Bertz

I was reminded this AM that Murakami's posting was earlier than the two other big time NPB guys. Murakami's posting window closes next Monday the 22nd. So realistically he probably needs to agree with a team by next Friday/Saturday? Kind of wild how quiet it's been with him given how that deadline is coming up.

Mostly convinced the Cubs are either only in on FA starters to try and hold leverage in trade or they're okay spending a little more than we're used to. You pretty much can't get a decent FA starter for less than $20M, and while you can *technically* square that with treating the LT as a red line Occam's Razor is clearly indicating the opposite.

Yankees are interesting because they probably have enough room for one more move of substance, and you could argue in a couple directions what that ought to be. I suspect they bring Bellinger back as their big move but we'll see.

I like Zerpa and assume the Brewers have a plan of attack to make him significantly better, but yeah still hard to not like this for the Royals. One thing I noticed is that Collins barely played in the playoffs. I wonder if the Brewers felt his September was not just a modest slump but being figured out.

I remember last summer wanting another '22 style draft explicitly to lean on Zombro’s expertise. Now that he's actually focused on the draft hopefully we actually get it in '26. And yeah his whole deal is supposed to be about properly accentuating what a guy naturally does (e.g. low slot supinators get a very different reco than high slot pronators), but when the world is his oyster who does he stock up on? Gonna be fun to find out. Also hopefully we get A LOT more breakouts on the farm. Last year was basically Wiggins, Gallagher, and Florentino as guys who look like they might have some impact? (and of course Gallagher is gone)

. I didn't realize he hadn't even really done anything with the minor leagues yet.

[Sic] Funny what happens when you have to write about a subject that ChatGPT doesn't have purview into

I shouldn't make the easy joke about the former but regarding the latter I do find it interesting how much you posted during the day this week.

People who actually write their own posts sometimes have typos

A lot to unpack here but two things broadly Re: your main question about Hoerner, he's a great well rounded player and quietly a star. Additionally, most research says that these kinds of players tend to age more gracefully than TTO-heavy types already on the wrong end of the defensive spectrum. HOWEVER, given that Nico even here at his peak is basically a league average hitter, I'm not super interested in paying him $25M a year. I suspect that "aging gracefully" in his sense will mean being a solid major leaguer until he's like 38. I think the margins between him being the impact guy he is right now and being more of a premium utility player are pretty thin. Think like an Elvis Andrus or Andrelton Simmons type of trajectory. As for the rest. This post is REALLY not going to help with the AI allegations. Off the bat, notice how most of the quoted text above has a white background? That means you copy/pasted from somewhere else and didn't write it here. Not totally damning in isolation, but given that it came with a ham fisted regression line that you were comfortable admitting came from Chat GPT along with everything else from the past few days there's certainly an implication. Beyond that, AO/GO is a *weird* stat to form an argument around. I honestly don't think I've seen it used to reference a major leaguer since before you were born. Humans who actually analyze baseball use groundball rate. AO/GO's only utility is that it's available in situations where we have not always historically had groundball rate available such as spring training or the low minor leauges. Also, beyond the weirdness of using AO/GO for any sort of analysis when much better and much more common alternatives are easily available, it's certainly not an indication of "explosiveness." Very broadly flyballs are good and groundballs are bad, but there is no athletic component to it at all. I would expect a person who actually watches baseball to clearly understand that, while an algorithm probablistically linking words together probably wouldn't catch it. Last thing: Stop asking ChatGPT to do math for you. Even beyond a broad "stop using AI" point, ChatGPT specifically is the worst of the commonly used models at math (god I hate that I have to know this stuff for work now).

"You got a 35 on your ACT AND a 5 on AP English Lit?!? I'm sorry sir, forgive my insolence, I only wish you had said something sooner!"

I'm sorry but I legitimately laughed out loud at this part

While there are some repertoire things to clean up, Snider seems to primarily be a question of velocity. Does he come to camp next year still throwing 92-93, or can he get back up to 94-95 with an offseason of velo training? That makes him a particularly nice lottery ticket as there's frankly not a lot of judgment required.

He's really good so I'm not going to say this is dumb, but man that's aggressive for a 35 year old with the slowest fastball in the league. Also he probably doesn't make sense after adding Milner but I think Taylor Rogers is probably gonna end up being a bargain for somebody.

I mean at this point they're pretty much optimized. You see a long term contract for like $300M and the ZiPS projection comes out and it's a trivial difference like "the model had him worth $293M." There are exceptions, the model HATED the Schwarber deal for example, but mostly the market is stable. Ultimately it's just about timeliness. When you sign a long term contract for $30M a year you're expecting to get like $50-60M worth of production each of the first few years and like replacement level production by the very end. So it's not "is this a good idea or a bad idea" it's moreso "is *now* the right time for this sort of contract?" For example there's this perception of like "WTF the Dodgers sign everyone!!" And the last two offseasons that absolutely happened. But look back the ten years prior to that and it wasn't true at all.

It's not crazy. The Phillies rotation is good but it's thin. Most indications are that they're a little more focused on the outfield but it wouldn't be way outside of the Dombrowski playbook to say "horsefeathers it we're adding another ace." I'll decide to focus on the positives which is that it almost certainly means Imai has started doing his visits.

Yeah I'm on the same page. I struggle to see a scenario where the return for Hoerner blows my socks off (though devil's advocate, Hoerner's not much worse than Tucker?). And I need my socks firmly on the other side of the room to not be irate about dealing Hoerner away. But after this year? I have little interest in extending Hoerner and I'm reaaaaallllyyyy hoping Jefferson Rojas and/or Cristian Hernandez make it an easy decision (on paper at least) to let him walk.

Compounding it too is I think too Jed's philosophy is to at least check in on everything, and that's before considering the idea of a source or a writer just outright lying. There's things that writers can do to raise the bar of how serious to consider something (I feel like the Bregman stuff is the most recent example) but yeah like you say if you're not casting a really wide net you're not doing your job.

Sharma and Mooney put out a podcast this morning. Most of it was kind of commiserating about how boring the winter meetings were. But they did address this report and it was kind of fascinating. I loosely transcribed what Mooney said "We don't write every single thing we hear. There's lots of stuff that ends up on the cutting room floor. In order for us to write something it has to clear a pretty high bar in terms of who we're hearing it from, where we're hearing it, and how frequently we're hearing it. And the Nico rumor cleared that." They bookended it by saying the team loves him, he's probably not going anywhere, etc. But I thought that was a notable bit of throat clearing. My guess is that the Cubs are not shopping him but that there is a team or two that is pretty seriously trying to make a run at Nico.

Just listened to Sharma and Mooney's podcast. It's kind of funny, they frankly seem exasperated like a lot of fans because of how many disparate places they're hearing the Cubs involved but that none of them has gotten super concrete yet and also how many times we've been burned before. I think the main concrete thing is they seem pretty convinced Jed likely won't do a three year deal for any of the remaining relievers. $15M AAV sure but not three years. Take that for what it's worth.

Not the most important thing but its $46M rather than $42M But to the main point the deferrals lower the worth of the contract. So the Dodgers are paying penalties on 46, but that's because Ohtani's contract is only *worth* 46. No one is getting away with anything, no one is at a disadvantage (well...except California taxpayers), it's just simple accounting. The confusion is for all of history if we said a contract was "ten years, $700M" it meant that three things: - The player would play with the team for ten years - The team would pay him $700M - The team would pay that $700M while the player was playing for them With deferrals 1 and 2 stay true and 3 goes out the window. But we'reconditioned on all three being true so it creates sticker shock. Thankfully though his is math is VERY EASY and VERY COMMON to account for. It's stuff you learn before the first midterm in a 100 level college finance class. No player's agent is getting bamboozled here. No rival teams have to Google "how to do a deferral".

With all due respect this shows that you still don't understand deferrals