squally1313

Wait, are we supposed to be criticizing Hoyer because, in this hypothetical, he wouldn't have traded Eloy and Cease for Quintana? Or that he wouldn't have given Kimbrel $40m for 1.1 fWAR over essentially 2 years?

I'm aware it's dumb to split hairs on WAR in October, but BaseballReference has him as either a 2.7 or a 2.8 WAR guy in 2024. fWAR, which I've always believed to be more predictive of future performance than bWAR, has him at 3.4 for 2024. So 2.5 is more pessimistic than any recent performance measured in any reasonable way.

Fair. Paredes + Tucker is obviously a better starting point than Shaw + Tucker. To make a worse inter-sport analogy than your Bailey/Portis one, it's like having the draft rights to Bronny James, but he's actually a good player. There's an established trade market, and then there's what he's worth to the Lakers. My less analytically sound angle to this argument is that I think I kinda want to open up what is essentially a starting spot to a prospect if only to widen the error bars/standard deviations of performance a little bit. Like, PCA played at a 6 win pace the last two months of the year, but the opening day plan wasn't to give him consistent MLB PAs (nor did he earn it in AAA). He got there through injuries, and yeah, could and probably will happen again in some form. But now we've got this upside that we didn't have before. In 100 Shaw seasons and 100 Paredes seasons, Paredes is going to outperform him most of the time. But I think Shaw's ceiling is higher (shiny new toy? maybe) and I think the path to a 95 win team given implied budget constraints is hitting on one or two more of the AAA guys. Said another way, given appropriate pitching updates (and we'd have essentially the same budget either way), I think Tucker+Paredes is a playoff team, Tucker+a 95 wRC Shaw+like Kevin Newman or whatever is a playoff team, but Shaw turning into a 3-4 win guy right off the bat opens up a much higher team ceiling in 2026 and beyond.

I've been very clear on why I keep bringing him up as the potential trade guy for Tucker. The Astros, due to their ballpark dimensions, can extract unique value from Isaac Paredes and his batted ball profile. This isn't like Coors where you measure everyone on a different curve. This is Paredes and his extreme pull heavy approach. Whatever the market value for Paredes is (and honestly, I have no idea! I don't really disagree with anything you're saying as to his skill set, but also 3 months ago his market value was a guy with 3 fWAR in 1300 PAs), I think it's logical that the Astros would value him higher. If you don't think one year of Tucker is worth two years of Paredes, that's fine, ask for more (like one of their two offensively inclined catchers, hypothetically).

I mean, you’re better than this. 2/3rds of his last 200 PAs? What he did in the minors 5 years ago? Don’t turn this into a pedantic/pseudo-political discussion. ‘Elite’ is just fine as a proxy for ‘first division’, ‘top X’, etc, and is just as nonsense as ‘sexy’. Paredes is a valuable player in the way that Swanson, Hoerner, Happ are valuable players, and I’ve been one of the biggest defenders of all of those guys all year (or longer). All I was saying is that if you can use him to acquire a guy with 140 wRC (180 in 2024), I would explore that idea.

For me, this certainly isn't Paredes' fault and he's 100% an upgrade over Morel, but he's just another obvious starter, cost controlled for multiple years, where you'll be pleasantly surprised if he tops 4 WAR. Which is basically the profile of Happ, Dansby, Nico, and a little more pleasantly surprised for Busch, Belli, Suzuki, PCA. He should absolutely be getting every day ABs, he's more than good enough to deserve that. But he's not elite.

Yeah this is more me just being weirdly laser focused on Paredes in Houston. 26 projected home runs in that ballpark this past year vs 13 in Wrigley. This isn't to disparage Paredes (though, candidly, I still have a lot of 'well, the Rays traded him for a terrible player, and the Rays are smart, so...'). Yes, Tucker would be the dream (and maybe wouldn't be enough get Paredes straight up?), but like....they've got Caratini and Diaz both putting up above average offensive numbers behind the plate. There's a laundry list of injured arms that used to be good/could still be good. I'm done harping on it after this because I've thrown it out there enough and been mostly ignored, which is fine. I just feel like Houston would have to love the idea of him at third.

I'm still stuck on the idea that a Paredes should basically be the uniquely essential target of the Astro's offseason (cheap, the porch is made for him, Bregman is gone and they don't have anyone else), and it's worth at least seeing how much they'd be willing to overpay for him (especially given that they have one of those game changing bats in right field). But otherwise, yeah, slot him in at third.

Caleb doing some vulturing of his own

He’s good. He’s actually good.

…sorry?

.....fine. I'll bite. Who here is making the arguments that 'you don't need to spend money to win'.

Why do you think teams employ the bullpen guys that way?

Would you watch and/or care about the regular season if that were the case?

Yeah you're never going to get a 'fair' playoff system. That's why I think you need to do whatever you can to incentivize the thing you can most discernably 'win' in the regular season, which is your division. Repeating myself, but go back to 2 wild cards and make them play each other in a 1 game thing. Or, if you want to stick with the 'everyone is invited' thing, go to 4 wild cards and make one of them have to win two games, back to back, before immediately going into the divisional series. Basically, do whatever you can to minimize the chances of a wild card ending up in the World Series. It incentivizes winning the division, which should already draw interest because it's against your rivals (they should also do some combination of unbalancing the schedule and backloading division games), and every couple years you'll get to have a wild card team play the cinderella role.

Cubs parting ways with Willie Harris. Based on that, can probably take them out of the starting pitching market.

Yeah I don't know if this is getting old/old and soft or what, but like...Soto and Judge are a ton of fun. And as a fan of a big market team, give me the prestige that comes with the best teams of this current generation going at each other. This Guardians/Tigers series is fun, but it's fun in the way that like, I tune into the College World Series and pick a team based on some reliever (except in this example Jose Ramirez is also there). The Dodgers have been doing this forever and I certainly strongly dislike a lot of their bit players (Edman, Muncy, Kopech, Treinen especially)....but Shohei/Mookie/Freeman is about as good as it gets. The Padres are universally great and I hope Darvish shoves tonight. But it's probably fine either way.

Let's maybe wait until the Tigers, with their entire playoff roster making when Jameson Taillon does, gets eliminated before we start thinking the owners are going to learn a lesson of some sort here.

Very small complaint, but more often than not when I get to the bottom of a page in a thread there's a whole bunch of dead space (besides the ads running along the right side), which isn't an issue outside of the fact that I've grown pretty fond of the 'Forum'/''Sub Forum' buttons that typically go below the last post. Think it's got to be something with the ad script on the right not cutting off when the posts end? If it's an easy fix, great, if not, no big deal.

I just kinda assumed Soler was a salary dump to line up the money. He can't field, he's barely above average against RHP anymore....I guess you can make Suzuki play right field and can DH him against lefties? Bellinger being here or not being here has very little to do with whether I want him on the roster at all (I don't).

the absolute hardest of passes.

Baseball teams play 6-7 games a week with regularity. Making a bunch of teams play back to backs to open the year seems a little excessive, and the alternative is you have an opening day and then it disappears the next day.

If baseball is comfortable with the 3 game first round, they should be fine making the divisional series 7 games. Basketball and hockey do four rounds of it and it works just fine. Cut a wild card team to bring it down to 2 per league, make them play one game the day before game 1 of the divisional series.

Counterpoint, the Padres are horsefeathers sweet