Hairyducked Idiot

Castro isn't a really expletive good player yet. He projects well, but by the time he gets there, he probably won't be that cheap anymore.

Sure. But what if Pujols re-signs in the World Series glow, and Fielder just decides he wants to go somewhere else for some reason. In a vacuum, if Votto were available for a trade, I'd see no reason to call Castro untouchable.

I'm assuming you mean the 7-WAR elite hitter as one of the most valuable trade pieces in all of baseball, but I think you are underselling Castro.

THE SOSA HOME RUN OFF THE CAMERA SHACK??? THE AWESOME BLOWOUT IN GAME TWO SPOILED ONLY BY DUSTY LEAVING IN PRIOR FOR LIKE 200 PITCHES? ARAMIS'S INSANELY HIGH ALMOST FOUL GRAND SLAM WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE? KERRY WOOD [expletive] TYING THE GAME WITH A [expletive] HOME RUN The Marlins pitcher falling and throwing a pitch into the first-base dugout.

he seems like the type that would just have his intern do the powerpoint'n While he takes his wife to Starbucks.

I bet I won't hear a word from him.

I'm still mad at Tyler Houston for borrowing my sharpie, signing everyone's stuff, and then handing it back to me without signing mine.

What if Fielder decides to sign somewhere else? The Cubs are supposed to be leveraging their money into premium talent. Votto is about as premium as it gets. Cheap talent is nice, but we don't need it the way some teams need it.

That has to be a joke. I'm not sure who is perpetrating it. Sullivan? His editors? The guy who says he saw Epstein? But somebody is trolling somebody here.

For Votto? Possibly

Worst case scenario at this point >>>>> more hendry

do you ever pay attention or do you just wiki-it after the fact and pretend to understand it in its totality? Pay attention to what? The endless stream of contradictory rumors credited to unnamed sources with vague descriptions like "inside the baseball industry"?

And he was publicly besties with Hendry, right up until it turned out he'd fired him a month ago without telling anyone. I think Ricketts has proven that any correlation between what he intends to do and the public perception he gives off is purely coincidental. That's different. You are comparing the public perception of an employee of Ricketts with the publically stated model of how Ricketts wants to build his baseball team. Unless of course you think Ricketts is trying to throw people off by saying he wants to emulate the Red Sox when in reality he is building the team like the Dodgers. Expect the Ned Colletti hiring any day now. No, I think he wants to emulate the Red Sox in broad strokes. But he's proven, at least to me, that he's a patient and cautious decision-maker. Maybe he wants Epstein no matter what, but I think there's also a real possibility he just wants to interview several people on his short list, and won't make up his mind until he's done the interviews.

Well, in that sense, I agree. But the public perception is also that the Cubs would be idiots not to make Ryne Sandberg the next manager. So the public perception can go take a flying [expletive] at the moon.

And he was publicly besties with Hendry, right up until it turned out he'd fired him a month ago without telling anyone. I think Ricketts has proven that any correlation between what he intends to do and the public perception he gives off is purely coincidental.

I think it's fairly obvious that his position on the list is "If you want, the job you're hired!" To pretend otherwise would be as transparent as the Bears insisting they wanted Martz all along. Why is that obvious?

The Cubs would only look bad if everyone assumes Epstein is their first choice. All that's been reported is that the Cubs have sought permission. So that means he's on the list. Who knows where on the list he is.

Turk Wendell was awesome.

I'd assume that if Theo was 95% wanting to stay in Boston he wouldn't risk hurting his standing among Sox fans by interviewing with the Cubs and then staying in Boston. The Red Sox guys talked about this in their radio interview. They said they have a blanket policy not to discuss this stuff, because someone comes out looking bad. Either the team looks bad because they get turned down, or the interviewee looks bad because they don't get offered the job.

I stopped caring about Red Sox fans' opinions when one of them posted that if he were in charge of the Cubs, he'd throw Vitters into the fire next year but make Jackson prove himself at AAA.

It's not just the contracts, it's the lack of premium talent. The 2011 Red Sox, who won 90 games and missed the playoffs, had five position players with a better fWAR than our best. The Cardinals had four. Pitching-wise, we have Garza and a few other useful arms. Starlin Castro still gives up too much of his value in the field, as does Ramirez. The latter keeps getting worse with age, the former will probably get better eventually, but there's no guarantee it happens right away. The Red Sox brass interview talked about this yesterday too, but it's getting harder and harder to build a team with older free agent talent. Teams are getting really savvy about maximizing their six years of team control and also trying to lock guys down when they are worth it beyond that. So, yes, the Cubs might be a playoff team quickly. But that's going to have to involve having a very high success rate in pursuing high-profile free agents, not having any of them go Crawford on you, and in general having a decently lucky 2012 on the field. That's an awful lot of moving parts, and I don't think it's unreasonable for an outside observer to think that 2014+ is the most likely time frame for the next Cubs playoff appearance.

Stupid question: How much extra revenue does a playoff run generate for these teams? The Brewers aren't going to be suddenly able to afford to keep Fielder or anything, right?

do you mean to suggest that the Boston fans are not as excited/engulfed/interested in who we sign for a GM as we are? NO WAY Seeing as how it's their GM, they would have at least a little reason to be interested.

It doesn't. He might be staying, he might be going, but nothing in that interview gave the slightest hint either way, by design.

That sentence was immediately preceeded by them saying he was still the man or something like that. It was a two-faced answer. "He's going to be our GM, unless he decides he's not." Dodged. But nobody heard that. Because they said so much other quote worthy stuff. Nobody heard that because they wanted to hear other stuff. Because it leads to the answer they want and because it's more exciting that way. If we were Boston fans hoping for him to stay, we wouldn't be focusing on the second part of the quote. There'd be lots of talk about how they were asked directly if Epstein was still the man and ownership saying "He is." Just like when they were asked about non-lateral moves. They said their policy was to allow such contact requests, but there have been times where they haven't, and declined to elaborate on specifics. But I've seen it said a few times now that they said they would grant an interview if it was for a non-lateral move. Nah...Boston fans on SoSH were focused on the same "quote worthy" stuff we were. Many believed that Theo was on his way out after that interview. I was reading SoSH at the time, and I just went back to check the thread. In a four-page thread about the subject, I saw one poster, *maybe* two, who you could describe as talking about the interview as being a sign that Epstein may be out and/or allowed to leave. The Boston fans on SoSH barely commented on that stuff and seemed much more interested in the Crawford/managers/fitness stuff.