Frayed Knot

CloserAge2011 TeamStatus for 2012Jonathan Papelbon31Red SoxPhillies - 4 yrs/$50mil + 2016 optionRyan Madson31PhilliesRejected arb -- signed for 1 yr/$10mil w/RedsFrancisco Rodriguez30Mets/Brewers1 yr/$8mil avoiding arbitrationHeath Bell34PadresMarlins - 3 yrs/$27milFrancisco Cordero37RedsSigned w/Blue Jays - 1 yr/$4.5milFrank Francisco32Blue JaysMets - 2 yrs/$12milJoe Nathan37TwinsRangers - 2 yrs/$14.5mil + 2014 optionBrad Lidge35Phillies---Matt Capps28TwinsRe-upped w/Twins - 1 yr/$4.75mil + 2013 optionDavid Aardsma28AAA (Mariners)---Mike Gonzalez33Balt/Texas---Jonathan Broxton27DodgersRoyals - 1 yr/$4milOctavio Dotel37Jays/CardsTigers - 1 yr/$3.5mil + 2013 optionJohn Grabow32Cubs---Pat Neshek30Padres---Jon Rauch32Blue JaysMets - 1 yr/$3.5 + 'performance bonus'Kerry Wood34Cubs1 yr/$3mil + $3mil option for 2013

TheOldMole wrote: Why are RBIs not a meaningful metric? Each one represents a run scored as a result of something the guy did with his bat. But they're very situational and line-up and team-dependent. They measure what they measure but as a comparative tool it's very flawed.

So Prince is now signed through 2010 Miguel Cabrera through 2015 (@ $21, $21, $22 & $22) and Victor Martinez through 2014 (@ $13, $13 & $12) Now Martinez is (most likely) out for this year, but that still leaves at least two years of trying to stick those 3 guys into roughly 2.5 positions - Martinez only caught 26 games last year (DH = 122) so it would be tough to think of him as anything other than a part-time at best catcher following a year off at age 34 - Prince is hardly a great defensive player at 1B but he's better than Cabrera. Not sure if the Tiggers will try either one at 3rd where they've kind of got a hole after Brandon Inge suddenly fell into an abyss last year, but I can imagine either staying there full time. - Then throw in the approx 9-15 games per year where they'll have no DH option and it gets even tighter for for up to 10% of the season On the other side of the coin ... these dudes are gonna MASH, and they're get to do so in front of Verlander 20% of the time.

LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr wrote: ... between Cabrera and Fielder, the team should have no problem staying afloat. Between Cabrera and Fielder, ANYTHING will have trouble staying afloat.

And all this just as the rumor mill was claiming no team was willing to go more than five years. Looks like Scotty found his sucker once again.

Edgy DC wrote: http://www.baseball-reference.com/minors/player.cgi?id=hernan001joh A shame to see "Unknown" with regard to what arm he threw with. Ask Keith! As per Keith explaining in his book about his life-long comfort at hitting against LHPs, John Hernandez was a lefty.

Sickels puts the Mets in the middle of the pack as he ranks the systems overall.

Vic Sage wrote: 1. Best Picture: "The Artist" ''The Descendants" ''Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" ''The Help" ''Hugo" ''Midnight in Paris" ''Moneyball" ''The Tree of Life" ''War Horse." Interesting that they "only" went with eight when they had the option of going with as many as ten In the end it's going to come down to "The Descendants" and "Moneyball" - ELAIC isn't getting good enough reviews (which makes you wonder what it's doing here) - TREE OF LIFE was more a critical fave but didn't have enough popular appeal - THE HELP has that whole political correctness thing going on which will get it some smaller awards (like supporting actress) but not this one - HUGO; too much of a kiddie flick - THE ARTIST; I have nothing to say about this movie - MIDNIGHT IN PARIS; Woody had enough trouble getting wins when he was on top of his game - WAR HORSE; probably has a better shot at winning Tonys than Oscars Of the ones I saw (Moneyball) I select Moneyball

John Cougar Lunchbucket wrote: They let him go when his eyesight went bad. And yet John Sterling soldiers on. it is high, it is far, IT IS GON ....... no wait, it's off the wall ... and now the umps are calling the batter out so he must have caught it Suzyn. We can't see everything here from the Lowes Home Improvement Booth, but at first it looked like ...

Cincinnati in the house .... and he/she is either a night owl or a real early riser. Welcome to the 'pool, and may we assume you brought some chili?

Nymr83 wrote: Why was St Louis stupid enough to build the stadium without ironclad gaurantees? If I were a municipality, I wouldnt pay for a stadium (I'd maybe go so far as to offer a tax break or supporting road improvements for privately financed one, but i'm iffy even on that), but if I were to build one, there'd be so many doomsday clauses that the franchise would be afraid to even mention moving, they'd have to gaurantee 8 home games per year for 40 years or face heavy fines if they reneg. In theory that's fine - and personally I agree with everything you say - but when the NFL dangles a team in front of the city fathers and tells them to pay up or we'll go elsewhere very few politicians (even the ones who actually want to) are strong enough to resist that and go down with the label that THEY were the ones who let the team slip away and allowed the city to fall into second-class status. That ironclad type deal is what the Islanders have on Long Island..and it's a horrible situation for everyone. Except there the building is only part of the problem. The main one is that previous absentee ownerships ceded over control of things like parking revenue, merchandising, concessions to an outside entity via a very lengthy deal. Throw in a too-long TV deal which has gone from best in the league to barely adequate during its life span and they've severely capped their income as other teams have grown theirs. It's still a shitty situation but it's mostly of the team's own doing.

Edgy DC wrote: You know, you could really get caught up in a racket, building a stadium and tearing it down every ten years --- getting folks to pay for part of the new one, getting them to pay for pieces of the old one. You could definitely get a Producers-like scheme rolling. Even better, slap some new fa�ade pieces on one year, auction them off the next, replace them regularly, but the structure still stands. Ka-ching! Speaking of stadium scams, I see where the St Looie Rams have "volunteered" to be the home team during the NFL's annual game in London for each of the next three seasons, meaning that real home games in eastern Missouri now number seven per season rather than eight. Convenient also that this three year stint lasts exactly as long as the team's lease at the domed stadium that was built specifically for them not all that many years ago. After that the Rams are often stapled to the short list of teams that would jump at the opportunity to go to LA when and if a stadium is built there specifically to lure an NFL franchise. If such a move does involve the Rams it would be a case of them moving Back to LA following their move from LA to StL when ... wait for it ... they had a stadium built for them. So, city of St Louis, how's that public expenditure working out for you? -- nothing like pouring public money into an already profitable private business for the purpose of supposedly bringing entertainment to the public which lasts until ... well until a better offer comes around from someplace else. I confess that I have no actual idea of what percentage of the money the city put into that building (although I'm betting that the number falls between 'Virtually Everything' and 'Everything') but it could turn out to mean, what, just 20-some years of a team and (unless I'm mistaken) never even a Super Bowl there even though it included the cost of a dome in an area which doesn't really need a dome and the SB is usually the big carrot hung out there in order to get cities to finance the building of domed stadia.

I remember Fossum as a 1st round draft pick for the Sawx and one labeled 'untouchable' by many fans as he worked his way through their system. Eventually dealt to Arizona in the Curt Schilling trade which, in retrospect, is a deal I suspect the Fenway faithful are probably OK with now. Since then he's toiled for Tampa, San Diego, Pittsburgh, Detroit, the Mets, the Yanx, the Cubs, and then back to the Mets (signed Feb 2011) - seeing ML action during that journey only for the Rays, Tigers & Mets. In all those transactions only the DBacks to the Rays was via a trade. Every team since released him to be subsequently picked up by the next as a FA. I think it says a lot about the second chances of first round picks ... and of the value of being left-handed.

then we're gonna party like it's nineteen sixty nine

I noticed this flick on a surprising number of year-end TOP TEN lists. Not that I thought it was terrible, but the critical reviews seemed better in most cases than did ordinary person reviews (like what we've got here for instance) and while that's certainly not all that uncommon it does seem so for this type of movie.

I've been meaning to check out THE CANDIDATE again one of these days seeing as how I saw it once like a million years ago and remember little. At times in this one it seemed like Clooney/Morris campaign speeches were included for the purpose not of advancing the plot but so George could capture the unofficial title of leading ersatz political hero of the left since the cancelation of WEST WING took Martin Sheen's President Bartlet out of the running.

Yeah, the Marlins sign Heath Bell for mega-bucks to be their closer and are suddenly their shocked, **SHOCKED** to discover that their former guy has been lying about his age.

Or maybe, being a pitcher, he just wasn't pitchy enough. And what is it with StL Cardinals and singing offspring? Wasn't Ozzie Jr part of that show a few years back?

I never did see an accounting on what the "setbacks" were following the TJ

I thought Joe McGrane was going to be a major star

It's even on Eutaw Street, that's right where Camden Yards sits. Coincidence? ... I don't think so!

Lefties hadn't been invented yet when he first started.

Written and directed by George Clooney, he also casts himself as Democratic Governor (from PA) Mike Morris in the midst of a run for president. Philip Seymour Hoffman runs his campaign Paul Giamatti runs the camp for the opposing Democrat hopeful And Marisa Tomei is the NYTimes political reporter aggressively digging for the next scoop So with all that fire power the movie centers around Ryan Gosling as the young calculating brains to PSH's more passionate guts on Senator Morris's campaign committee. The hi-jinx ensues when a back-stabbing power struggle emerges for control of the campaign just as the Ohio primary appears to hold the key to the nomination and eventually the presidency (the unseen Republican challenger is dismissed as a turkey). So all this intrigue and double-crossing adds up to ... ... not all that much I'm afraid. I found the stories of how the campaign pros go about screwing each other only mildly interesting and sometimes not all that well explained. And I suppose the overall moral of the story is that politics can be a dirty business, killing idealism as it goes. -- gee, thanks George! -- but even aside from not telling us much we didn't already know it lacked both the intrigue and the complex characters of, say, Clooney's vastly superior 'Michael Clayton'

And six years it is @ $10mil/per So that makes it $111.7mil (60 + 51.7) over six seasons all in ... or just under $19mil/yr For comparison purposes, the tab on Dice-K ran about $101 over the same time period.

Ceetar wrote: Maybe I don't follow enough Red Sox fans, but are they killing Crawford for waiting? Or they blaming it on out of shape from fried chicken and beer? Are there beat writers tweeting every skeptical medical decision, right or wrong, from the last 6 years? I don't know, I'm just saying that fans who think medical decisions that look so simple to us outsiders aren't, otherwise there'd be not such thing as second opinions, multiple options, or actual malpractice suits. And that those who think those questions are unique to their team's medical staff need to get out a little more. Two years back, the Sox sat Pedroia out from late June until late August claiming he needed rest & rehab but not surgery. He made it back to the lineup, played in two games, then sat out the rest of the year and had the surgery they were trying to avoid.