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Hairyducked Idiot

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Everything posted by Hairyducked Idiot

  1. Hairyducked Idiot
    Oh, sorry. I need to maintain the purity of the system. I need a color that's between yellow and green.
  2. Hairyducked Idiot
    Not yet. It's still a possibility that we get Sanchez and actually have some pitchers in 2014.
  3. Hairyducked Idiot
    Epstein's having Contreras flashbacks. Totally played.
  4. Hairyducked Idiot
    So either we completed our starting rotation for the best pitcher still available or he used as us a way to extract more money from the team he really wants to play for.
  5. Hairyducked Idiot
    (assuming for a moment this isn't like the last few fake-outs) Perfect. If they have any intention of competing in 2014, let alone 2013, this was exactly what they needed. Even if they did nothing else this offseason (which would be annoying, there's still work to be done), I'd consider us ahead of last offseason. You can really start to see their "low-walk" approach to the pitching staff take shape. I think the Fangraphs WARs are a little flashier than the actual production. Throwing him into my beloved WARWAG chart, I've got him as an immediate 3-win upgrade to the rotation, partially because we're almost certainly going to need our 6th starter and having Wood there is way better than whatever Iowa fodder would have been next in line. Projection: 79-83.
  6. Hairyducked Idiot
    We make weird decisions about the back of the 40-man sometimes.
  7. Hairyducked Idiot
    Russell is our only lefty reliever now, right?
  8. Hairyducked Idiot
    hahahahahahahah I wouldn't have minded the Cubs matching that at all. He probably wanted an NTC though.
  9. Hairyducked Idiot
    I love how the Cubs/Padres/Red Sox are just one massive incestuous pile of bodies.
  10. Hairyducked Idiot
    Want.
  11. Hairyducked Idiot
    After arbitration awards and filling out the roster with minimums, about $90 million.
  12. Hairyducked Idiot
    Sure. We'll definitely be getting something out of this prospect-gasm. But will it be enough to justify the losing in the meantime? We'll see. Especially since we could have gotten a lot of them without losing. Heck, this season we'll be fielding three pre-arbs in the everyday lineup, and could push in a fourth if he learns to hit a baseball. Plus three more pre-FA guys, plus a pre-arb starting pitcher.
  13. Hairyducked Idiot
    I prefer to think of it as I put prospects in their proper perspective. I love prospects, I absolutely do. But sometime in the last two years, a contingent of Cubs fans has declared prospects uber alles as their creed, taking it to an absurd degree such that mere trifles like Major League wins and losses are considered purely secondary concerns if they are even worth noticing at all. Yeah, relative to them it probably seems like I hate prospects. And it probably seems that way even more because I'm not one of those "Oh man, once every single one of our A-ball guys hits the big-league lineup in two years, they'll all be all-stars!" guys. But in reality, I love prospects truer than anyone, because I love them for what they truly are. (how's *that* for a maelstrom)
  14. Hairyducked Idiot
    That's asking for an awful lot to go right, and assuming that the CBA won't continue to restrict the financial advantages Dodger money would infer. It's pretty Cub-like to be the last to the table on those sorts of competitive advantages, right as they are shut down.
  15. Hairyducked Idiot
    It's definitely better. But I was hoping when we hired Epstein that we'd be aiming for slightly higher than "well, it's not as bad as the Tribune/MacPhail/Hendry era."
  16. Hairyducked Idiot
    I'm on the fence. They screwed the pooch hard in 2012. They're halfway to something not-awful in 2013, but we'll see if they have the will and skill to finish that job. If they don't make some very savvy moves in the remaining half-offseason, they are putting themselves in an awfully bad spot for 2014 as well. But they make enough good moves that I get the impression that when they decide they want to turn it on, it might be impressive. For 2015 and beyond, I'm sure we'll get to the point where the team is pretty good for an extended stretch. But I don't think the other teams in the division are going to just roll over and let us win six straight or anything, so I'm not sure we're actually going to get good bang for our buck ultimately. If you have something like 3 tanked seasons, then 4 division titles in 8 years, have you really come out ahead?
  17. Hairyducked Idiot
    Given my distaste for Szczur, this was the first time so far I didn't think that it was all that hard to come up with three I like way more than anyone else on the list. 8. Maples 9. Vitters 10. Lake
  18. Hairyducked Idiot
    Yeah. That was crazybuckets and I feel the appropriate amount of shame and remorse.
  19. Hairyducked Idiot
    Marlin says we're not interested in him.
  20. Hairyducked Idiot
    A lot of players who never became established major league players were also non-established major league players. You can't assume that Brown is in the former group at this point.
  21. Hairyducked Idiot
    Here's a good set of articles on the subject: http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/how-do-baseball-players-age-part-1/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/how-do-baseball-players-age-part-2/ 24-27 is an overreach. I'll settle for 25-29.
  22. Hairyducked Idiot
    That is a crazy amount of hostility for the suggestion that peaks might be a year earlier than orthodoxy. And the point that it's irrelevant because he's not an established MLB player is dead on, whether you like it or not.
  23. Hairyducked Idiot
    http://www.npbtracker.com/data/player.php?p_id=199 This has me a little less excited. Average fastball velocity down to 88 MPH last season. But maybe rest and TJS can goose it up a little for a one-year run with the Cubs.
  24. Hairyducked Idiot
    It'll probably get its own thread in a minute, but we've apparently signed some crazy hard-throwing side-armed relief pitcher who is Korean but pitches in the Japanese league.
  25. Hairyducked Idiot
    That's fine, but the Bill James number was derived in the 1980s. It's hard to get an accurate look at prime right now, because right now is always changing. I happen to believe that there are a couple of factors at work right now (the weeding out of PEDs, the increased emphasis on defense) that are shoving it a little earlier than usual. I mean, the real answer is that a baseball player's value comes from an odd mix of disparate skills that all have different age curves, and every player possesses those in different mixes. And really, none of it matters because as I mentioned earlier, age curves for established MLB players suffer from huge survivor's bias issues and don't necessarily apply to prospects and non-established players. But that's a tangent to a tangent.
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