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As others said, its probably a check in to see what the asking price is in case we get Harper and decide to go for it. Who knows, maybe they really love one of our guys who we aren't as enamored with.

The fangraphs guys were saying there was a little less worry about his contact issues after his team USA stretch last month. I think one of them said they talked about it in the podcast that should be out soon. After watching a couple of the games and looking at the stats, I am much less concerned about his contact but much more worried about CJ Abrams and Riley Greene. My personal top 5 right now is probably 1) Rutchsman, 2a) Witt, 2b) Vaughn, 3a) Josh Jung, 3b) Corbin Carroll, with Kameron Misner as the wild card.

Maybe it would make sense if we can trade Abreu and then get Carlos Santana from the Mariners while giving up minimal assets in return.

It seems like they both have some love for Misner.

Kameron Misner was a name I hadn't heard before who sounds really interesting. Big tools and potential but missed time with an injury. Sounds exactly like a guy who puts it together for their junior year and rises up the boards.

Didn't he break Barry Bonds freshman homerun record at ASU? Dude has serious power, but he really doesn't seem to get much draft love and even less than Vaughn.

https://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/article/45445/comparing-drc-ops-and-wrc/

https://legacy.baseballprospectus.com/card/104176/eloy-jimenez The stat also seems to work for most minor league stat lines. Eloy posted a 150 DRC+ at AAA last year.

Yeah, like I said, its better than the other ones haha I also found it interesting how big the separation is between Ted Williams and everyone else.

I didn't see this anywhere else, so I figured I would mention it. Baseball Prospectus has just introduced a new hitting metric called Deserved Runs Created plus (DRC+). Its supposed to be more descriptive and have better predictive power than wRC+ or OPS+. It is like those in that it has 100 equal to league average, but I have found several players where the difference between the it and the old ones is more than 10 points. Its also nice because on each player's page it not only has their DRC+ but also the standard deviation amount so you can tell how confident they are in the number and what kind of range of possibilities seem plausible. They have also folded this number into their WAR calculations, so we can probably expect their numbers to be different than the other two. https://www.baseballprospectus.com/drc-deserved-runs-created/

So that sounds like it doesn't include Seager which means they still might have to use someone else on their roster to get rid of his contract.

Bobby Witt Jr just hit for the cycle in the gold medal game of the 18U Pan American championships. In a couple days cumulative stats from the whole tournament should be available.

Someone said Seager's team option turns into a player option if he is traded, so we should really count that $15mil as part of the salary because if he continues to struggle he would probably take it. If that is the case, then taking all of his salary would be about as much as Cano because the Mets sent contracts back and got money. So you could be looking at a deal very similar to the Cano deal if you want to build that from our prospects.

And was just non tendered by the Reds yesterday.

Robbie Grossman and Wilmer Flores are intriguing to me because they both have good platoon splits against lefties which we might be needing next year as we just let go of one of our best hitter against lefties. Jordan Patterson is also an interesting guy. Not much major league playing experience, but he put up some good numbers in AAA (though it was in a hitters park in the PCL) and he got claimed by several teams so other organizations think he might be something too.

He also said his source couldn't give him stuff anymore because it was starting to piss off the FO.

Well I dislike this. Four years of a decent catcher with good offensive numbers for two years of an already 30 year old reliever that won't even be that cheap in probably non-competitive years. Unless the FO really believes in Zavala and has moves lined up for us to be competitive this year, this really doesn't make much sense to me.

We will have another legit list next week with pipeline coming out with their first draft top 50. They will probably have Adley and Witt at the top and I think they like Vaughn.

That assumes that the Mariners retain 0 of Cano's contract and that he produces 0 value for the team. Considering he put up over 3 WAR last year and is projected for 3 WAR next year, that seems to be a bad assumption. So if you can get the M's to retain some of the contract and Cano produces some value, then the package would definitely have some surplus value.

I agree. I just see it happening where the TV deals are no longer massive because there aren't enough fans, and even among those fans not enough that have cable, to let the companies justify spending crazy amounts for live content, especially when there are other new options that seem to work better. A while back I heard about a study done that advertising through TV had some of the lowest ROI while podcasts were really effective. Now there also might be movies on youtube for free but that have unskippable ads. If something like that is similarly more effective than TV ads, then even the larger numbers with sports might not be enough to justify the huge cost when podcasts and youtube is cheaper.

It might be the cheapest, but the price for the actual importance of each game is much less. When no one game really matters because there are so many, people might not feel compelled to go to any one game thinking they could feasibly go to a game at a different date with the same relative importance. The problem that MLB has is that people then don't go to as many games because they find alternatives and by the time the actual importance of the games is increased, most of the teams are out of the playoff race so there is even less reason to go. And the game being slower and more boring now is a problem. From a basic economics standpoint, for any given price point, your utility is now lower while the utility obtained from competition at the same price point is likely higher because of the vast amount of entertainment options younger generations have. And on top of all of that, teams are actually raising prices when they should probably be lowering them to compete with the other options available to young fans. To me, teams are making a mistake and are sacrificing potentially exponentially higher future profits for current profits by trying to find the absolute most they can get out of people for tickets, merch, and TV viewing. You might be able to make more money by using higher prices to offset (and more) the lower customer base, but you are losing fans in an asymmetrical manner such that you are losing the fans with the highest potential future spending (young people who have more years to spend money) while retaining those who will likely drop out of the consumer base sooner (older people who will no longer be able to attend games/die) while also doing almost nothing to replace those who are lost. The worst part is that I don't think the owners even care. They are now getting so much from TV deals that they can make money even with poor attendance while the values of their franchises continue to rise seemingly partly because they do nothing but rise in value. As long as there aren't a ton of sales where they actually lose money on their investments or they all start losing money every year I don't think anything drastic will change. People suck at changing in small ways when something could possibly happen in the future. They are much better at reacting to drastic situations. While I don't know if my doomsday thought process will actually happen, I really fear it will. /end rant

Some guys I found interesting from looking through the top 30 lists: Luis Gonzalez - Orioles Josh Ockimey - Red Sox Trevor Clifton - Cubs Michael Beltre - Reds Roberto Ramos - Rockies Riley Ferrell - Astros Drew Jackson - Dodgers Connor Joe - Dodgers Ali Sanchez - Mets Richie Martin - A's Tom Eshelman - Phillies Art Warren - Mariners Max Schrock - Cardinals Drew Ward - Nationals

They basically did eat some though because they took back Clippard.

I'm about to do the same haha