the 8th, or the 9th, I wouldn't know about it

credit where it's due...

Someone will have to explain to me sometime what is so special about the ever-injured Guzman. He's Prior/Wood without the major league success. Just curious why we need Dunn and where exactly would he play? C Pie 1B Ramirez 2B Floyd 3B Soriano SS Dunn LF Izturis CF Lee RF Ward ????? You'll have to excuse me, I've been up all night and my sense of humor may be a little off... Seriously, I'd put him in right. Floyd may be hitting ~ 300 and taking a few walks, but that extra 166 points of SLG that Dunn would provide looks damn tasty. Floyd can pinch hit. Murton's not an uninteresting player but there's no chance he's worth passing up Dunn for, Jones sucks, and Pagan is crap. Dunn is a butcher in left field and would be a nightmare in right..We have no room for him. I see you've been here since just after the choke job in '04. Surely, then, you've seen the 17,000 debates we've had about this kind of thing, and the 12,000 debates that applied this reasoning specifically to Dunn. The disagreement we're having isn't a disagreement about Dunn's attributes but rather the value of different baseball skills in general. My view is that an OF who posts a .565 SLG and a solid OBP can hop around on a pogo stick out there if he wants to. Clearly, you have a different view.

Someone will have to explain to me sometime what is so special about the ever-injured Guzman. He's Prior/Wood without the major league success. Just curious why we need Dunn and where exactly would he play? C Pie 1B Ramirez 2B Floyd 3B Soriano SS Dunn LF Izturis CF Lee RF Ward ????? You'll have to excuse me, I've been up all night and my sense of humor may be a little off... Seriously, I'd put him in right. Floyd may be hitting ~ 300 and taking a few walks, but that extra 166 points of SLG that Dunn would provide looks damn tasty. Floyd can pinch hit. Murton's not an uninteresting player but there's no chance he's worth passing up Dunn for, Jones sucks, and Pagan is crap.

Someone will have to explain to me sometime what is so special about the ever-injured Guzman. He's Prior/Wood without the major league success. Just curious why we need Dunn and where exactly would he play? C Pie 1B Ramirez 2B Floyd 3B Soriano SS Dunn LF Izturis CF Lee RF Ward

Someone will have to explain to me sometime what is so special about the ever-injured Guzman. He's Prior/Wood without the major league success. He may never be Kent Mercker, but it's not like he's God or anything.

Jimbo should start the proceedings with an offer of Howry and Jones for Dunn If they insist on Marshall, they can have him, but only if they take back at least two of Jones, Eyre, and Izturis. They can have Howry and even some $ if they take all three of J/E/I. Keep the Gooz if possible

http://www.forums.mlb.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?tsn=1&nav=messages&webtag=ml-cubs&tid=279475 While it's probably true, trusting a source at Cubs.com could be a bit sketchy. Yeah, like the injury report. It's usually sketchy. ;) :D surely you gentlemen do not intend to cast aspersions upon that most venerable and Muskat-ed of websites

http://www.forums.mlb.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?tsn=1&nav=messages&webtag=ml-cubs&tid=279475

I don't understand. Why would this be a problem?

Agreed. Barrett has sucked this year. According to ESPN.com, Barrett's 2007 salary is $4,533,333. Although this is not a inconsiderable sum, I think it would be somewhat excessive to label it a high salary. Had Barrett begun the season with the Pads, his contract would have been only the sixth largest on the team, behind Maddux (10), Giles (9.67), Hoffman (7), Cameron (7), and Peavy (4.75), although the difference between Barrett and Peavy's paychecks is trivial. Had Barrett spent all of 2007 on the Cubs, his salary would be have been only 9th on the team, behind Lee (13.25), Zambrano (12.4), Soriano (10), Ramirez (9), Lilly (6), Jones (5.63), Dempster (5.33), and Marquis (4.75). Furthermore, his contract would have been only marginally more expensive than Howry (4.5), Izturis (4.25), and Eyre (4). According to the same website, 9 catchers, or about 1/3 of all starting catchers, will make more money in 2007 than Barrett: Jason Kendall (13.43), Jorge Posada (12), Jason Varitek (11), Ivan Rodriguez (10.57), Paul Lo Duca (6.6), Ramon Hernandez (6.5), Kenji Johjima (5.93), A.J. Pierzynski (5.5), Jason LaRue (5.45). It is also interesting to note that Barrett makes less than 10% more than Brad Ausmus and Bengie Molina, each of whom will make 4 million in 2007. I'm not sure I see why this is relevant to the discussion. I am kind of confused by this. Are you saying that you agree with the general principle that the contract must be long term, but that you think we should define long term to mean something other than multiseason? I'd reply that the word 'long' has somewhat different meanings in different contexts. A season might be psychologically long, as for instance last year or 2002, without being a long time in the objective sense. When we say that a contract must be long term, I think we should mean long term in the objective sense[/]. (I'll argue for this point later in the post.) True, but perhaps this is just to repeat that a bad season can seem endless and endlessly frustrating. Both of those suggestions, which I would certainly agree to, have to do with psychological features of fandom rather than the financial and statistical facts that should define albatross contracts. I don't think I quite understand the role the poem is playing in this discussion. Perhaps that is because, as I think BBB was telling me earlier, I am wading into the middle of a conversation that started several days ago. Well, I don't believe I ever claimed that the fact that Barrett was traded itself showed that Barrett's contract is not or was not an albatross contract. In fact, the only argument I advanced to support the claim that Barrett's contract is/was not an albatross contract was the argument about the length of the contract, although I did mention objections about the role of luck and about the wisdom of judging a player's future on 2.5 months of production as being other potential arguments that I chose not to employ. When I said that a player would need to be "essentially untradable," I used the word "essentially' rather than the word "absolutely" because I wanted to leave room for situations like Todd Hundley's from a couple years ago. Hundley, whose contract was paradigmatically an albatross contract, was himself traded for Karros and Grudzielanek before the 2003 season, if my memory serves. The contracts the Dodgers sent us were, if I recall, somewhat bloated and perhaps even burdensome, but well short of albatross status. Since I think I remember that no other players were involved, it would be fair to say that one albatross player was traded for two expensive but nonalbatross players. This kind of deal is not something that I was trying to rule out when I stated that a contract needs to be "essentially untradable." What I meant by that could be restated along the following lines: the player's contract must be such that it cannot be traded without the team taking on either another albatross contract, or a significantly greater overall financial commitment, or sending along a painfully large amount of talent/cheap players in compensation. If we want to be strict about it, I'm laying those conditions out as a description of an albatross contract in an ideal market---it is always possible that a Jim Bowden will do something very illogical, and of course that may not tell us anything at all about whether or not the contracts he is taking on are albatross contracts. I agree. It's hard to say. Fan reactions to that situation varied widely; some fans thought the fight was a huge problem, others didn't. Perhaps the opinions of GMs across baseball were similarly varied. I'm not at all sure that Barrett was essentially untradable. As I noted above, my opinion is that Hendry significantly undervalued Barrett in this trade. Unfortunately, the low return we got on him doesn't show that every other GM saw Barrett as a basically worthless player. For all we know, Hendry lept at the first offer he had. Or, perhaps Jim had several offers on the table that the analytic baseball community would feel were better than the one he chose to accept. It's hard to say... I don't think there is any simple sense in which suffering is noble. It is noble to bear suffering well, and I will certainly agree that it is profoundly beautiful when people are willing to suffer in order to achieve something difficult but valuable, but there is a tremendous difference between sacrificing for an important goal or value, on the one hand, and suffering for the sake of suffering, or for the sake of nothing at all, on the other. I'm not sure, though, that I understand what any of this has to say about Barrett's value as a baseball player. There is still a lot more to say about this, but I'll stop here to give you a chance to respond.

Sunny, I'm pretty sure that use of the term "albatross" is usually restricted to situations where a player is a problem for a team because: 1) the team gets almost no production out of the player (sometimes this is evaluated against salary rather than absolute production vs. league average) 2) the player is highly paid 3) the player's contract is long-term 4) the player is essentially untradable Normal usage of the term, at least in the analytical baseball community, seems to require all four of those conditions, so that an albatross player is one who sucks, will suck for a long time, and must be expected to continue dragging the team down for several seasons to come. Obviously, the term is not precisely defined. Reasonable people might disagree about what constitutes "almost no production" or "highly paid," although it's clear that "highly paid" must mean "highly paid relative to other major league baseball players of comparable skill" or "highly paid relative to the baseball talent market" or even "highly paid relative to an idealized model of the baseball talent market," and emphatically not "highly paid relative to your average blue collar worker." A standard exception to these requirements is somebody who has met the criteria for several consecutive years immediately prior to this one, but is now in the last year of his contract. Obviously, to use the term albatross correctly, it is neccessary to show that the player's low production resulted from conditions that can be expected to persist into the future; one-time injuries, bad luck, and other external factors need to be removed from the equation. Often it is neccesary to look at available levels of replacement talent as well. I didn't begin this post to take issue with your classification of Barrett as an albatross, but it is interesting to compare the Barrett situation with the definition of albatross that I have proposed. It would be possible to argue against your assessment of Barrett on the basis that Barrett has been unlucky or, alternately, on the basis that two months of poor production, even if genuinely bad, are not enough to make it reasonable to expect him to suck for the indefinite future. More obviously, and more relevantly for the definition of the term albatross, Barrett has not sucked in the past, and as an upcoming free agent would never have been in a position to become a long-term problem for the team. I'll leave it to others to draw the conclusions. =D> I love reading your posts. Please post more. i think he would have won the tournament had he signed up. Thanks, but there are several superior posters on this board-- Pinghitter foremost among them, if you want my opinion, and Mephistopheles when he feels like it. Several of the guys who manage the minor league forum are consistently excellent, Rob and Vance are always fun (Tree too, when he's around), and of course we can't forget Tim and the other mods. Bruce Miles deserves mention as well. Several posters whose names elude me at this early hour have shared interesting sabre work beyond the LD% level that more ordinary posters such as myself have a working familiarity with. I'd like to include them in this list as well.

Sunny, I'm pretty sure that use of the term "albatross" is usually restricted to situations where a player is a problem for a team because: 1) the team gets almost no production out of the player (sometimes this is evaluated against salary rather than absolute production vs. league average) 2) the player is highly paid 3) the player's contract is long-term 4) the player is essentially untradable Normal usage of the term, at least in the analytical baseball community, seems to require all four of those conditions, so that an albatross player is one who sucks, will suck for a long time, and must be expected to continue dragging the team down for several seasons to come. Obviously, the term is not precisely defined. Reasonable people might disagree about what constitutes "almost no production" or "highly paid," although it's clear that "highly paid" must mean "highly paid relative to other major league baseball players of comparable skill" or "highly paid relative to the baseball talent market" or even "highly paid relative to an idealized model of the baseball talent market," and emphatically not "highly paid relative to your average blue collar worker." A standard exception to these requirements is somebody who has met the criteria for several consecutive years immediately prior to this one, but is now in the last year of his contract. Obviously, to use the term albatross correctly, it is neccessary to show that the player's low production resulted from conditions that can be expected to persist into the future; one-time injuries, bad luck, and other external factors need to be removed from the equation. Often it is neccesary to look at available levels of replacement talent as well. I didn't begin this post to take issue with your classification of Barrett as an albatross, but it is interesting to compare the Barrett situation with the definition of albatross that I have proposed. It would be possible to argue against your assessment of Barrett on the basis that Barrett has been unlucky or, alternately, on the basis that two months of poor production, even if genuinely bad, are not enough to make it reasonable to expect him to suck for the indefinite future. More obviously, and more relevantly for the definition of the term albatross, Barrett has not sucked in the past, and as an upcoming free agent would never have been in a position to become a long-term problem for the team. I'll leave it to others to draw the conclusions.

Cobra LUH-LA-LA-LA-LA :cry:

Pretty hardcore. I don't like the disrespect that I see some modern baseball fans showing to earlier era's in baseball, as if people back then didn't play the type of bang-bang, in your face, sport. Some say "well, they didn't throw as hard." That's bullcrap. Sure, some people with conditioning these days might be able to throw harder than some guy back then, but people on the most part threw just as hard. If guys out of 1A highschools in Podunk, Mississippi can throw 90+, then so could full grown men back then if they just had the talent for it. Hell, they obviously threw hard enough to kill a man, since Chapman got killed by Mays. I think some people just have rubber arms and they are born that way. Back then guys with weak arms would have been weeded out because of the stress and so the only guys who made it to the bigs and could deal with the stress of constant pitching were guys like Livan Hernandez or Zambrano or Randy Johnson. I could almost guarantee you that Zambrano could throw every third day. I know you're going to battle me on this (because you have before), but while I'll concede that pitchers back then probably threw as hard (a la Bob Feller), I just can't believe the hitters were as good on the whole. With the advances in nutrition, conditioning and sports "medicine", the average hitter now is much bigger, faster and stronger than even 20 years ago, not to mention 50. With new training techniques, even hand-eye is probably much better. This makes it more difficult for today's pitcher to maintain great stats, and while a pitcher in 1920 might have been able to produce on shortened rest, I find it unlikely in the extreme that they could do so against today's offensive beasts. Rather than your theory that weak armed pitchers were weeded out, I think great pitchers could get by with only a fraction of their stuff on a regular basis because the average batter really wasn't that great. And its counter intuitive; logic dictates that the overall talent pool todays is far, far greater than it was in the time of Cy Young, but somehow there aren't as many durable arms today? Add the dead ball into the mix. Another factor to consider is that there are more pitches available to pitchers today. Decades of innovation have seen new pitches developed, giving today's pitchers more weapons. And even so, modern hitters produce much more on average than the hitters of yesteryear. Now before you get too upset, let me clarify - I mean the average offensive player. If you look back over the years, you will find that there was much more disparity between the greats - Ruth, Cobb, etc. - and the rest of the league than there is between the stars of today and their peers. And while guys like Ruth and Cobb may have been able to produce at similar levels in today's league, they almost certainly would not have while indulging in the lifestyles they did when they were playing. While guys like Young, Walter Johnson and company would still have had to deal with awesome talents, there was a lot more chaff in between. Could Zambrano pitch every third day now? Probably. Would he be effective? Almost certainly not. The game is played on a different level than it was 80 or 70 years ago. Developments in science, as well as innovation and the influx of huge talent pools from Latin America, Asia and our own African American population have seen to that. Players today are bigger, faster and stronger. The balls are livelier, the parks smaller and the bats better. These are the main reasons that records like Young's 511 will stand. Nice post.

Murton ----> AAA :cry: I think Pagan would go down rather than Murton. I think this is the likeliest scenario. It was an example of lame hyperbole. I repent.

Murton ----> AAA :cry:

I thought you were an English teacher. :lol: I'm taking the summer off. Well played.

I'm guessing no, that it was the area between his wrist and elbow. If it were his elbow before I think it would have been stated that way. I'd have thought so too, but a couple of the articles I've seen online have described yesterday's roster move as resulting from "forearm soreness." Granted, one of these was Paul Sullivan... Anyway, it has me wondering...

So you think we should trade Jones at any cost as well? Depends on what you mean... I don't like Jones at all, but I wouldn't take on a bigger albatross contract to get rid of him. Nor would I send along a good prospect just to dump his salary. On the other hand, I'd trade him for about anything I could get my hands on, and I'd be willing to eat his salary this year. I'm not sure how this question is connected to the broader issue of the Cubs' chances. Is it the following? In contention----> Maximize on-field quality------>dump Jones immediately Not in contention----> trade guys for highest possible value----> play Jones in hopes he improves and then can be dealt from stronger position If those are my options, I'd pick the former. We're close enough to contention that I'd be willing to forego the pair of B prospects that Jones might fetch in the rosiest possible scenario, However, I think I'd play an outfield of Murton/Pie/Soriano almost regardless of whether the Cubs remain in contention, on the basis that consistent PT for Murt and Pie is more valuable than the marginal prospects that a streaking Jones might bring.

Oh, of course! I think most of us can agree that Guzman has been badly handled. Showing that the Cubs have taken stupid risks with him, though, isn't the same as showing that those decisions caused Guzman to have the problems he's having. Maybe he would have had them anyway. If I remember the Myers story correctly, there was precious little to suggest that he was injured, or even deviating from his normal mechanics, before his move to the pen. So, in that case it was very reasonable to conclude that the move caused the injury. There weren't any other plausible stories available. The Guzman case is different because of his injury history. Guzman's injury history suggests that he was already at risk for this sort of thing, no matter how the Cubs treated him. So, unlike the Myers case, the Guzman case has the potential to be explained in different ways. In the Myers case, the only possible alternative explanations were conspicuously improbable: that Myers was hurt before but that it somehow hadn't shown up in any observable way, that Myers' shoulder was going to catastrophically break down once he had thrown a certain number of pitches in his career, ect. These arguments are bad because there isn't any evidence for them. They were logically possible, some of them, but they weren't compelling because there was no real reason to entertain them. For the Guzman case, it's not crazy to think that he might well have broken down anyway, particularly if someone can produce evidence that his minor league troubles with forearm soreness were similar to his current troubles, and especially if someone can show that they occured in connection with earlier leg problems. Another way to look at it is this: weren't we all somewhat concerned about Guzmans health before the season even began? Wouldn't we have all been a little nervous about it, even if the Cubs had put him in the rotation in April and left him there, pulling him after 95 pitches each time? I happen to think that the Cubs' handling of Guzman did contribute substantially to his injury. But at the same time, it looks to be me like I can't justify this belief, for the reasons I just gave. So, I'm strongly suspcious, but at the same time it seems like too much to insist that anybody who disagrees simply hasn't got their head on straight. (VVMattVV, I am NOT saying that you think anything of the sort about those who seem to disagree with you. I've quoted your post only because it helped me set up the beginning of this post.)

When the hamstring thing came up a couple weeks ago, somebody mentioned that he'd had the same issue in the past. Can't remember if that source indicated with what frequency the problem had occured. Did anybody ever tie the earlier leg cramps to the forearm soreness he had in minors? Do we know whether the forearm soreness he had back then in the elbow area? I guess I'm not sure what this injury shows us. As questionmarkgrace points out, it isn't that surprising when a guy with leg problems starts developing arm trouble. Although highly suspicious, it's not an open-and-shut case that the move to the pen significantly contributed to the problem. On the other hand, it's far too quick to say that Guzman's history shows that his breakdown was inevitable and that the move was insignificant. I'd agree that Guz should ideally be in the rotation, but at the end of the day I don't have the medical training to say whether he has a reasonable liklihood of staying healthy in that role. [/i]

Interesting that scouts think that; hadn't heard their opinion either way. As other posters have mentioned before, our third order winning percentage still looks good enough for first place, albeit not as decisively as in recent weeks: http://www.baseballprospectus.com/statistics/standings.php It's a frustrating team, no doubt, but not one to be given up on in early June, particularly in a division like ours. It's interesting to think that our difference between W1 and W3, which at a glance is the third largest difference (in absolute value) in the majors and second only to the Yanks among negative differences, includes the horrible performances of certain players who shall go unnamed. Even if we kept these nameless players, if the team played to its pythag-projected win % of .539* over the remaining 104 games, the team would end at 82 games. So, even a mild upswing in luck might move us into serious contention, particularly if combined with a deadline acquisition or the dfa-ing of nameless pieces of dead weight. *before Thursday's game

what a load of idiotic BS. he gets moved to the pen and gets hurt shortly thereafter, and it proves the cubs were right to move him to the pen? seriously, what a stupid post. Abuck, I think he was kidding. It's hard to believe that someone with that long a history of posting here would, in seriousness, produce a post as insipid as that one. I mean, the board has gone through the Wood/Prior debates so often, and so clearly, that only absolute retards could continue to insist that a talented and cheap pitcher should be considered valueless just because he's often injured. Only a few weeks ago, this board- not to mention almost every respectable baseball analyst- crucified the Phillies for the Myers-to-bullpen move. When Myers broke down, the issue was even more widely discussed. It is difficult to think of a time in recent memory when the already obvious dangers of moving a pitcher from the rotation to the bullpen were more readily apparent. To believe that Soul was serious, you'd have to believe both that he doesn't follow major news stories in the National League and that he's one of these posters who thinks that his feeling such as disappointment or frustration or disgust at hype should be given significant weight in personnel decisions. Neither of those seems particularly plausible, and since, together, those claims amount to the suggestion that Soul is a remarkably stupid baseball fan, it seems far more reasonable, not to say generous, to conclude that he was joking.