bean5302

As I recall, the way Palacios got to his consistent .800+ OPS months shifted around in regard to batting average or power, etc, but the end of the day was a pretty steady OPS. It's hard to take much away from a single month because a nasty 10 or 20 game run of luck can blow numbers to pieces.

If Buxton knew he'd be healthy, have a great year and the CBA would work out well for the players, I'm sure he'd elect not to sign an extension right now. There are a lot of things Buxton might consider at the moment. The same reasons it's so very hard to figure out what a fair offer or his trade value actually looks like.

If you think Buxton is so awesome and important, why would he only bring a couple fringe prospects?

Buxton has produced less than 2.0 fWAR per season across his career. He was under 2.5 fWAR until the last 10 games of the season this past year. A player like that doesn't make the difference between retool and rebuild. What they replace Buxton with will make the difference.

A lot of professional sports owners are real estate specialists. Buying a mid size apartment complex isn't going to be a big deal. It's easy and cheap. It's also virtually guaranteed to be "feasible." Hotels/motels are only allowed on a very exception basis based on what I read above. Apartments, Rental Homes (like AirBnB or VRBO) and Host Families must all be exhausted before considering hotels. There are no leases the players can sign which would include sub-leasing. Apartment owners would not be able to have the tenant's (player) name on a lease. Of course, hotel ownership and management is your expertise and I'm not even about to pretend I'm as knowledgable as you are on the subject. I might be opinionated, but I try not to be an ignorant and arrogant jerk at the same time. Let's say MLB teams could go to motels and say I want to book 16 double rooms in your motel for 6-7 months. Let's compare the finances over a single year. Motel 6 vs. a $1.5MM apartment complex. The apartment complex with an I/O at 3.25% is going to be $3,312.50/mo * 12mo = $39,750 per year. In addition, we'll budget 10% of that for property management, bringing the total to $43,725. Now, what's a motel for 16 rooms per month in Cedar Rapids, IA (Kernels)? Let's say it's Motel 6. The motel owners are going to give a 30% discount off their already published rates ($39/night) at $27/night. Now add in taxes and fees and figure $35/night. 16 rooms, 30 days = $16,800/mo * 6 months = $100,800. So the MLB team would save nearly $60,000 annually by buying an apartment complex, and they'd have way more control, but also way more responsibility for the property. Any tax benefit from the more expensive hotel rate would be more than offset by depreciating the property value on the apartment complex or deducting improvements. Motel 6 comes with perks too. It's super easy from an accounting standpoint and it's staffed, comes with security cameras and key log reports of entry/exit, but again, hotels/motels can only be utilized on an exception basis. It's cheaper to own the apartment complex than all options except maybe host families and teams would have more control over an owned property, plus they'd be able to concentrate their players in a single location for logistics and be able to set rules more effectively. Property management would be handled by a different company (possibly affiliated with the owner already) reducing that burden of owning the apartment, and of course, it's allowed to own an apartment complex in the rules whereas it's probably not allowed to use a motel/hotel service in most cases. When it's all said and done, I can only speculate what owners or team front offices might be thinking. I could be completely and totally off base when valuing certain things. I can't even manage to agree with the baseball team on baseball related decisions, haha.

I don't disagree with you in regard to spending money always making for a competitive team. It does increase the likelihood the team is competitive. I'm also not encouraging a hard salary floor or a hard salary ceiling. Just a luxury tax system like baseball currently has. Hard floors and caps are bad for teams because it takes away all flexibility and can lead to teams being forced to make unexpected, but catastrophic decisions to their roster. Mediocrity does improve raw revenue vs. being very bad. Mediocrity provides hope. Hope brings fans to the game improving ticket sales and engagement. Hope gets fans to tune in and leads to larger TV contracts. Looking at team revenue's the worst teams will have the lowest revenues. The best teams will have the highest revenues. Revenue sharing does get mixed in there to help smooth that out so from a "net" perspective, there might be more truth to what you're saying.

Not trying to win does not equal actively trying to lose as far as I'm concerned. Those are two entirely different concepts, but I think it's really semantics in a lot of ways. Many MLB teams are not trying to compete for years at a time. The rebuild philosophy is incredibly unpopular with fans but extremely popular with franchises because rebuilding is more successful than a traditional approach when it comes to fielding a championship team. The Dodgers and Yankees don't have to rebuild. The Royals? They had losing seasons for 17 of 18 years from 1995-2012. They began a rebuild for the 2011 season and made it to back to back World Series' in 2014-2015. That is not a coincidence. The trade off of assets by the Royals led to a few names like Lorenzo Cain, Alciedes Escobar, James Shields and Wade Davis. Big names which led to 14 WAR for the 2014 World Series team and 10 WAR for 2015 with Shields departing for the Padres. The World Series appearance in 2014, bolstered by great young talent and the saved money from trading away big assets allowed Kansas City to go big (for them) in free agency which led to the Royals becoming the 2015 World Series Champions. Rebuilding works. Fans hate it. It's not good for MLB as a whole, but it is good for an individual small/mid market team owner. It's a valid strategy to allow small and mid market teams a better shot at the World Series. The traditional method involves trying to spend near the maximum the club can afford and fielding a mediocre team hoping that a group of home grown prospects have a breakout in a very short window to supplement the already good, short term asset entrenched players. This means the up and coming players must mesh with the existing players. Having all DH's (like the Twins) doesn't work here. Finding a sort of balance which smoothes out the process, where owners are compelled to put a competitive product on the field, but not prevented from rebuilding is the best option, IMHO. A salary floor does this. The Royals still start the rebuild in 2011 by trading Greinke and Betancourt, but they sign a couple aging 1 year guys to bring the payroll up, but without any kind of long term drag on the team's finances. You never know when a has-been veteran pitcher on a one year contract will show back up with a career year and help you into a World Series Championship.

I'm not super enthusiastic about Taylor. Comes with a QO, his defense at SS has been below average across his career (-4.9 UZR/150 career) and he's age 31. His contract predictions seem to generally be in the 4 year $15MM AAV range. Taylor's bat is solidly a bit above average, but he does strike out quite a bit for his mediocre power numbers. Nick Ahmed is the reason the Diamondbacks didn't have Escobar playing SS, but it's become pretty apparent he can't hit. I'm not exited about trading for a guy who produced 0.0 fWAR this year and is under contract for 2 more years and nearly $18MM. Wendle is chronically under-utilized? Not buying that. With just 3 plate appearances more in in 2021, he'd have been qualified in 3 of 4 years. In 2019, he broke his wrist and had another stint on the IL for a hamstring. He's not been asked to cover shortstop a whole lot, averaging about 10 games a year there, but he has graded out well on the defensive side of things. The problem is he's not been projected as a shortstop. Wendle saw a big drop off in sprint speed now at age 31 and his arm was rated as questionable at SS though his small sample size seems to be allowing for a stellar error rate. Unfortunately, his error rate at 3B is pretty poor in far more opportunities. Wendle is year 2 arbitration eligible, projected to make $4.0-4.5MM and he'll be in his 3rd year of arbitration in 2023. It's tough to say how the Rays value him. How good is Wendle? Probably not good enough if the Twins are looking to compete, but not truly cheap if they're looking to rebuild. Of the three, if I had to pick one, it'd be Wendle, but I'd rather find talent elsewhere.

The expense of buying an apartment complex isn't that bad. $100-200k per room. If a team were double-bunking, they could probably buy an entire 16 unit apartment complex for like $1.5MM in most places and cover the team roster. While affiliations do change from time to time, the MLB clubs could just swap ownership as the cities with affiliations rarely change. The most complicated part of the process would probably be clearing the entire complex of the existing tenants so it would be easier to operate. Maybe I'm misremembering something, but I actually read the fine print at a hotel stay on a business trip as I was bored. Stays of 30 days or longer were not allowed. The person was required to check out and check back in. When I did some searching it looked like it was designed to prevent people from establishing residency at the hotel and residency rights so the hotel wouldn't have to go through the eviction process? I haven't researched well enough to back up my position. I just went with what I remembered.

Manfred works for the owners. He's the owners' representative. Tony Clark, who hasn't performed well, is the players' representative. I think Manfred's attempts to shorten the game (which the players continue to try to block), his attention to umpiring and his concerns with the entertainment value of MLB have all been fine. MLB has been pretty fair and generally consistent in regard to player punishments. The commissioner of baseball is not all powerful. He answers to the owners as a collective. He's infinitely better than, say, Gary Bettman.

Like over his last several years? Last year Palacios' bat was pretty consistent. May, June and August were all great with OPS' over .800. July wasn't as great, but hardly terrible for a single month at .667. Palacios did slump hard in the final couple weeks after being platooned and having his playing time reduced a bit.

I have a hard time why a team wouldn't take Palacios in a Rule 5 selection. He was one of the best hitting shortstops in AA last year and his defense was good after he shook off the rusty glove he was using to start the season. Detroit grabbed Goodrum a couple years ago. Then again, I felt like Levi Michael would have been picked when he was first exposed after a pretty nice 2014 campaign. When it comes to Vallimont... the stats tell me he doesn't know where the ball is going and that rarely translates to being highly effective in the high minors when batters can lay off borderline pitches at higher and higher degrees. I probably would have protected Enlow like the Twins did. So much potential upside and the Twins believed enough in him to really go out and get him on his draft day paying him dramatically over-slot to get him to sign. Jake Cave? I don't see the attraction to putting him on the roster. Guys like him are a dime a dozen and I'm not convinced Nick Gordon can't completely replace him already. Those are the roster filler guys before the season starts and you've got all the starters and plans worked out. No real need to sign them this early when roster crunches are happening.

MLB teams are not going to want to use hotels/motels for coporate housing. Even cheap hotels would wind up being $2,000/mo with all the fees which are tacked onto rates and hotels/motels won't generally allow people to stay there more than 30 days at a time due to renters rights laws. I suspect small/medium sized, inexpensive apartment buildings will be purchased by the teams at this point since the players themselves are not allowed to sign leases. I'd imagine the owners of the MLB clubs are already in the process of finalizing this. Concerns over being able to make food seem fairly unwarranted.

The bottom line you're saying Berrios is a wasp and not a honey bee?

I got the impression there is a difference in terminology here. Tanking for a higher draft pick vs. tanking (rebuild) being at the heart of it. I don't think there are MLB teams actively tanking to secure a higher 1st round draft position and I believe that's the position other people have meant when they say there isn't "tanking" in MLB. I didn't get the impression anybody has said they don't believe teams rebuild or go through long bouts of being non-competitive in MLB but I may have missed it in comments.

Here are the 100 loss teams and their payrolls over the past 5 full seasons: 2021 - Orioles ($45.7MM), Rangers ($84.9MM), Pirates ($35.9MM), Diamondbacks ($89.1MM) 2019 - Orioles ($61.1MM), Royals ($67.9MM), Tigers ($98.0MM), Marlins ($69.5MM) 2018 - Orioles ($143.0MM), White Sox ($72.1MM), Royals ($129.9MM) 2017 - None 2016 - Twins ($108.2MM) I'd have to do a more thorough analysis of how to identify "tanking" teams, but 75% of the teams losing 100 games or more over the past 5 full seasons have been under the proposed $100MM salary floor owners made to the MLBPA a couple months ago. There's no doubt spending correlates with wins in sports.

I think that's about half right. They're not actively trying to lose because losing reduces revenue, but they are actively saying "I don't care if we win or not because I can guarantee at least a small profit by tanking."

Teams might still be terrible, but that's not the issue. Some team is ultimately going to draw the short straw and lose a lot of games. The Twins had what looked like a competitive roster this year, but injuries and poor play led to a bad season record. The issue is teams not even trying to be competitive and committing to long stretches of non-competitive baseball during rebuilds. The Marlins and Pirates' of the league, if you will.

I had never even considered this. Of course Mauer would be behind it! He's got Buxton believing the old phrase "Absence makes the heart grow fonder." It suddenly all makes sense!

I honestly just feel like the Luxury Tax Floor works. Same penalties for going under as going over. Tax teams under the floor and potentially take away draft picks.

From my actual post above: Buxton is scouted "better" than Lewis I make no claims that Lewis will have a better career or produce more than Buxton. I am claiming Lewis' baseball skills are similar to Buxton. Hit tool, power tool, arm tool. Lewis' speed is supposedly a tick below Buxton and Lewis' defensive value is questionable right now because of error rates which look unplayable from years ago. In pure athletic baseball ability, Lewis and Buxton are not oceans apart.

Salary/Luxury floor. It's already in discussions. The NBA is a game where a single player can carry a team into the playoffs. Consider LeBron James recording seasons with 11.79 VORP (WAR). You might say, oh, well MLB sometimes has 10 WAR players... but that's across 162 games. The NBA has half the games making a single win worth twice as much. If you convered James' 11.79 VORP season to MLB, that'd be 23.58 WAR. Also, the value of NBA draft picks is dramatically higher than MLB picks. https://medium.com/@burakcankoc/what-are-the-odds-to-become-an-all-star-for-each-draft-pick-2d113d6b82e5 In this analysis, a #1 pick is 63% likely to be an All Star during their career. By the #5 pick, the probability is down to about 30%. By the #10 pick, less than 15%. Rebuilding MLB teams know the #1 pick is valuable, but how much more value over the #5 pick is less clear.

I gave some examples of off the charts achievements to give a frame of reference for what that might look like for tools. I'm not sorry you've recognized how Buxton's accomplishments cannot even be framed as competitve with those examples. You literally said Buxton was off the charts on hit tool, run tool and defense which is why it was fair to compare him to Trout, who was looking like potentially the best player in MLB history, but not fair to compare Lewis to Buxton, who looks like a sub-MVP level talent on actual, real life results basis. While I don't think off the charts in any specific category would make a player super human, having all his tools off the charts is no longer something a human could reasonably accomplish in baseball. There's no way I'm going to let you walk back what you wrote on this. You essentially called Buxton super-human, i.e. a god. That inability to reconcile Buxton's actual performance and achievements with the mental and emotional view of what he may represent is one of my biggest pet peeves surrounding this historical meltdown of Twins fans in regard to Buxton's status. The way they have elevated Buxton's theoretical limits to beyond human and then converted those theoretical limits to real world accomplishments. It's disrespectful to other baseball players who have actually been awarded things like MVPs for tremendous accomplishments on the field and it's also a disservice to Buxton himself who cannot possibly live up to the climbing hype-spiral. Outperformed peak Trout? For 100 at bats. Wow. No player in history has ever outperformed peak full season Trout value over a 24 game sample. Joe Mauer - 2009 - 24 G, 104 PA, .429/.519/.881, 1.400 OPS. 1.282 WPA Carlos Gomez - 2013 - 24 G, 95 PA, .465/.516/.837, 1.353 OPS. 1.913 WPA Byron Buxton - 2021 - 24 G, 98 PA, .370/.408/.772, 1.180 OPS. 1.044 WPA Danny Santana. - 2014 - 24 G, 87 PA, .370/.407/.506, .913 OPS, 0.923 WPA https://www.baseballprospectus.com/prospects/article/26653/the-call-up-byron-buxton/ Hit - Power(Potential) - Speed - Arm - Defense(Potential) Buxton(2015) - 50 - 45/60 - 85 - 60 - 70/80 Lewis(2021) - 50 - 50/60 - 70 - 60 - 40/60 I think that's a fair assessment of Lewis right now and a fair assessment of Buxton based on Baseball Prospectus' "call up" scouting report for the time. Buxton is scouted "better" than Lewis, but the two are similar enough that just looking at a tools list wouldn't write them off as different planes of value.

Buxton has known for years reckless play caused him to miss hundreds of games, but he continued the trend. He may back off as he's maturing and can probably see the big picture a little clearer, but he's beaten himself up quite a bit now. Will the surgically repaired shoulder, surgically repaired finger, a history of back spams, concussions, migraines, various strains of legs, hips, wrists and hands along with multiple broken bones allow him to ever be healthy? I'm serious. That's his injury history, paraphrased. Injuries add up. They become chronic as scar tissue builds up, bones calcify, ligaments and tendons stretch, etc. Buxton would be in the position to decide... make the spectacular catch like he wants to which he also knows will increase his value if he's successful vs. risking that catch injures him and that injury will decrease his value. Is that a decision he can make in a split-second, conscious decision?

You're right. Royce Lewis... chopped liver. What a bummer the Twins were forced to draft him #1 overall. There's Byron Buxton and then humans. I'm not sure Buxton shouldn't just walk to the plate when he's hurt and have the pitchers kneel while allowing him to walk around the bases for an inside the park home run while in his casts. When Buxton breaks the single season home run record set by Barry Bonds of 73 in 2001 while simultaneously being the first hitter to bat .400 since Ted Williams in 1941, it'll certainly be the same year as he sprints far faster than any MLB player and throws harder than Aaron Hicks' 105.5mph throw in 2016. I bet Buxton will get a special exemption and play for 2 teams at the same time one day game and one night game per day and not miss a single game while racking up 50 WAR next year. Easy. What makes Buxton special isn't him being peerless in every category, it's him being excellent in most categories. Buxton's hit tool is a 40-50, tops. The guy is a career .248 hitter with a .299 OBP and there were serious questions about it by the time he was debuting at MLB. Buxton was the fastest player in MLB by a solid 0.5ft/sec. He'd probably grade as an 85 speed (if there was such a thing) before he gained weight for power and perceived durability. There's probably nothing else which could be graded as "80" or better based on the real data rather than hype. His fastest throw from the outfield? 99mph. Most home runs? 19. Highest batting average ever? .306. Highest OBP ever? .358. Let's get back to reality; Buxton isn't even a top 3 center fielder over his career. Bader, Kiermaier and Hamilton all have higher UZR/150s than Buxton from 2015-2021 among players with at least 2,000 innings at CF. Buxton is a good player. Maybe even a great one, if every "great" year he's had didn't come with the caveat (SSS) next to it. Annointing him as some sort of god is a bit far fetched.