Jake

You always say you're basically out of cash when you're really about 10% away from your projected maximum. Then you can still get the guy you want, but you might be able to convince him you can't give him what he wants.

QUOTE (ptatc @ Dec 9, 2014 -> 09:39 AM) This is the key. He is only going to pitch 160-175 effectively. How do you want to sparse them out. If you put him in the rotation at the beginning of the season, he will be gassed in August and could hurt the team. My vote would be to sart him in Charlotte and limit his innings early on. It's not out of the possibility that the Sox will have him in the Chicago pen for the first 1/4 of the season then by July work him into the rotation. He will learn to use his pitches to get MLB hitters out and move on to the rotation. I think that is what the Sox will do, although I think starting in the minors would be better. This is actually a plausible and defensible plan. I suppose the budget-conscious thing could be to start in Charlotte and if he succeeds there as expected, call him up and have him do some relief appearances at first to lighten the load. I don't love that plan, though, just because I think it is hard on a lot of guys to switch back and forth to and from the rotation.

QUOTE (Real @ Dec 9, 2014 -> 06:51 AM) Does Danks plus Anderson land Kemp? Salary swap plus a legit prospect? Would you do it if you were Hahn? Right now Kemp is unwantable. We don't have to give up actual good players to get him. It's just a matter of whether we can stomach his contract

I wanted to say that baseball reporting beats all the other sports, but the existence of Harold Reynolds may make that statement inaccurate

Put your sack on the table Hahn, sign Scherzer!!!

"Clearly a rental player" - Heyman

I really don't like giving up the presumptive MLB starting 2B for the next X years for one year of Samardzija. It's well-known, I suppose, that I just don't think Samardzija is that great. I hope the Sox see something in him that hasn't really been there in his past production, which wouldn't merit this kind of return for a one-year rental

My feeling is that if you're going to lose a pick, go ahead and grab other guys while you're at it

There's no good reason to think Micah Johnson is ready for MLB. He played at a pretty "meh" level in AAA last year. It also remains unclear whether he's an acceptable defender. All indications are that he needs more time.

QUOTE (ptatc @ Dec 8, 2014 -> 11:45 PM) I really can't see that. Supposedly WAR looks at "just another guy" that can be acquired but not an average. Kershaw is only 7 wins better than him and that is the top in the game? Sorry to derail the discussion Ill stop but using WAR as the only justification to refute a comment whenit is so abstract always irks me. Yeah, we're comparing to the "average replacement" player, which means that lots of replacements will be better or worse than 0 WAR. I think the main thing about WAR that is counterintuitive is just that it's not going to give any one player a ton of credit for winning a game. You're not going to play so well in a single that game that you get anything close to 1 WAR. But, in our minds, we might be thinking, "this game was won by THIS guy." But WAR says no, all kinds of other guys had to not f*** up to make that possible so they get some measure of credit (even if credit = not being docked WAR). But it also seeks to remove context, so that if Clayton Kershaw played for teams that aren't nearly as good, we still can compare him to players that are on great teams. Pitching WAR is a little more debatable. Over small sample sizes, including at the level of a single season, FIP-based WAR is generally more accurate. Over longer stretches, though, RA/9-WAR is better...you can think of that as an ERA-based WAR. I usually look at both.

QUOTE (ptatc @ Dec 8, 2014 -> 11:38 PM) Exactly, so the WAR is abtract enough that how will you know if it actually is a good thing to help your team. So how does a GM build a team based on something that has no correlation to actual wins. Especially when the elusive replacement player doesn't exist either. I would venture to guess that WAR has more correlation to actual wins than any other statistic

Danish and Michalczewski can be parted with. These are the kinds of players you give up in these deals. High risk high upside for the receiving team. Semien has too much upside and too little risk for this IMO

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Dec 7, 2014 -> 12:16 PM) That is my biggest problem with it. Dude is walking away during the busiest time of the year for a front office, complete with the teams entire knowledge and plans. Well that isn't necessarily when he would leave his position. Guys change FO positions all the time and I don't think it's usually a big problem that they know things about their previous org.

Not good. Hope he sticks around.

Kirk is normally good on D but he's lost out there tonight

I hate how Kirk has to play in crunch time. He's Thibs's Darin Erstad, he just can't resist

I'm sorry for comparing Pau to Boozer

I don't think he's any better of a bet than Semien or Sanchez and comes with more risk

Just got Lollipop on my HTC One and this thing is beautiful. I want to use it just to look at it.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Dec 4, 2014 -> 04:08 PM) 7 years ago today... http://www.milb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=2...b&fext=.jsp

I think I'd rather give Scherzer the kind of megadeal he's expected to get than the deals the next tier of guys are likely to get. I'd also prefer that to trading anything valuable for Samardzija and then giving him a big contract.

The "black folks should join the police force" argument has a serious problem. Many of the people who are so upset with the police force, believe it or not, have no faith in the police or probably the criminal justice system. "Reform from within" only makes sense when the system you're in works. I don't want to make a false equivalency, but any revolution makes sense to understand this thought process. Americans went to war with the British because they didn't feel that legal recourse had any chance of working. Confederates seceded because they felt the USA wouldn't let them keep their way of life. There are countless examples. The sentiment behind things like the Gawker article is that for as long as American police have existed, they have not treated black people fairly. Certainly, there are countless times each day in which well-meaning police act fairly towards everyone. Those incidences obviously outnumber the one we're talking about in this thread. In many ways, the plight of black people has improved in the recent past. One of the best things to happen is that it is almost always socially undesirable to be racist. But we're left with implicit biases - all of us are - that we struggle to recognize and even if we do, most of us try to convince ourselves that they aren't there. Most people would agree that the officers involved in these cases are probably not virulent racists who were thinking, "this guy is black, let's get him!" The allegation is that, unconsciously, their judgment of the people in question was influenced by their race. Michael Brown seemed more dangerous than he was because he was black. Tamir Rice's blackness made it more plausible that he was waving a real gun around. What is frustrating is the refusal by anyone to face their shortcomings. When we can't even get an indictment in these cases, many people see this as the police establishment saying, "no, this cannot possibly be fueled by a racial bias, even an unintentional one." If you walked up to a young man or woman at work and asked them to make you some copies and came to find out that, oops, this person is your superior...what would you do? Always assume that other young people are your inferiors or realize that you might not be able to make these judgments based on heuristics like how old somebody looks? That's all people are asking for here ... except there has been a far longer time to learn. You know that bias your profession always seems to have? Maybe be a little more careful, or at least act like you've accepted the possibility that it's an ongoing problem. At the very least, don't expect the group suffering at the hands of these biases to join the club as if that will fix things. It's a structural problem. We actually have research showing that, while less frequently/intense, even black folks have learned some biases against other black people. These things are pervasive. I like to think I'm a pretty thoughtful person, but I found myself referring to a female doctor as a nurse the other day. Why? Not because I'm evil, I don't think, but because I've been conditioned to assume that to be the case. We aren't perfect and never will be, but we'll only get better if we actively work towards fixing the problems rather than constantly confusing the victims and the perpetrators for one another.

I'm still scratching my head about them letting Lind go. They have a void at the DH spot now.

I don't think Lester is going to do all that much for the Cubs. All that does is replace what was lost in Samardzija, more or less.

Shark won't be signing an under-market deal.