duan

marlon byrd is gary matthews jr lite. lite in that he's not going to get as absurd a contract but he's going to get way over paid on the basis of some reasonable counting stats in Texas.

and baltimore signing him means no 1st round pic for the Braves, who've managed to demonstrate BOTH the possible downsides of offering Billy Wagner arbitration in offering it to Soriano & Gonzalez

jesus this is way too hard.

I thought this was going to be about ian bladergroen

less then 6 years service time so he was only a free agent as he was non-tendered, presume that means it's up to use whether or not we want to tender him a contract

Nady would be a fun fit, can play any corner but 3rd (he has actually played it just not very often) and is platoonable to allow us to keep getting murphy reps if he deserves them. However, if you're telling me that he costs 7*3 years I go you gotta do better then that.

Centerfield wrote: We do know that he wouldn't have accepted, since Boston offered it, Wagner walked, and now the Sox get the picks the Mets would have gotten. well not necessarily since (and this was my point about having signed k-rod last year we should also have gone for Derek Lowe and whomever else was a type A) The Braves may sign another Type A free Agent. We'd still get the sandwich pick, but not the first round one. Also lets not forget that there are 15 teams that he could have signed for where the 1st round pick wouldn't be offered either. I can stand over saving the 3.5 million as a legitimate call - a safety first one all right but a legitimate call.

it's funny, that trade at the time was supposed to include Escobar and the mainstream media take on it was that the mets would have been mad, and they were MUCH better off getting bordick for http://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/29/sports/baseball-the-mets-get-more-for-less.html Melvin Mora yet Mora was by far the most productive player of any mentioned anywhere in that article.

you can't blame Cora for being prepared to play with a busted thumb, that's fucking sore and admirable on every level. you CAN blame the manager and/or the GM for not having a better plan to deal with it. He was doing something which actually have could hurt his long term career potential to do what he could for a team in the mire. As for the deal, it's ok - same as everyone else, if that's the two million that they can't then use to find a legitmate corner OF with than it's a problem but otherwise i'd give you odds that his eqa will be as good as Scutaro's next year and he'll earn a lot more money.

I'm not voting for McGwire, but we're going to get in really sticky territory now that we know that 104 (or whatever the number was) of MLB players definitively failed drugs tests, obviously the player who's be the best player of his generation was one of them. Does this mean that we have no Alex Rodriguez in the hall of fame? Similarly people have mentioned about Tim Raines' candidature being invalidated by his cocaine abuse. Frankly, I don't think cocaine was used to be performance enhancing and that his use of cocaine was recreational, that he was prepared to challenge his dependancy and come out the other side is actually a positive aspect in my book. The lack of appreciation for his consistently high obp and his extremely efficient and plentiful stealing proves that Rickey Henderson knew what he was doing when he was trying to make his name, the gap between them is a few points of eqa and a slightly longer tail of speed.

It's funny, that whole thing has a certain degree of resonance because I live in a country that for a period of time had a part of it that had *WAY* more people dieing in it than it should have, and if you went by statistics nobody would ever have come to Ireland, yet even though South Armagh was only 60 miles up the road the 'troubles' have had no visible impact on my life in Dublin, apart from the odd issue with bomb scares. Similarly I've spent a fair few nights out on the tear up in Belfast before the Good Friday agreement and never had anything but hospitality and fun. Everywhere has it's dangers and upsides and downsides but the world is about going to places and experiencing things. I wouldn't be strolling down Kabul waving a stars & stripes, but South America isn't a warzone.

oh that and the not just having the proper names and players etc.

my problem with OOTP was it seemed to be locked into a curious hybrid of 'in game managing' where you're making a fairly limited set of decisions in game vs 'GM managing' where you're just doing the roster and letting the results happen. If you're going to allow the in game managing i think you need to allow it be a bit more then they do, or else just force people to stick to being a GM and GM alone. I can never buy into the 'autoplay' thing as I'm left feeling "... but if" Football Manager wrestles with this quite a bit as well, and sometimes gets it very right, but can also take way to long to play.

are we so quick to push delgado out of town? I'm not paying him 12 million or anything, but if you could get him on a one year deal at 4-6 wouldn't you do it?

Jorge Posada's elbow was really, really pathetic. It wasn't sore or anything but it was the hallmark of a total wanker.

and another thing while I'm at it. This nonsense about 'franchises' all comes from the fact that it's a closed shop in sporting terms. Eliminate the closed shop and you eliminate all this whoring about of my MLB/NFL/NBA team. That drives me crazy too. If Portland is enough of a baseball town it's AAA team will get promoted etc etc etc. I do find it funny, how a country that's allegedly free-market & competition based approaches sports virtually entirely on a cartel basis.

i said this ages ago about Promotion & Relegation. What drives me maddest about US Sports is that there's no punishment for failure in a sporting context, indeed, you could argue that you actually get rewarded for it be preferential terms in player selection. That's insane. It also means there's NO REASON to invest. You wouldn't need a salary floor if you had relegation, because Pittsburgh would be relegated. As opposed to this kind of nonsense where halfway through the season they give away all their players, you'd find that teams would be trying to MAKE THEIR TEAMS BETTER all the time. Sure, you'll get a few 'midtable' teams who're neither one thing or the other but it'd stop this absolute shit where people deliberately make their team worse for this year. I'd have two 16 team "MLB" divisions, each team has 5 games against the other, making 150 games. In the second MLB DIVISION you drop to "AAA" Then you'd have THE MLB CUP where teams from A level up get to play against teams in the MAJORS - you might need to start that regionally but that'd replace the 12 missing games and the ALL STAR GAME and associated shite.

one thing that people are forgetting even about type a free agents is that there's no guarantee that you actually get a pick in the first round for them. That only happens if the pick is between 16-30 and if the team doesn't sign any higher ranked free agents. Sure we may have got a sandwich pick and a round 2/3/4 pick but it's not like we're getting first dibs on a top 5 pick.

let me see if I can get the sequence right though; we pay him $1 million to decline his option. We then offer him arbitration. Now, if we offer him arbitration the minimum his salary can be is 20% less then his salary in 2009 (10.5 million). Which is 8.4 million. So if he accepted arbitration he'd be getting a minimum of 9.4 million. Which is quite a bit more then his option, and to my mind quite a bit more then he's likely to get on the Free Agent market. hmmmmmm

if sheffield wants to have an extension at a modest raise to what the mets are paying him this year, I'd be all on for that. I wouldn't just double what we're paying him I'd treble it. And if he isn't happy with his 1.2 million well then maybe i'd go as high as 1.6. But I AIN'T paying him 10 million next year to be Moises Alou renewed contract part 2.

he got BADLY shaken up by it. smelling salts were out, he tried to say I'm ok but nobody was having any of it. I'd say he's gone till tuesday anyway and I wouldn't be surprised if it was longer. It really was a big ding off the helmet.

="Edgy DC":20movskg]We've missed three batsmen a bunch more though.[/quote:20movskg] totally, it's just that Pelfrey & Hernandez seem to alternate good & bad outings and whoever's in the 4th & 5th slots is usually pretty junky so on the days where we don't score 7 runs we lose more then half the time. I sorta feel if we just had one more stable starter we'd be close to .500 now and if the batters came back could make a go of it.

every time they look like they *just might* put something together that'd mean they'd claw their way TOWARDS being at least able to duke it out in September they lose two straight and fall back off. I'm still cool with saying if they go 13-6 or something in the remaining August games they'll be well in it, but there's only so many times they can fail to actually have one of those runs and still be able to put enough of them together. We've really missed a healthy John Maine.