Hairyducked Idiot
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Minor League Discussion & Boxes 4-14-14
Hairyducked Idiot replied to CaliforniaRaisin's topic in Cubs Minor League Talk
Minor league free agent in the offseason. I think he had a good winter league or something. -
Except the small differences make it difficult to rebuild through free agency and the draft. The intent was to curb spending by the big boys, but the unintended consequences have rewarded teams for not trying. The new CBA sort of rewards the status quo. The new CBA isn't what's making it harder to find useful players in free agency. There's basically two factors at work there: 1) League-wide economics, independent of the most recent CBA, are improving the state of affairs for small-market teams and allowing them to keep more of their players 2) The aging curve is shifting radically downward, meaning players who reach free agency in their late 20s and early 30s may already be in sharp decline. Better PED enforcement is probably the big cause of this, and my pet theory is that the rise in velocity is also contributing.
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The new CBA is really, really not that much different than the old CBA.
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I could swear the playoff system changed to allow more teams since most of those years or something If we add the 5th playoff team in each league retroactively, I still don't believe that would put any team on an 8/10 run besides the Yankees. The Cardinals are the closest and they still miss in 2010.
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I believe the only team currently on an 8/10 stretch is the Yankees, and they are a really good bet to lose it this year. 8/10 just doesn't happen in current MLB. Too much parity.
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My best guess? 2016 or 2017, depending on how lucky we get with pitching injuries. Yeah, I won't argue that. Although I could see playoffs next year with a few things going right. But I think we'll have a long run of success, but so will the Cards and Pirates. My prediction is 8 playoff appearances out of 10, starting in 2016. I don't think anything this front office has done in their time here has given me even a sliver of hope that they are capable of putting on that kind of run. Nobody makes that kind of run in the modern MLB, and all they've done so far is put together a top-5 farm system, something half the teams in the league have every five years or so.
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My best guess? 2016 or 2017, depending on how lucky we get with pitching injuries.
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He's in the rotation until we have five more interesting options. Are we gonna demote him for Chris Rusin? The only way I can see that happening anytime in the next few months is if Hendricks is ready to come up before Samardzija is dealt, and everyone is healthy.
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We could have had 5 top 100s too if we'd traded Castro or Garza. How many top 100s did we have after one year? If we're losing track here, the comparison was how the A's turned around their organization in three offseasons from 2011, when they finished 74-88 and had the 28th rated farm system. Vs. how the Cubs have progressed from a similar situation beginning in 2012 through three offseasons. Doing it "quickly" would have been being good immediately. 3 offseasons *is* slow. And the 2011 A's weren't close if the 2012 Cubs weren't.
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I really don't think most of those things are true. I think you're kneejerking that *obviously* the A's must have had it better off without really looking at what they had or how they got what they have now. For the record, the 2011 BA organizational rankings (analogous to 2012 for the three-offseasons comparison), the A's were 28th.
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We also had McNutt, who was top-100 at the time, iirc. I don't see how the first paragraph contains so much more value than the second.
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We had a -87 run differential last year. We're on pace for -108 this year.
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Their interpretation absolutely needs to rewrite history. Every year that Epstein fails to put together a good MLB team, the organization he inherited has to be assumed to be a bit worse to account for it.
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For whatever it's worth, the A's only once were more than 11 games under .500 in the 2007-2011 span, so unlike the current Cubs, they weren't embarrassing themselves in between playoff appearances or racking up awesome draft picks. The A's were also never in position where they had a previous general manager who didn't give a [expletive] about the minor league system and handed out horrible contracts like candy. Actually look at the 2013 A's. A pretty decent majority of their contributions came from players who were acquired in the previous three offseasons without massive FA contracts. There were savvy trades and smart, cheap pickups. Nothing that Epstein couldn't have done here if he were good enough and motivated enough.
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Is your book ready yet?
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Garza had easily as much value as Gio. Who are these young pitchers the A's had that are better than, say, Samardzija and Cashner?
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People find it aggravating to haggle over the long-term plans of their favorite baseball team? I'll admit I'm not always in step with ordinary people, but that seems weird to me. It's a time-honored tradition and never not fun.
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For reference, keeping Ramirez was definitely not my first choice. I wanted to let him walk for the pick. I just preferred keeping him over what we actually ended up doing with the position. In order for getting Bryant over deeper first-round picks, and other similar trade-offs, to be worth it, we're going to have to go on one *hell* of a run. Because starting 0-for-abunch makes averaging it out really hard.
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I would love to be a fly on the wall for those negotiations. The Cubs would start by demanding a younger, better player than Samardzija plus four more prospects, and the Rays would offer us Hak-Ju Lee for Samardzija and Baez. Eventually they'd meet in the middle, but it'd take awhile.
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"spend just to spend" is a condescending, lazy catchphrase. You spend to help your baseball team win baseball games. It's been three offseasons. I have no idea how you've managed to convince yourself that it would somehow be a Herculean feat to take this team to respectability in three offseasons. For comparison, take the 2013 A's. A fairly decent majority of players who made major contributions to that team were acquired within the previous three offseasons, and none of them would have been major, impossible FA signings. The only particularly difficult thing Beane did in that time was get a pretty amazing haul for Gio Gonzalez, but he didn't have any more trade value at that time than Garza or Castro did when Epstien got here.
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Didn't this front office already prove they could draft and develop better than Hendry's organization did with the same back-of-the-order picks? And no, it wasn't all overslotting. These were supposed to be the guys who didn't need top-5 picks to rebuild the farm system.
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It's the game thread and we don't have another game until Tuesday. Any participants are willing. If you don't like it, don't. I like it. I assume anyone who takes the time to respond enjoys it too, or they wouldn't respond. Not your problem.
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That's the truth. If we don't have the ability to carry more than around a 100 mill in payroll, none of this matters. A better front office making better decisions absolutely could have had this team in better shape right now with a $100m payroll. It's counterfactual so there's no way to prove it, so feel free to sputter some vague insults at me over that statement.
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My reply to what? "spending just to spend" is a strawman. You spend to help your MLB team win MLB baseball games, which is sort of your job. Well, there wasn't much left "after" missing on Tanaka. They should have had a better read on the Tanaka situation and not wasted the whole offseason pining after him. We have a bad back of the rotation and a historically awful outfield. I bet we could have found a few players to spend that money on if our super-smart front office really wanted to win more games in the present.
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How do you square that with your statement earlier that they would spend money if they had it? Their decisions on who they "like" or not are being heavily weighed on by the fact that they are in love with the idea of a super-rebuild. Oh yay, it's another round of "It's not their fault now, but I promise I'll hold them accountable in the future." Haven't been hearing that for three years...