smg58

Haggerty draws a ton of walks, but he'll need to hit more to keep that up at higher levels. It will not be for good reasons if we see much of Lockett.

Johnny Lunchbucket wrote: I'm having a hard time imagining the use-case for Davis, much less justify coughing up 3 decent-looking lottery tickets for him, unless it's to purposefully get a pitcher-hitter guy. Can't McNeil provide backup at the corers and also hit? Rivera (I personally am a Rivera skeptic, but just for argument's sake?) It's more than I would give up for somebody who might not be better than Rivera. But maybe some of that AAA hitting is legit, and the light switch will click on at this level given enough chance. I can't imagine planning to use somebody specifically as a hybrid player unless that player is special, though.

They and the Marlins have a similar problem in that most of the baseball fans in their market grew up rooting for somebody else. You have to build up your fan base slowly and carefully -- i.e., not jerking your fans around by holding fire sales more often than you put contending teams together. And even then it's going to take time. But I think they'd be better served charging something like $5 for the upper deck seats. Make it real easy to come to the game. If nobody is buying them anyway, why not? (And the vendors will love them too.) No attention-getting promotion is too ridiculous to be considered, outside of dropping turkeys from a helicopter.

Seems like more of a salary dump than anything else, but he just never distinguished himself enough to be missed.

It will be interesting to see how much Wilmer Flores will cost somebody in comparison.

The Hot Corner wrote: =batmagadanleadoff post_id=660 time=1546747643 user_id=68] Who asked about Ellsbury or Gardner? You asked whether the Yankees or Dodgers would have carried someone like Lagares the past 4 years. SMG58 simply pointed out 2 comparable ( though better) players to Lagares that the Yankees have continued to carry on their roster. Granted, with the Yankees offense, they can afford to carry a defense first centerfielder much better than the Mets.

Like most minor-league signings, I have zero problem adding him for depth but hope he isn't needed.

The Yankees have kept Ellsbury, and re-signed Brett Gardner.

He's comparable OPS-wise to Lagares. He's healthier, his glove is legit, and he does have some pop. He also strikes out way too much and has a career batting average of .221. And he looks to be out of options if his bat gets in the way. It's an upgrade if you assume (and it's a reasonable assumption) that Lagares won't give you a full season, but it's not a huge upgrade. I'm kind of sorry Bobby Wahl is heading to Milwaukee. Not that he showed much here (it didn't help that he got hurt almost immediately), but I think he has more upside than the other righty AAAA relievers the Mets toyed with last year (except maybe Bautista, but he's gone too). And we're at most one injury away from needing one of those guys to step up their game in a way that none of them did last year.

Actually the most surprising thing about the article is the Yankees' apparent willingness to play along, even as the Red Sox make a mockery of the league-wide austerity.

This quote cracked me up: "The Red Sox, one of two teams to go over the cap, will pay a penalty of a little under $12 million and slide back slightly in the June Draft. As Matt Collins points out at Over The Monster, that's $6 million less than they paid Pablo Sandoval not to play for them and roughly what they paid defective Cuban phenom Rusney Castillo to rust over and hit singles in Pawtucket. Boston also won the World Series, you will recall." I'm not sure what the league is getting at. Their players might not be old enough to remember 1994, but presumably they do. And plenty of fans do as well.

A bit more AAV than Familia, but they get a club option for the third year. Robertson is older but he has a good record of staying healthy. Certainly not a bad signing, by any stretch. I'm still waiting for the Phillies to get stupid, as their owner suggested.

I can't fathom anybody (Boras least of all) agreeing to a deal that gets voided if his client doesn't win the MVP. It's every bit as naive to assume that we are getting the maximum amount of money back from Cespedes' insurance policy as it is to assume he will be our everyday left fielder from the middle of May on. As of now he is still slated to resume baseball activities other than running next month, and he certainly won't miss the whole season if he stays on that schedule. We can neither count on him nor on the insurance money being there, which makes it impossible to assume anything. So Harper has two 5+WAR seasons out of seven (only one going by Fangraphs), and that makes him a good bet, at the money we're talking about, to give his new team a bunch of 5+WAR seasons? I'm not buying that at all. He's an excellent bet to be the overall player he's been up till now, which would justify an AAV in the upper 20s for seven or eight years. But he's already turned down a bigger offer than that. Having said that, we're about 9 or 10 million behind last year's payroll (including half of wright's contract). I'd take $10M over last year as progress, even if I think we still could/should do better. I'd take $20M over as getting serious. I'd take breaking even or worse as a major disappointment.

OK that's funny.

I really hope the poor kid wasn't named for this person.

So the Nats are picking up 18 games on the Braves. While (presumably) losing Harper. Interesting. We're going to need to make a mental note to come back to this thread in October.

In hindsight, he would have.

The difference between Grandal and Ramos is nowhere near being worth two extra years, nearly twice the AAV, and a draft pick. The Marlins unsuccessfully tried to extort the Nats over the summer, and are still intent on extorting somebody now. They got very little for moving Stanton and Yelich, and want (need?) to make up for it. But so far, Realmuto is still a Marlin. It's possible that markets will crash for both Realmuto and Grandal, and the winners will be the teams who wait the process out. But in the meantime, I am very willing to give Brodie points for choosing prudence over the splash on this one.

I could see Lugo as a sell-high candidate, but that's only useful if you can replace him without overpaying. It could be done, but I have no idea what was on the table.

There are a lot of things that don't make sense in the projections, starting with Nimmo but they shortchanged Conforto too and probably McNeil as well. If the WAR difference between Alonso and Smith is that big (and this is assuming a modest rookie season for Alonso), there is no way the playing time will be that even of a split. I would also assume that there is no way Frazier starts ahead of McNeil against right-handed pitching. We are trying to win, right?

Play Ball!

A Boy Named Seo wrote: I'd like to see the Mets take a stab at a guy like Drew Pomeranz. He'd surely be cheaper than Vargas but his upside is > Matz. He's an interesting buy-low prospect. His age isn't an issue. I'd consider a year with a team option; that way if he's good, he's still under our control. We'd probably have to go a bit above the $6M that MLBTR predicted to get him to agree to a team option, but if the money is available and our other starting pitching leads are dead ends, it might be a gamble worth taking.

I'm bullish on Wheeler, but you have to assume Jake can't duplicate that. Matz could go either way. The talent is there, and he could have done worse coming back from the injury, but he's got to do a much better job of keeping the ball in the yard. Vargas is probably capable of 5 adequate innings, like he did the last six weeks of the season, IF he stays healthy. There's no good reason to expect more than that. Sneaky options? The Yankees want major league players for Sonny Gray, unless the prospect package is as good as what they gave up for him in the first place. The latter is not going to happen, and it's not clear what major league players (if any) were put on the table. I'd offer Frazier. The upside is obviously not as high, but he has outperformed Gray since the middle of 2017, the deal would basically be payroll-neutral, the Yankees want to get Andujar off third base, and Frazier made a more favorable impression with the Yankees than Gray has. Another player whose team very clearly wanted to move him, but who hasn't gone anywhere yet, is Zack Greinke. The contract is daunting, but it would be a lot less daunting if the D-backs were willing to accept Cespedes as part of a return package. That's not a given, but they'd free themselves of the third year of Greinke's contract, they'd save some money this year if the insurance policy goes with Cespedes, and a healthy Cespedes might be easier to move next offseason (if not sooner) than Greinke would be. The last part is a very big if, but I see no harm in asking.

Hopefully people have figured out by now that Beltran and Martinez were the best players available, who just happened to also be Latino. I wouldn't be in on Harper, at the money he is likely to get. He had fewer WAR than Nimmo last year, and only half a WAR more than Conforto in 2017 in 50 more plate appearances. If I have those kind of resources to spend, I want the upgrade to be unequivocal -- which it would be if Machado were replacing Frazier, for example.

Benjamin Grimm wrote: I haven't really paid much attention to this kind of stuff. In the past, how accurate have their forecasts proven to be? That's a perfectly fair question.