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ashbury

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Everything posted by ashbury

  1. ashbury
    Thanks. It means a lot!
  2. ashbury
    Cave's retention probably is another indication that Buxton is departing. You don't deplete your CF depth chart until you have adequate replacements on board. If they acquire a couple of competent center fielders, Cave will follow Buxton out the door, albeit for slightly different rationales.
  3. ashbury
    How do I know you exist?
  4. ashbury
    Uffda. Aside from that, I'm in agreement.
  5. ashbury
    Maybe this franchise is just jinxed. On one hand we take a risk by waiting to trade him during the season, since his track record is he could be injured at just the wrong moment. On the other, we think we want to sign him long term. These two points of view are pretty incompatible. Tough outcome for the team, and an unsolvable dilemma, regarding a former high draft pick
  6. ashbury
    Major league ballplayers who are any good are underpaid for the first 4 years or so, compared to the value they bring to the team. We're going to veer off into a discussion of the entire economics of the game, terminating probably with "they could cut ticket prices if not for....", and I'm checking out of this thread in advance of that dead end.
  7. ashbury
    I don't see why it's ridiculous. It serves as a compromise between fully-guaranteed pay, and heavily incentivized pay-bumps each year. If the Twins' opening argument was, "you haven't had more than 511 PA in a season, how can we guarantee a contract for a whole bunch of years?", escalators would be a response saying "okay, if he plays (say) 150 games in a season, will that be enough to ease your worries?" Escalators aren't as team-friendly as incentives, but they still represent a form of risk-sharing rather than the team bear all the risk. Every multi-year player contract, no matter the track record on health, carries significant risk.
  8. ashbury
    Not gonna contribute to a threadjack. You threw shade on the players for no reason, that's all.
  9. ashbury
    The owners are all about below-market salaries for the first several years of a major league career. Two sides of a coin.
  10. ashbury
    I think it was Brock who brought up the possibility that it's not incentives per se that are the hangup, but escalators. If Buxton's camp is insistent that achieving one level of incentives in a given year locks in that level for all future years in the contract, I could see that the distance between the two sides is greater than we understand.
  11. ashbury
    You don't even have to start out working in sports at all. Kevin Mather eventually became president of the Mariners, and his Wikipedia bio says he spent his first 5 years after graduation working as a CPA (Deloitte, I found elsewhere), before getting hired into the Twins organization in a financial capacity. (His Seattle tenure came to an unfortunate end but I don't think that's germane to the discussion of getting one's foot in the door.)
  12. ashbury
  13. ashbury
    This kind of incentive is, I believe, specifically ruled out. It's not even in the CBA, but in the Major League Rules (not the one that covers definitions of balls and strikes, but the one that lays out how teams may operate). In Rule 3(B)(5) it states: (5) No Major League Uniform Player's Contract or Minor League Uniform Player Contract shall be approved if it contains a bonus for playing, pitching or batting skill or if it provides for the payment of a bonus contingent on the standing of the signing Club at the end of the championship season. (My emphasis) We'd all like to incentivize good outcomes, but pretty clearly MLB has through hard experience learned that there are unintended consequences. A team can reward games played, but not homers or batting average. Which I find interesting, in that I remember seeing that MLB is proposing, during the CBA negotiations, to go well past HR and BA to using something like FangRaphs WAR as a metric. Pretty radical, in that light.
  14. ashbury
    OOTP isn't the hill I would die on, obviously. But they put more effort into their scouting, their financial model, and their trading AI, than one might expect. IMO it's on a par with the trade values site, in other words just somebody's guess but one form of sanity checking.
  15. ashbury
    Fun to think about but we don't line up that well in terms of excess prospect talent to offer, and literally 28 other teams will at least kick the tires to find out how serious the Reds are. The thought-exercise in this article shows why. We'll get outbid, probably by a team who feels that their window is now.
  16. ashbury
    Not really your point, I'm sure, but it's not the throw home that separates LF from RF, but the throw to third. Okay, now that I type this, seems not even worth saying, but I still wonder if there is some difference if you have two similar fielders in terms of range and arm, but one is more likely to miss the cutoff man or throw to the wrong base. I'm thinking, put Brain Cramp Guy in left, but I could be wrong. And no, I'm not saying Eddie was remarkably prone to mental errors.
  17. ashbury
    The offer for Lopez seems light to me, and the trade simulators in Out Of The Park (simulation game) and baseballtradevalues.com come to a similar conclusion - neither of these is gospel but both are constructed with at least some serious intent. A better pitching prospect than Strotman, maybe Canterino, would seem to be indicated, to get Miami to even enter a discussion. A position player prospect like Royce Lewis also would get their attention, but I presume you don't want to go that route.
  18. ashbury
    There are 4 pitchers who threw 200 or more innings (31*6 plus a couple of 7s) in 2021: Zack Wheeler, Walker Buehler, Adam Wainwright, and Sandy Alcantara. Which one shall we sign?
  19. ashbury
    The published reports were incomplete on details. I believe they said the parties were in agreement about the base salary but were apart on the incentives. So I lack insight on how high the Twins had gone, but if they didn't make it possible for the player to make $30M with reasonable full-season performance thresholds (150 games or similar) then IMO the team fouled up. Less likely IMO is that Buxton was holding out for the incentives to reach $40M, in which case I'd cut the team some slack. Probably we'll never know, but as events play out we may be able to guess increasingly well about last summer's negotiations.
  20. ashbury
    If he were to hit free agency this time next year, my expectation would be he'd face a wider spectrum of opinion than most players - no unanimity. The many teams that can't stomach the risk, would give a cold shoulder to him, or offer a heavily-incentive-laden contract at best. But so what - the only ones that matter, from his POV, would be the big-market teams who have World Series aspirations immediately and for the coming seasons, and all it really takes is two to vie for his services. To those teams, getting help for the long regular season is of secondary importance because they expect to reach the post-season already, so Buxton's track record of partial seasons won't bother them the way it would a lesser team. They would look at October. "If we sign him and he's healthy for the post-season, he's a difference maker - and if he's not healthy, then all we did was waste money," would be my expectation of their bottom-line thought process. A good $30M annual value contract offer to him would be merely the cost of doing business, for those anointed teams. No team purposely wastes money, but for a difference-maker they would be willing to take on risk. If Buxton is willing to accept an incentive-laden contract from the Twins, the team should get the paperwork in place. They should have done this already during the last trade deadline, IMO, based on the reporting we saw.
  21. ashbury
    Unless you happen to think Sands isn't a legit prospect, no dice. I'm not trading pitching prospects except for established pitching. Teams hang onto their arms and we shouldn't be handing ours out like candy.
  22. ashbury
  23. ashbury
    Smart move to hire someone older and more experienced to sit with Rocco on the bench. Jayce's extra [checks baseball-reference.com] 301 days on planet Earth will no doubt make a big difference. Does anyone know the proper pronunciation of the new guy's name? One syllable, with a long-A? Or "Jay-Cee"?
  24. ashbury
    My two would be Jake Cave and Kyle Garlick.
  25. ashbury
    You can put literally any major league hitter at DH. Having a revolving DH amounts to that. But it doesn't amount to an advantage over the opposing team on any given day, if they can put a Yordan Alvarez or a JD Martinez in the lineup against you while you're employing someone with an OPS in the .700s. A top-notch dedicated DH can be a very cost effective way for a team without deep pockets to gain the advantage I want, because they are not paying an additional premium for a glove that sits unused while he's DHing. Nelson Cruz's bat probably could have commanded $20M+ if he could still field a position competently. Cruz might not be the right guy to sign anymore, I don't know. And maybe there isn't anyone out there to acquire who will be at the Alvarez/Martinez/Cruz level. But I wouldn't be satisfied going into the off-season with a stand-pat approach to DH. After all avenues are explored, maybe stand-pat will turn out to be right, come February.
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