Hairyducked Idiot

I'm not sure how many teams have sixth starters better than clayton richard let alone wood Probably very few. But very few teams are as good as us and thus need to worry mostly about covering their downside.

You guys vastly underestimate the odds of pitching injuries detailing the season. It is easily the biggest threat.

For a team with our ambitions, we need six starters of at least the Hammel/Hendricks/Lackey caliber. I want something like what the Cardinals had last year, where Wainwright gets hurt and they don't even flinch. We're one tweaked elbow in Februrary away from a Lester/Lackey/Hendricks/Hammel/Richard rotation, and that's a lot scarier to me than having a crappy CFer.

The gap between whatever CF is still out there to acquire and Baez in CF is smaller than the gap between whatever pitcher we could get for Soler and Clayton Richard.

Sucks, they have little interest in him starting, and sucks.

Your sixth guy isn't really "depth." He is more likely to be in the rotation than not Ok, your semantics about terminology aside, that changes nothing about what I'm saying. The point is we need a sixth starting pitcher every bit as much as we need a CFer or anything else. Given the attrition rate of pitchers, your base number you aim for should probably be six and not five, so we're still one short. We need another rotation-caliber SP as much as we need a starting CFer.

Your sixth guy isn't really "depth." He is more likely to be in the rotation than not

:roll:

I assume that means "backloading" and thus we were even further in NPV. *shrug* We aren't a team that can do massive contracts year after year. Lester was ours for now.

It's also pretty darn realistic for Soler to never, ever reach Gordon's level of offensive production. Or even ever become an average MLB starter. This team doesn't need high-risk, high-reward position players. We need to lock in as much certainty as feasible (I mean, it's still baseball) and add pitching depth. Signing Gordon and trading Soler would address both of those.

Awesome deal. Unless he got an opt-out. Then it is terrible.

Functional and kinda trolly toward cubs fans. I like it.

"You may have to give one to get the player" is a completely different argument from "they are equal or better for the team, all else equal."

Gretzky records are always so hilariously good. Perfect combination of best offensive player and highest offensive era. During his 51 game streak, he had 62 goals and 91 assists. 3 ppg for more than half a year.

Assuming "rat boy" is a Alcantara, I wouldn't consider him a serous candidate for an MLB job either.

I mean, if you squint hard enough, the difference between a meh AAA player and an acceptable bench bat is small enough that you can convince yourself the former might be the latter. But you can pick up guys on waivers and off the minor league free agent market at will who are better than what Villanueva has shown to date.

So would I, but I have no interest in letting him decide between those two three years from now.

We're talking about the Christian Villanueva who put up a .750 OPS while repeating AAA in his age 24 season last year? I mean, anything's possible, but as it stands he's not a serious candidate for an MLB job.

Bless your heart

When the opt-out comes up, he'll only be 10 months older than Greinke is now.

I absolutely can't. Which is why I said I didn't have any problem with people liking this deal specifically or any other deal that happens to have an opt-out in it. I don't, but that's just an opinion and there's plenty of leeway here. But earlier someone said "If a team wants 7/$210, they should also be happy happy with 7/$210 with an opt-out after three years" implying they are equal, and that's just unequivocally, objectively wrong. Something like this comes up every time opt-outs are discussed. That was where I was coming into the "opt-outs are always bad in a vacuum" discussion.

We shouldn't give Samardzija a player opt-out for the same price as a non-opt-out contract.

Results-oriented fallacy. You don't judge a decision after the fact, you judge it on the moment you make it. I'm not denying that it's theoretically possible the buyout could pay off, but that doesn't make it equal or better for the team. Again, if I bet $100k to win $75k on a coin flip, it's *always a bad bet*, even though I might win money off it. Similarly, certeris parabis (I never spell that right and won't look it up, even though looking it up would have taken less time than typing this caveat), player opt-outs are always worse for the team than identical deals without the player opt-out. Anyone who thinks that A is approximately equal to B because of the balance of possibilities is just a wrongy-wrong wrong head.

Because the player gets to act with more information than we have now. It's theoretically possible that he gets diagnosed with fast-onset bonitis the day after opting out, but on average he will only opt out when he's worth more to the market than what he's under contract for, and by definition that's a scenario where losing him is bad for the team. Just because you can imagine scenarios where a bet pays off doesn't make it not a bad bet. It's akin to saying "Betting $100k to win $75k on a coin flip isn't always a bad bet, because you might win the coin flip and be ahead $75k." Giving the other side of a negotiation the option to act later against your interests with more information than you have now is *always* a bad bet on its own (absent any compensation you get in the deal for allowing it).

The issue isn't whether you are "happy" to let him opt-out after the three years. The issue is whether that scenario is *good enough* to balance out the downside of being stuck with him if he isn't. ok so i was open to the idea that maybe i was missing something but no this is just idiotic. the seven years is th.. i mean *is the incentive*, not the opt out. the player gets protection from the market, and the team GETS THE PLAYER. in any suboptimal scenario, you're saddled with the years of salary, and no realistic alternative allows you to escape from that while still also getting the player in the near term I honestly have no clue how what you just said is a response to what I said or what you meant by it. Lemme start over with my original point and see how that goes. I have never seen a contract with a player opt-out that I like because I think they tend to be undercosted on the market, but that's just my opinion and I have no problem if there are specific contracts with opt-outs that people did like, including Price's. But if you take two contracts with identical years and money, and A has no player opt-out and B has a player opt-out, then the only correct belief is that A > B from a team's perspective. Every time. Every time this comes up, somebody finds a way to argue A = B or A < B, and they're wrong every time.