Cris E

Brayan Medina come on down!

Bundy was just a flyer on guy in a value trough. He could bounce back to be useful or tradeable. This trade is about being a functional team in a winnable division with increased playoff spots available. They had to get someone decent to front a team that wants to forget 2021 even happened and try to roll straight through from 2020 to 2022.

Eight more off-seasons like this and he'll weigh almost 400 lbs.

A couple weeks back Rocco was talking about having him play a little deeper and use his speed to come in rather than go back. It would trade a few singles for getting to the wall with time to check up, which I think everyone would take.

Stewart has had a lot of injury distractions over the years, and I wonder if that's made it easier to avoid hard questions about his approach, work ethic, etc. If the past year or two is when he was finally healthy for extended periods but still didn't get the results, maybe that's what pushed him to finally listen more and study his craft a little differently.

Starting pitchers don't fall off a cliff at 32 like 2B. The risk with them isn't age so much as the nearly inevitable injuries.

Perhaps he's the missing veteran for the bullpen. If he hasn't pitched since he was 12 he'll need some time to get the arm in shape.

My guess is it's a contingency as much as anything. Buxton gets hurt frequently and seriously, and who is the backup CF right now? I'd trust Santana over Rosario (speaking of no experience.) So in addition to keeping Byron on his toes they'll have an actual option in case he can't hit, gets hurt or otherwise fails. And it also results in in an improved utility skill set for Danny.

I don't know, once guys move away from a defensive spot they rarely come back to it in the same way. Cabrera springs to mind because he's the exception, not because he was awesome (in LF or 3b.)

I say 2. You have to allow for mistakes, but Sano and Arcia are more or less stationary so Byron shouldn't have too much trouble avoiding them.

3) Kids get better and injured guys return. It's what Ryan is counting on, and in some cases it's very real. In the case of the 2016 bullpen TR might be counting on May and Meyer. He could be dreaming of Tonkin finally becoming something. He could have a spot in reserve for the injured guys riding into Spring Training on white stallions to save the day. He might still be waiting to make a move in April once he sees what he has and who ended up without a job at the end of camp. But there are enough open spots in the pen that he really should have locked one down with someone new, and I don't think anyone is defending the complete lack of action. The only thing I'll say about bullpen FA is they are incredibly erratic from year to year, they get hurt, you can usually go find a Jepson when you need one in the middle of a season, and he's had some pretty good luck fashioning a pen out of junk over the years. Here's hoping he cuts bait on more than just Duensing and some of the young herd (Pressely and Tonkin and Graham and on and on) step up and grab the innings. But I understand a lot of his other idleness. He kept Plouffe because Sano is still an unknown. He couldn't stay healthy last year as a DH, so TR wants to see him play 150 games before he dumps Trevor and Molitor finds himself playing a SS out of position for four months. He didn't go find an OF because he has a handful to sort through. He did pick up a catcher on the cheap, and while he still has Suzuki around for a year he can find out if Murphy is the guy or he still needs to shop. I have no answer for signing a DH this winter. That was weird. But he did offer Torri another year, so who knows what he's thinking about the outfield. Maybe Sano was slated to go to 3B until Hunter retired.

Well now you want it both ways: not signing FAs is bad strategy, but signing them is not strategy either. So if the bullpen is in the shape you say it is (similar to the rotation a few years ago) then signing FAs would once again be desperation instead of strategy. I'm not confident you'll be happy with anything TR does. Ryan has two things to invest/spend/allocate: dollars and playing time. When you have holes you focus on investing dollars to get guys, but when you have young players you focus on allocating playing time. There's usually a lot of grey in these cases, but when you have a Sano or a Rosario or even a Duffy you want to give them a chance to take a job before dredging up a Bourne or Stauffer to fill the spot, regardless of money. Mazeville is talking about broad philosophy, not specific players, and he's right.

I think they'll keep Rosario in LF, Arcia at DH and Vargas in AAA until either Buxton or Vargas forces their hand. Then we'll send Rosario down and bring up the one that can't be denied. The improved defense is a huge part of the recent improvement in pitching, which is a huge part of the improvement in record. I think Molitor knows that and is trying to find a polite way of getting it without knocking Arcia's glovework directly.

1.2E+02 if you're going geeky, plus it adds a fine gloss of "of course it's a long shot" (which appears to be needed here.)

Assuming Sano makes it to Target Field in 2015, what should the thresholds be for dealing with Plouffe? How well or poorly does Sano have to play to make Trevor completely extraneous (or vital) at 3b, and does he have more value as a trade chip at 3b or as a utility guy or OF?

Hicks didn't get the nod in CF because position players are held to a different standard, he got it because they traded away all their better options and didn't leave themselves much choice. They want to be in a position to pick the kid when he's ready, not out of necessity. Mays and Meyer should earn a job just as Hicks would have if Revere were still around.

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They have the middle and back of the rotation covered in depth, so the only space is in front. They need a #1 to put in front of Hughes Nolasco Gibson May and anyone else looking for innings. None of those names mentioned above make any sense in front of Hughes or between Gibson and the approaching talent like Mayer and Berrios. We've got 2-4-4-4-youth so we need someone in front or just spend on OF defense and wait for the kids.

Sansevere is, before all other things, a bad football writer. Anything he says or writes about baseball comes in beneath, behind and below that.

To be fair, Olberman was simply quoting Will Carroll, and Carroll was the one who said "Coward". This reaffirms what I think about him, which is that he's a moron and likes pretending he's in the know. He followed this twit with another that says he thinks Steinbach is likely to get the MIN job, and one more where he has no idea who might be hired in AZ. (Hint: half of the 89 OAK team has been hired in AZ within the past six months. If Terry S is getting a managing gig he'll be closer to the front of the line down there where Tony LaRussa and Dave Stewart are hiring. Molitor is ahead of him in MIN.)

You can change the clubhouse culture by mixing in a couple red-*ss guys to stir things up a little. I agree with Mackey that it was the reason they tried bringing some of those geezers in last spring (but not Kubel - he's a quiet one.) They were more effective when Hunter and Morneau were around, not just because they were playing well but because they ran over catchers and got on teammates and ran a clubhouse. It's part of why Hunter got that huge-tastic deal in 2008: he brings more than 20 HR power and good CF defense. They need to go get one of these types again to fill a corner OF spot. They have a roster spot and money, so there's not much excuse to fall back on stiffs like Bartlett to fill the role.

Be fair to the org: they did dump half the coaches over the past couple years, and I could easily see Anderson getting the axe this winter based on the poor return on their pitching investment this season. If Sano and some of the other young studs had shown up on schedule and failed then I think Gardy would be facing some music as well. But they didn't arrive, and he got good seasons from a handful of unexpected youngsters (Santana? Escobar?? Vargas?!?) which will count in his favor as they decide on 2015. In 21015 look for Gardy and the new guys to stay, Anderson to go.

I just sent a link to this thread to Jeff Moore. It's unlikely they'd have time or interest in following up with the staff to see what changed (if anything), but I bet they do care about publishing stale notes. The shelf life of a scouting report on a 21 year old has to be pretty short if the kid is learning anything at all.

The bias isn't in the voting for starting lineups. There are only nine or ten names there out of dozens. The serious bias is in the selection of pitching and backups. The best teams with the most wins get the most all-stars, but the causality might not be players bringing wins as much as wins making all-stars. There are two forces that multiply each other to concentrate the player selections on the best teams: the manager comes from the team that won the World Series, and the manager gets to select his guys for many secondary roles. If every team got to provide the manager at some point (similar to site selection or One Player Per Team) then this might start to even out. But team selection stays in the hands of the winning teams and they'll keep appointing their own guys as much as possible. It turns out all-stars are usually not flash in the pan meteors, so having a bunch of them is also predictive in how many games you might win next year. But the the non-stats factor in how they're selected that makes a straight wins formula hard. Second place is waayyy behind first place. TRDR version: Look through the over-acheivers and count how many WS wins there are versus the other lists.

That sounds good on the surface, but that 42 run DET series was backed up against a 20 inning scoreless streak that was only a couple weeks removed from another 19 inning scoreless streak. This offense is far from sound. We may be in the middle of the pack overall, but our pitching isn't good enough to survive low scoring games and there have been far too many. There have been eight games of 10+ runs scored vs ten times shut out, but 101 runs in those 18 games (5.6 runs/game) has only netted a 8-10 record. Nine other games we only scored 1 run, which did produce one win, but that only reinforces my point (4.0 r/g should get you more than 9-18.) The measure of an offense is similar to the measure of a starting pitcher: did it gave the team a chance to win? People (rightfully) complain about the crappy rotation, but games where we score 0 or 1 run are going to be losses, and there have been a lot of very flat stretches where this offense gave no chance for a win.