Transmogrified Tiger

why do I remember that it was katyperrysbootyhole, I have wasted my life https://www.nbcsportschicago.com/mlb/chicago-cubs/wetbutt23-and-katyperrysbootyhole-the-reddit-users-who-scooped-the-baseball-world-in-quintana-to-cubs-trade/306218/

I don't think there's any sourced rumors he's as available as Glasnow, and certainly not as a combo in anything I've seen, but I'm curious what the price tag for Glasnow + Brandon Lowe would be. Lowe has one guaranteed year, has had injury struggles and regressed a bit offensively, which potentially could make him a trade option for the Rays given his 8.75 million salary and their org depth. From the Cubs perspective he's a LHH bat who we can comfortably say is going to be a good hitter(Steamer says 118 wRC+), he could pretty conceivably be tried as a 3B given his 2B play(and at a minimum is a solid 1B/DH option), and he has team options beyond this year where he could be useful given they are only minor increases over his 9.75 LT number this year. The main downside would be availability(174 games the last 2 years), and that Glasnow + Lowe eats up a big enough chunk of money without getting a big bat that you might be forced to compromise further down the wishlist, and potentially even at the top of that list(e.g. Soto) to fit things in.

I would probably bump power ahead of K-focused SP, but maybe that's my hitter bias talking. I'd also put a sizable gap between 4 and 5, or maybe more to the point I'd structure it like this: Tier 1: SP, Big Bat Tier 2: Secondary bat, leverage RP Tier 3: 3B, CF, additional RP I'd rather not do anything in Tier 3 to get to the best possible solution in Tier 1 and 2, but the opportunity is there if options start to dwindle.

Glasnow starts to make more sense or less sense depending on other moves that happen around his acquisition. He's a 1 year commitment and one that has significant injury risk, but the Cubs are fairly well positioned to handle that given their pitching depth and the need for his caliber of upside. If you are using Free Agency to make significant gains in the offense and bullpen, and/or don't have to trade much of the MLB-ready pitching depth to fill other holes, then Glasnow works great. If making other improvements requires trading 2 or more of Wesneski, Assad, Wicks, and Brown, then Glasnow becomes a riskier proposition.

I'm pretty sure Glasnow's LT number as a Cub would be 25 million, a traded player's LT value is the AAV of the remaining guarantee. It didn't used to be that way but within the last couple years it changed.

I'm with you, though the list of teams ruthless enough to do this is very short and also includes the Astros. "Normally" in this situation there would at least be some type of internal option that they may have a higher opinion of than most, but looking at that roster it sure seems like they'd need to add an infielder. And unless they were so impressed with Madrigal's transition they want to move Altuve to 3B, or they think Pena is a 3B and they really love Tim Anderson or something, they'd have to play in some shallow waters in adding a 3B.

Personally I think this is a very good thing. Shaw had a swing-happy approach and was consistently doing damage to the opposite field, and those that I saw both HR and 2B/3B were mostly line drives as opposed to fly balls drifting into a gap/over the fence. I think there's a lot more opportunity for him to be a little more discerning and do *more* damage with his swings rather than there is risk his pop was a SSS fluke.

I like that the Cardinals saw the Mets flame out spectacularly with a rotation full of super old arms who used to be elite and their takeaway was to skip the 'used to be elite' part.

Once every 12 to 18 months there's a situation that is not so dissimilar to Manoah's, a guy who had been very good inexplicably falls off or has some type of personal/unknown issue, and all of us obsessives perk up at the thought of arbitrage and getting that caliber player for less by rehabilitating him. In practice, this mostly tends to not happen, Manoah is pre-arb and a pitcher so the odds of the Jays not being able to find room for him if they want him are minimal. And even if they were ready to cut bait, the market for teams interested in a potential 4 win SP on pre-arb salaries is everyone, so the winning bid tends to be much less of a discount than we initially think.

Maeda is 36 in April, does not throw hard, and his last 3 years have gone 100 IP of 3 WAR pace, TJS recovery, 100 IP of 3 WAR pace. His run prevention lagged his FIP in both of those non-injury seasons, and last year hitters started hitting the ball harder too. Across the 2 years of his deal, getting 200 IP and 3 WAR would seem like a pretty good outcome, and I struggle to see that outcome getting paid 2/24 as a gross injustice relative to anything we've seen in recent FA deals.

Perfect move. Get the guy who averages 8 wins a year to go to the school that averages 8 wins a year and then have everyone be furious at him 3 years later when he averages 8 wins a year.

The odds of the team not going into the luxury tax if they sign Ohtani is 0%, if the hesitation is that they won't make other marginal upgrades on top of Ohtani then you do not have to worry about it. They may still be mindful of the 2nd and especially 3rd level(since that has draft and compounding monetary penalties), but they wouldn't be pursuing Ohtani if he was taking up 95+% of their money to spend, they probably wouldn't have picked up Hendricks' option, etc.

Probably not a great sign that the market for the lower/middle class of FA is going to be that hot, presumably due to how much TV money has evaporated in the last 12 months from clubs that do a lot of their spending in that bracket.

They put the surplus value calculation right there. They see Steele with 132.8 million in value for those 4 years(33 mil/year) at combined salaries of 73.4 million, and Peralta with 85.7 million in value for those 3 years (28 mil/year) but only 21.7 million in salary. So they think Steele is a bit better a pitcher for those seasons(Steele being a year older probably inches them closer), but Peralta makes up for that due to having a low arb starting point while Steele is a super two who coming off his best season is setting a much higher arb baseline.

I can't tell if that was an incredible throw or one of the most successful horrible throw decisions I've ever seen. That DB looked like an old video game character just running away from the flight of the ball.

I think this type of criticism misunderstands what BBTV is actually useful for. Yes, you can get it to say any number of unrealistic trades are 'fair', and if you look at the user generated proposals it's clear people use the calculator to try to make various 4 for 1 'my trash for your star trades' that would never happen. The utility of that site is that it's an objective *starting point* that isn't so far off how players actually get evaluated, so in thinking about a possibility it can be a very useful tool. That doesn't mean its valuations are gospel, they acknowledge that up front and present them as a min/max/median, and even then there are places across thousands of players where it's not gonna be quite right(Trout being an extreme example). But if you approach it with the thought of 'could a deal work to trade X to Team A or X for player Y, it's a perfectly good foundation where you also need to take into account the other team's needs and motivations. Most people just skip over the second part and then other people get mistakenly irritated at BBTV for that.

There's 'okay maybe a multi-year deal for a reliever', and then there's 'give up a QO pick to pay a reliever a multi-year, 8 figure AAV'. The former is believable, although maybe not so much plan A depending on where the market goes with AAVs. The latter seems like a desperation Plan D at best.

The relationship is apparently greater than Nootbaar just being allowed to play because he has the right relatives.

STL has Nootbaar, and any team could presumably sign Imanaga or especially Matsui too.

I don't think PCA is really on the table here. Bichette only having 2 years to FA caps the value, and I can also see them being a bit gunshy about expecting immediate prospect production in CF after getting burned by Varsho who did have one year of MLB performance.

I don't feel like there's much point in a Hoerner for Bichette swap. Hoerner is a similar caliber of player on a manageable extension, so even if you like Bichette a bit better it's a lot of thrash for little benefit. I tend to think this is still more speculative, but I think from the Blue Jays perspective sending Bichette to the Cubs is more about assets than specific players desired in return. Their farm system is in pretty dire shape, and while they aren't the Padres they don't have a huge amount of financial breathing room to make multiple impact signings. So trading Bichette would let them get the assets needed to trade for an SP or OF, or maybe split the difference and get Morel as a helpful bat plus other stuff you can use to help get e.g. Glasnow or Burnes. As you allude to Bichette isn't much of a SS defender, so an internal solution or cheaper external addition may upgrade there and have compounding benefits(especially after losing Chapman's glove). Still seems like longshot territory to me, but that would be an extremely fun addition.

The Cardinals have the urgency and apparently Nootbaar is basically everyone's favorite person after he played for Japan in the WBC, so some of the same logic used for getting a Japanese FA to Chicago would apply. That said, I think they banked the FA signings that are lower years right away so they raised the floor and then can explore a bats for pitching trade on their terms where they aren't competing to hand out a 9 figure contract. Cease, a SP from Miami or Seattle, those are much more on brand and feel much more likely than the Cardinals writing a big enough check to get a tippy top FA.

I think the state taxes stuff is similar to the 'he had an offer for more money' leaks that come out after a player signs, sometimes specifying a particular team. It's one of those revelations that basically benefits all parties(player, signing team, team that missed out) in terms of perception. As such while it's possible it is true, we can never know if it's something that's shared because it's true or in order to make everyone look a small bit better after the decision.

Tom, for the sake of our sanity and your ability to post in good standing, please stop applying your conception of how "sports fans" or similar vague grouping of people think about a topic. For a couple weeks now you haven't been able to make any type of meta point about free agency without it devolving into something that's barely comprehensible on top of being irrelevant and putting words in the peoples' mouths. To try to address what it feels like you're trying to get at, we're all smart folks who can hold multiple thoughts in our head at once. Thoughts like: MLB's salary structure can be exploitative, both years of control pre-FA and the posting system. Yamamoto's contract is undoubtedly influenced by the additional ~20% that teams have to pay to his Japanese team, even if that money doesn't count against the luxury tax Since the structure exists and teams operate within it, how "good" a deal is or how desirable a player is at their likely price is a reflection of that structure. We can acknowledge that reality and not like it while it also doesn't cause us to cease to follow the offseason or evaluate potential moves. While you might find it too convenient, there are actuarial realities associated with performance by age, especially for players getting very long term deals at high dollars. Similarly, while you might find it too convenient, there is some level of uncertainty into exactly how well Yamamoto will translate to MLB, and that uncertainty will be reflected in the commitment teams are willing to make. But more than any of the actual arguments here, please, just take a breath. I like hearing your views, but for whatever reason since the calendar ticked over the offseason they are consistently reading as unhinged, and that's a problem.

I dunno, he turns 31 before this next season starts and he's probably not going to pitch meaningfully in 2024. I would be a little surprised if he ends up with more than 72 guaranteed over his next 4. But I also suspect that especially the deal he signs this offseason is going to be on the creative end of the spectrum. I'd be interested in getting him, but I'd be concerned about how much dead money could be on the payroll for 2024 that could handcuff other moves if the 2024 LT number isn't sufficiently low.