Hairyducked Idiot

These are the ones that always go insanely high on offense and had every team winning 90 games last year, iirc.

I got a Tweet favorited by Patton Oswalt's brother.

I'm going with "pretty much always." Reading old threads is a blast.

Being a fan of advanced statistics and whatnot may make you better at understanding what has already happened, but looking back at the board archives always seems to show that we have about as much understanding of what is going to happen as some grandma who loves Kaplan.

I'm not even sure that's my favorite Hill home run. Wasn't there one where he hit it off the Mets' closer and gave him the best death stare ever rather than leave the batters' box?

When Tom Ricketts gets his way, that will all be blocked and impossible. There's no end to his evil.

The Dodgers deal wasn't in place when Ricketts took over, iirc. This is a relatively recent thing. The Cubs' TV deal was within range of normal when it was signed. There's just been a massive bubble in the last couple of years, and teams whose TV contracts happened to be expiring became huge beneficiaries.

It's near the bottom for big-market teams, but it's not like we make the same as the A's or Brewers or something.

Why are we trading for Matt Garza when we already have Randy Wells?

Maybe I'm wrong, but the quantity and specificity of all these Samardzija trade rumors make it seem more like "they are trying to deal him in the next six weeks" than just "ho-hum, we wouldn't mind trading him if someone went nuts, we'll see what happens in the next two years."

All of these were posted in 2012. Names redacted to protect the innocent: I'm not trying to dog anyone out for thinking it. It seemed reasonable at the time, and it was pretty much everyone (I think I only noticed Soul as saying 2015 back then).

I'm not saying you are incorrect, but we've been seeing those exact sentiments with every advancing dates for two years now. And if things go badly this year, I expect we'll starting hearing that 2016 or 2017 is the real season.

Qualifying Offers are starting to come in. I think Granderson was the only iffy one.

Stopgap until Baez is ready.

Shopping a player requires outgoing phone calls, which are expensive. The Cubs are planning to let teams know whenever those teams happen to call for whatever reason.

TomLoxas ‏@TomLoxas 15m #Cubs are planning on letting teams know they will be listening on Castro/ Castillo. They are shopping Samardzija.

So after all that, Arguello settles on an interpretation that $25m-$35m being on top of existing commitments, and that remaining money has to pay for arbitration guys, pre-arb renewal guys and any pending free agents. IF that were true, that'd mean we'd be in for a very scrimpy offseason and the front office would have to get pretty creative just to have a functional offseason that fills all of the roster holes to a minimally acceptable level. If we tendered every arbitration-eligible guy, gave them their projection from MLBTradeRumors (which were pretty close to spot-on last year) and filled out the roster with renewals and mimimums, that would put us up at $75m total already, with nothing to $10m to play with. You'll need to shed some salary via non-tenders and/or trades just to have a functional offseason. I have no idea if Arguello's source is correct or knowledgeable, and at this point I have no idea if Arguello is capable of reporting such a source accurately. But I have two questions about it: 1) Is it plausible? Yes. Well, it's basically the worst-case for payroll in what we've all talked about as plausible scenarios. The lowered ticket sales, the massive no-shows not buying concessions, the possibly lower radio deal, the initial outlay on the renovations, I think there were even rumors of some major debt payments coming due this winter. All of that would have to be eating away at MLB payroll. 2) Are we seeing things that fit in with this scenario? I'd say yes. Here's some things we've seen, said or done of late that make a ton of sense if you view if through this lens: - Reversing our "would rather eat salary to get better prospects" position from 2012, and dumping salary in almost every 2013 trade - Dumping David DeJesus (whose option was picked up today) and Ronald Torreyes for nothing but cash savings - Epstein coming out and saying lots of things like "We won't solve our problems through free agency. It's a very viable and sometimes attractive way to add talent, and to be a great organization you have to do it from time to time. Given our situation on a lot of fronts, it's not the cure for our ills." before the offseason starts. - A seeming interest in positive PR not driven by player acquisitions, like keeping your manager search in the headlines for a month and organizing meetings with STH. - A willingness to trade some of your mid-price players. That $5m each saved by trading Castro and Samardzija doesn't seem so trivial all of a sudden, and we do seem amazingly open to trading them (not that the prospect haul wouldn't be the primary reasons). Sure, there's some other data points (IFA spending, the rumored Girardi offer) that don't fit that narrative as easily. It's wouldn't completely shock me to have Theo come out into free agency all "lulz j/k" and signing Ellsbury and trading for Price. But after two straight years of spending the run-up to the offseason drooling over big-ticket items only to see payroll slashed, I'm not finding it that hard to believe that it could happen a third time.

http://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2013/11/2014-top-50-free-agents-with-predictions-1.html We are predicted to get No. 26 Joaquin Benoit *and* No. 50 Chris Young. So much for Epstein's "only one impact player through FA" nonsense.

I may accept him as a contributor to the team, but I will *never* like Chris Young.

Arguello making a butt out of himself on Twitter is probably going to be my favorite thing that happens all offseason :(

Because that's impossible to answer without defining the population of comparable players, which could range anywhere from "there's nobody just like him, he's a special unique snowflake" to "every professional baseball player in history." Players with > 2.0 WAR by the age of 21. ETA: I'm not even tailoring it specifically to Castro who put up 2 fWAR at the age of 20 in 3/4 of a season That's an odd choice. Why would you intentionally cut out two full years of relevant information?

Tanaka threw 160 pitches in a 4-2 complete game loss last night. Never change, Japan.

Because that's impossible to answer without defining the population of comparable players, which could range anywhere from "there's nobody just like him, he's a special unique snowflake" to "every professional baseball player in history."

Passingly related, but Fangraphs recently changed the way they report defense and I love it. Basically, they took out the defensive adjustment on offense and started comparing defenders across the entire player pool instead of just to their own division. So, for SS's for example, their offense now looks a lot worse but even the worst defensive SS looks pretty good defensively. So now Castro gets a +4 for 2013 on defense, even though that's only 17th among 21 shortstops.

Person A: "Castro is prohibitively likely to improve. Essentially all 22-year-olds do." Person B: "Well, that's not totally true. There's a bit of survivorship bias there." Person C: *implies that you think Castro isn't likely to improve* If you're asking me if I think there's a 50.1% chance or better that Castro posts a .281 wOBA or better for the remainder of his career, then I'll go with "yes."