ashbury

22nd in the majors means around middle of the pack in the AL. Because of the DH, mostly. Always distrust MLB-wide rankings. Always.

The White Sox got a good reliever. Season. Over. They gave up a pretty decent young catcher to get him, didn't they?

You said that three years ago, too.

It's probably the laser-beam focus on Kepler being positionally flexible that bothers me. If you feel comfortable saying "Cave or one of the OFs need to be able to play a different position" or "Rosario or one of the OFs need to be able to play a different position" now and then, I'll feel like the Positional Flexibility Club truly is inclusive. Cave is about the last guy I'd like to see locked to one position.

We're in agreement that Kepler needs to improve his offense or he's in danger of losing time in the lineup. Where we may disagree is where he should be stationed on defense on any given day he is in the lineup - say, against a tough righty where we don't like our two 1B options. If you think Kepler is our fourth most skillful outfielder on the defensive side of the ball, after Buxton/Rosario/Cave, then putting Kepler at first base does make sense. But I don't care for Cave's judgement in the OF nor his read on the ball. I don't think his range is better, and his arm is worse. So I consider Kepler the better outfielder of the two. Probably I'd put Kepler slightly ahead of Rosario overall, too. I don't mean to exaggerate Cave's ineptitude. On a simple scale, as outfielders I'd rate Buxton a 10, Kepler a 7, Cave and Rosario about a 6*. As center fielders, where the bar is higher, that puts everyone except Buxton at average or slightly below - there are some good CFers out there, and Kepler doesn't rank with those, and certainly not Cave, to me. But, I do see a difference among our non-Buxton guys, and Kepler ranks #2 for me. Maybe that's where the disconnect in all of this is. * For context, I suppose Grossman's about a 3 or a 4, and JD Martinez in the World Series looks like he's degraded to about a 1.

My guess, without any particular evidence except a recollection that he had some peculiar training methods as a rookie, is that Bauer must wear out his welcome with his team, despite good on-field production. Backup guess: the Indians have looked as his body of work and see a sell-high situation. Maybe I should make this my primary guess, after all.

The phrase usually seen for young players is "under team control" for a certain number of remaining years. The team is not obligated to offer a contract each year; the player can be released without further obligation. As the player gains seniority, the nature of the contracts also become less dictatorial by the team (e.g. arbitration).

I wouldn't call it a myth, but among the five tools, hitting for average remains key, and power isn't far behind. As I suggested/implied, if Kepler's offensive output doesn't start to increase, all the defense he is capable of won't matter, regardless of the position. He's not a good enough CFer to make his offense be a plus there, and the converse is true everywhere else he can play.

Answer is highlighted.

Simplifying my thoughts leads me to point out that I was responding to Nick's proposal to have Kepler split time between RF and 1B, not simply fill in for a game or two. Do you envision Jake Cave in RF when Kepler's at first? Perhaps you like Cave's outfield defense better. That would lead to a different conclusion than I draw. Otherwise, I suggest that positional flexibility should not be a one-way street and should not apply to Kepler alone.

I see that Twinkie Town has an article titled, "Welcome to the Cron Zone." Your headline-fu is weak, Grasshopper.

I think the flaw here is that not all chances are equal. It's true that a majority of RF chances are cans of corn. But the majority of chances at 1B are also routine. The batter at least is trying to hit something that a RFer can't get to; the shortstop throwing to first is trying to give the 1Bman something he can handle. Also, the consequences of a poor play at 1B are not as great as in RF. The batter could easily end up on third base with a muff in RF, or sometimes go all the way home. Also anyone already on base has a better chance of grabbing an extra base if the missed ball has to come in from the outfield, than if the first baseman can somewhat corral it or if (say) the catcher is backing things up. If I can't have both, I'll trade 1B prowess for RF prowess any day of the week.

Cody Bellinger is not a very good comp for Kepler. Bellinger's a first baseman who hits like one; if you put him in CF as a tactical move, say to get Max Muncy's bat into the game, the hope is that Bellinger's bat really outshines other CFers and compensates for a marginal glove. (I still don't understand LA's roster well enough to see why you wouldn't put him in a corner OF spot and use someone else in CF, but it may just go to show that all of this is second-order effects.) Kepler may yet achieve that level of hitting, but right now he's pretty much the opposite player. If he's not using his OF skills, a lot of his value is wasted. I am all for positional flexibility. But from a given player's perspective, it's to give him somewhere to play when the team has 3 better outfielders, say, than himself. We aren't close to that in the case of Kepler, or at least I don't like Cave or Rosario better than him. Flexibility is good in the abstract, and if (say) Cron goes down with an injury mid-game, and Austin is DHing already, telling Kep to go grab a first-baseman's glove for the remainder of the game sits just fine with me. But while an overall flexible strategy is fine, it still comes down to specific games. And if I'm writing out a lineup that has Kep at 1B, an instant improvement is to swap him to an outfield spot and let the other outfielder be positionally-flexible and handle 1B duties that game. That will remain true, even if Kep improves at bat and starts to hit like a first-baseman too, until the day his OF skill eventually erodes.

They aren't going to get to last year's payroll. They will say revenue is down, they will adjust payroll accordingly. That aside, my concern is that whatever payroll headroom currently exists will be frittered away $5M at a time on players whose ceiling is league-average at best. Each move will be justified by price-performance; at no point will performance by itself be the priority. And thus we end up with a roster that aspires to .500. That was what frustrated me with the previous FO too. Paying the same eventual aggregate sum for a smaller number of actual difference-makers, and relying on the young players making up the rest of the roster to step up, seems like the better chance for excellence if we want to contend. CJ Cron achieved a career year in 2018. It resulted in only about league-average performance, so he needs to take an additional step like that to become a real asset. $4 or $5M would be about a league-average salary (25 players, $100M or so). Everything about this waiver claim is in alignment. It's just... such low aspirations.

Insubordinate, this front office. Insubordinate.

If we wind up paying Cron $5M it's because our farm system isn't yet churning out the bat-only guys that other teams seem to be able to. That's why Cron wasn't worth literally anything on the trade market and he was simply DFAed - most teams looked at him and said "we have someone just as good". Tyler Austin for that matter is probably worth nothing on the trade market either - we accepted him as a fig leaf (along with a lottery-ticket young arm) in order to get a little salary relief from the rest of Lynn's contract, helping that signing look better. There's always guys Cron's age at AAA who OPS .800 or .900, about .100 higher than they will in the majors, and they can be obtained nearly anytime you want one. "Trader Frank" Lane and Bill Veeck used to joke about their "cat and dog trades" in the 1950s. When the hot stove wasn't to their liking, they would trade a CJ Cron type for an Aaron Slegers type, just to have something in the newspapers for fans to talk about. Your cat, for my dog. It was good marketing in its time; it had little to no bearing on team performance. Teams that are firing on all cylinders have a Brent Rooker type of player ready and developed when needed. (Tampa has theirs, Jake Bauers, making Cron expendable.) I am willing to give our FO some more time to get the pipeline going like it should. For now, we're still in bottom-feeder mode, watching the waiver wire each day, making claims on players that no one else wanted to trade for. On a related note, I'm not entirely sure why arbitrators are expected to award someone like Cron $5M when such a player has no trade value and would surely obtain much less on the free agent market.

We Unix computer geeks will call it a Cron Job and get nothing but crickets and weird stares for our effort.

My snap impression, which is usually wrong, is of a side-armer's motion except coming over the top (or at least three-quarters) for the actual delivery. A bit unusual.

Dispatching a guy rather than let him be taken via Rule-5, for... who? An infielder who will not be considered by Rule-5 selectors? I'm not sure the point. MLBTR indicates "more to come". I hope so.

I'm going to stick my neck out for him and project high .500s or even cross the .600 OPS line in the majors, in a couple years.

Clayton Kershaw without the fastball but a little better bat.

I took my information from the MLB web site about the AFL: http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/events/winterleagues/about/?league=119&id=player_elig One foreign player is allowed, as long as the player does not reside in a country that participates in winter ball, as part of the Caribbean Confederation or the Australian winter league. But, truth is, they have failed me before, as they no doubt leave out all the fine print. You are probably correct in how it works in practice.

In the short run, it could either go lower or else bounce back up. Over the long haul, the reverse is true.