ashbury

Just to spell it out for any who don't know, all kinds of splits such as mentioned in this second post can be viewed here: http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/split.cgi?id=doziebr01&year=2016&t=b

Santana was signed to bridge us to the time when our young pitchers would be ready to step up. It is revolting to discover that Santana's services are still needed for 2017. I do not subscribe to the idea of simply trading off all established talent when doing a rebuild. Dozier is trade bait because we now seem to have a surplus at his position; that's not the case with ESan. Moreover, a 100-loss season isn't license to blow up the team - a 110-loss follow-on season will lead to even worse business fundamentals that will dog us for years. On the other hand... with care, ESan could be traded, if that trade were to be followed up by something else that redeploys those freed-up dollars. ESan to a contender who is willing to give up near-ready pitching talent that won't help them soon enough for their window of opportunity - and then we trade say a couple of corner outfield prospects, of a lower tier than Kepler, for somebody's 30-something starting pitcher to give them salary relief - this would have to be thought through but maybe would be a win-win for three teams. Difficult to pull off; a short bit of web browsing didn't turn up a candidate pitcher to target. I don't think you can simply redeploy ESan's money on the free agent market, which would be the other route to go after a trade, and get a starter as good as we have now, especially not without taking on additional years, a risk we have already weathered for the most part with ESan. It would be like extending ESan himself by another 2 years, and we have seen how well that has worked out with Hughes.

The parallels of Ernie Banks's career to Joe's are striking. There's never an exact match between high-end players, but the main difference I see is that we don't know yet whether Joe still will be a productive everyday player at age 38. If he does, the analogy I see says that he breezes into the Hall when the time comes. The chances are very high that he doesn't, and then the analogy becomes problematic. I still say he should go in, but would he? (I guess that's what this thread is about. )

OPS is a nice "quick" stat, but it over-values slugging and under-values on-base percentage. So your question about how much actual dropoff in offense Polanco would represent is a fair one. There might not be any. OTOH other teams are aware of this too, and will value HR in their proper context. Combining this with the defensive metrics for Dozier, and I am suddenly not too optimistic about what quality of pitcher we can actually obtain for him. We might need to package Dozier with a good prospect below our very top-tier group, to get what we want. I am back to being on the fence about which of our second basemen to trade.

38 games in RF, 30 at 3B and 27 as DH... there are some who will claim that he's been out of position for all but 27.

I researched it carefully, and not one of these guys even merited mention on baseball-reference.com. What a bad team!

I guess people have looked it up by now, but I saw mention of 14 in the infamous 1982 season. That team had on its roster such stiffs as Tom Brunaski, Kent Herbek, Frank Voila, Garry Gaety, and a bunch of other guys I never heard of, so it's probably hopeless for the 2016 squad too.

Oh-fer-something, I'm pretty sure. It's pretty hard for it to be any other way.

*Sigh* Get'em tomorrow, I guess.

He should marry Mia Farrow Hamm.

Should I be alarmed that everyone here's an expert?

Ick. Ish. Ugh.

The Twins hitters are going to be kicking themselves tomorrow about this game.

There are different levels of cannibalism? And you know how to make value judgements on them?

That is not an easy question and will require a long answer.

In this world, we each travel our own Oregon Trail, and each have our own wagon.

If it's one of those ballgames where we're behind 5-1 in the third inning can I call dibs on Dysentery?

Certainly could have been. Good job Press.

FTFY someone

I will freely admit I could not. And you would rightly bench me.

No need to trade either Dozier or Polanco this coming off-season, to free up that 2B logjam, right?

http://www.theallium.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/puzzled-man.png

Wasted at-bat by Rosario. I'm going out on a limb and say that he didn't like receiving the bunt sign.

I think we decided the first week of the season that they were jinxing us. We might need to revisit that.

Pipp's probably your better bet for double-digit HRs in the occasional season, if Gordon doesn't pan out.