Jake

Bulls win, Lauri ?

Always a fool-proof plan that goes well

I think that's a pretty good deal for the Twins. I would have considered going a little bit higher just to try to make it harder for them to get to the playoffs this year.

I think Calipari tends to be the one using millions to get people to change their mind...

Several things: We have no idea what the Sox did to improve Narvaez's framing. I suspect that, at the least, they knew it was a problem. If they didn't buy into the framing metrics, you couldn't justify trading him given the amount of team control he had and how good his offense was last year. The Sox know Narvaez and it's hard to guess how that affected their projections of him. Maybe they think he's a dumbass and can't be taught. I don't know. It's great to put on a full court press to make a player better at something he's horrible at. But baseball is hard and sometimes trying hard doesn't ultimately work. It's kind of like asking why nobody taught Gordon Beckham how to hit or Alcides Escobar how to take a walk. There's a lot of unknown with Narvaez. With his past level of pitch framing, he's really only playable as one of the top 30 catchers in MLB if he hits as well as he did last year. Even then, he was probably bottom half of the league due to how extremely bad his pitch framing was. If he improves the pitch framing, his potential value obviously goes up. But he also has to maintain the level of hitting, to some extent, to remain valuable. It's not hard to squint and see the same old high .600s OPS hitter in there that he used to be. His big year was predicated on doubling his career home run total across many professional seasons. Maybe...he just won't be able to do that again? Anyway, the point here is I can see exactly why the Mariners decided to go after Narvaez but it's also easy to see why the White Sox saw a guy who could very soon see his value drop to Kevan Smith levels.

I'll just say this: I feel pretty negatively about most of the big decisions made this offseason, but I'll be rooting like hell for them to turn out looking good. I hope Machado plays horribly and handicaps the Padres for the next decade. Generally speaking, I'll feel satisfaction with every failure that happens to the Padres. I hope Yonder Alonso wins MVP. I hope Yoan Moncada wins a gold glove at 3B. You get the idea. I don't think most of these things happen, but I'd love to learn that I'm the stupid one, not the ones running the Sox.

Perhaps, as I've been speculating, Lozano was making a take-it-or-leave-it offer and somebody took it.

I strongly suspect that Machado's team told his suitors that if they would give the thumbs up to 10 years 300 with a mid-contract opt out, they'd accept on the spot and would not go to any other teams to match or beat it. He probably went to each team in order of preference, presumably Philly, then Sox, then Padres. Sox didn't get some last minute call because the point of the offer was to close out the process and make a team jump a little higher than they otherwise might have for the certainty of ending the bidding. Sox assumed nobody would go for the deal and they were wrong. All that being said, if you were willing to go to that number or some other number, there's not really any good reason to lay that out there after the fact. This is especially true if you have any interest in getting Harper. Even if we want to be cheap on Harper, to try to play the long odds of scoring him at a discount you have to signal that you could never pay anything but discount price.

Wouldn't an opt out make him more motivated to continue producing rather than rest on his laurels?

To be frank, this hasn't changed my anticipated attention level at all. I may be paying less attention during ST just because without a Machado acquisition (and presumably no Bryce) I doubt we'll be players for the remaining free agents. I was looking forward to seeing if we'd try to grab some of the other remaining talent after getting a big fish, but now I strongly doubt we do that and am not sure if I'd like it if we did. But I want to see these guys play. I really like everyone in our infield (despite management's stupidity regarding where they should play), I'm very ready for Eloy, and we have a bunch of interesting pitchers. What else am I going to be watching every night anyway?

The last thing I would ever want is for the Sox to move. I'd be a man without a team and I doubt I'd be very enthusiastic about picking up a new one.

It would potentially be useful in the service of driving a hard bargain with Harper to make a bunch of noise about your inability to afford a slightly cheaper player, but I think the safest assumption is that we don't value Harper as highly as we did Machado and we know that valuation won't get the job done.

I understood the "no magic number" comment to mean that they might give 10 years and 300 to somebody, just not Manny Machado. That might be just be a weasely way of saying if they got 100 million discount on Mike Trout they'd take it, but also might mean that perhaps they're not as high on Machado as some other players in the same tier.

I'd like to land Harper just because, but I'm cooling off on it as a good baseball move (considering price, etc.).

In this organization, I think one of the things that has kept KW/Hahn employed is that they may well have been basically overruled by JR on a number of big picture decisions that put the team in bad shape, like supposedly JR insisting they not rebuilding in the early 2010s and keep trying to go for it instead.

Why would you move to get further away from the White Sox

I'm mad about Machado and all but to be honest I'm super excited for the season to start and will be watching even more closely than last year.

I'm not against signing Harper, but I do believe that even if Harper is better our marginal gain is likely to be less because we don't have great internal options for the infield in the way we do for the outfield (long term).

I think it's very plausible and even likely that Harper is better than Machado, but he also is a poorer fit with our organizational depth. In a couple years, we should have a lot of young outfielders competing for one CF spot assuming that Harper and Eloy man the corners.

The difference in the contract's value to the player with or without an opt-out is enormous. That's a big thing to work out before you start throwing offers around.

No reason to risk your money on these vets when it's so hard to tell how long it will be before the team is competing.

Wouldn't surprise me if the way this deal went down is the Padres gave Machado's people a take it or leave it deal. Say yes now or we're not going to give you an offer this good again. But Kenny's comments make it appear we wouldn't have matched if given the chance anyway.

Makes you wonder how much the Padres outbid the field. I'll take all KW's statements as face value: We probably had the high offer until now and we weren't going to $300 million. So what does Harper go for if the only team willing to give $300 million to Machado is out of the race?

If the Sox sign Bryce Harper on similar terms, does that change your views on this?