This was posted a coupel days ago somewhere on here. As I said, parts of contracts being picked up by other teams (i.e. 7M of Thome's contract being paid by the Phillies) isn't accuonted for in those #s. It's annoying, and not that difficult to get correct. And it leads to people freaking out about payroll numbers like last year when everyone said the Cubs had an 87M payroll when they were paying 13.5M to Sosa.
http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y90/czechrepublicTCR/headfirstlikepeterose.jpg never bet against the reds Did choose some days to not bet on the Reds.
Not as much as I love what Jacque Jones brings to the Cubs. They're pretty equally awful. Houston won the 1st Annual NL Central crap OF contest by only inking Wilson for 1 year.
Who lead all of baseball in hits and doubles from 1993 to 2002? I really hate the arbitrary, lead the 90s in hits stat that's always tossed around. It's a selected 10 year period that just happens to coincide with Grace's prime. How many players even have a chance at contending for that?
It's not like the '01 Cubs outperformed their pythagorean by 8 wins or something. They underperformed by 1 win. (And had a better pythagorean than division winning Houston) Sosa was due for some regression since his season was flat out amazing, and Mueller likely wouldn't put up a 400 OBP over a full season, but the rest of his season wouldn't theoretically be taken by Ron Coomer. Poised for greatness maybe not, but certainly a serious contender for the division.
I don't think that's the point. He's still better than Konerko so expect his contract to be in that neighborhood. The Cubs don't want him to become a FA and have other teams attempt to drive up the price. I'm sure some teams would be very willing to overpay so the Cubs will want to be generous without breaking the bank. The best time to do that is now. But Konerko won a world series so he's clutch or something. I wouldn't be shocked at all to see Lee get a lesser contract than Konerko. Well hasnt Derrek Lee won just as many World Series as Konerko has??? No that world series was all speed and SMALLBALL~! Lee just happened to be along for the ride. Konerko single handedly carried the Sox to the world series.
This is revisionism however. The Cubs were coming off of an 88 win season, had Wood looking to be back to '98 form, had McGriff and presumably Mueller for a full season and had just signed Moises Alou who wasn't expected to mail in the entire season. On top of all that, Juan Cruz had an encouraging end of '01 and Mark Prior was on the horizon waiting to be added to the rotation
The Sosa trade isn't even top 10. I'd throw the Barrett trade, the trade for Miller, the Hawkins trade, the Nomar trade, the Rusch signing, and the Walker signing in there over it.
4/51, which is a better contract than 5/60. Of course Konerko deserved nothing more for playing on the world series but he had some mystical aura to dumb GMs like whichever guy won Orioles GM survivor.
I can't believe people aren't spending this entire thread worrying about this meaning a Dusty extension. I can live with another few years of Hendry, I can not tolerate another few years of Baker.