ashbury

Then that makes them the only team to go from 100 losses to playoffs to irrelevance in 3 consecutive seasons.

Haley suffered a season-ending stress reaction on his elbow?

Holding out for the baseball road trip you promised.

Rosario's agent replies, "the top free-agent contracts last off-season were Eric Hosmer, who played nothing but first base for his old team and nothing but first base for his new team. Yu Darvish. He plays pitch. JD Martinez. He can barely track a slow roller to right field. Lorenzo Cain. Nobody asked him to branch out and play a corner OF spot, much less second base. My client is not a superstar but profiles as a cornerstone player like these guys. You're asking him to be Eduardo Escobar, who just signed for $6 or $7M a year, or Marwin Gonzalez, who MIGHT crack $10M a year, both for just three years; positional flexibility doesn't really move the needle on salary. You're not going to have a happy player if you insist on this during the remainder of his time in Minnesota. My compliments to Granny." Tyler Austin, yeah. Guys on the bubble should be all-in if offered any kind of chance. Plouffe, he wound up like Austin but for a while there looked to be on a different trajectory. Don't get me wrong, I adore positional flexibility. It's just that it swims against a very strong current.

The senator is telling her fellow party members NOT to be like that. On a non-political level, I saw a local initiative to improve some hiking trails where I used to live go down in flames because the proponents spent so much time at public meetings demonstrating that all the technical aspects of trail-building were being handled professionally, that they forgot to get buy-in from the public. It all came across as railroading something through as though it was already decided. People reacted negatively to that, and they started making up things such as bus-loads of mountain bikers from Sacramento coming up to ruin their quiet neighborhoods (no way were these nice little trails going to be a "destination") or helicopter pads to transport people in (an emergency helipad already exists for fire suppression and people misunderstood). It made an impression on me. Hirono is speaking to that.

While I routinely use this strategy when playing OOTP on my computer, how do you deal with the real-world complexity when, for example, Rosario protests, "I'm not a utility player"?

When he's on, he's on. He drives his team's fans nuts too many times though.

To possibly save anyone else from a bit of searching when trying to look him up, his name is spelled with an 'e'. Dusten Knight.

Yeah, fair's fair, and I've expressed my qualms over some moves by this FO so they deserve credit here.

While TD's guess might have been an outlier, I think my point still stands, in response to Seth's question of why Lynn didn't "get" 3/$30 last off-season.

I meant to say "House" where I said "Congress". The senate electoral map was a special case that, as you say, would have gone differently with either of the other two biennial "classes". Still, a wave that narrowly wrested control of the House isn't what you might hope for when a party is that badly tainted by scandal. GOP house candidates collectively drew more than 40% of the vote, and it bears asking just what it is that causes 40% of the electorate to stick so closely to a party in such a dire state of moral decay. And I disagree very strongly that the problem is the lack of a comprehensive plan, if you mean a clearer party platform. Democrats are known for wonk policy proposals for every issue under the sun. They could cobble some more of those together for the next election, and it wouldn't move the needle much from where it is now, because voters know generally where the two parties stand on most everything. If you mean a comprehensive plan to change their "brand", for lack of a better term, then yeah. There may be 20% of the electorate that will vote for any autocratic conservative, and I can live with that, much as the other side can live with the 20% who lean socialist. What's needed for Democrats is a concerted effort to make sure that the persuadable middle spectrum doesn't feel looked down upon. That's why they vote Republican even when they can see that the Democratic "elites" they are voting against are often just regular folk who made good, as opposed to the actual elites like Jared Kushner descending from a long line of moneyed interests. It's baffling.. except that you can learn from the applause lines spoken by Wharton School's Donald Trump or Harvard Law School's Ted Cruz. They lay it out, right in plain sight, if the Democrats will listen.

I refreshed my memory by pulling up last year's TD off-season handbook, and sure enough, Lynn was thought to be getting 6 years, $150 million. So he may have turned down offers like what he just signed for, or even higher, and opted to sign that one-year deal and try again.

Wishful thinking. That the GOP collects enough votes in the age of Trump to remain a sizable minority in Congress means that the Democrats are failing to address very major un-met desires by a very large portion of the populace. It's tone, more than policy, and Senator Hirono captures one aspect of it (which the GOP spin machine already has distorted into an expression of pure elitism):

Falvey and Levine breathe a collective sigh of relief. The pressure to do something big has to wear on them.

The part about player makeup was thought-provoking. I think any analytically oriented front office should be working on assembling the most comprehensive database they can, with regard to the things that would drive them nuts about a player if they were to acquire them. It's not quantifiable, maybe, so one doesn't think of it as analytics - but we should. It's information, even if it's not data per se. If I had a team I would task someone on every minor-league coaching staff to watch the other dugout with an eagle eye and add to the master database with anything that looks amiss with one of their players - with emphasis on consistent ways of watching. Big-data mining people like Nate Silver (who used to be in the baseball world) can do wonders by sifting through such information. Individual bits of gossip or quick impressions may seem worthless, but in enough quantity you can start to see patterns. Joe Blow on the other team was sulking after the center fielder botched a play behind him? Write it down!!! Another guy didn't sulk when that happened? Write that down too.

It's a good thing the TD moderators weren't around to hear all of that bickering.

Not to ruin your joke or anything, but Bill Smith landed on his feet with what looks like a nice job in the Minor League Baseball Office a year or two ago. He's doing all right. http://www.milb.com/milb/info/bios.jsp#/bill-smith

I wouldn't extrapolate to the market as a whole. The exec's comment pertained to Machado. He's known to expect a very large contract; front offices like the Twins' probably say to themselves, why even invest the time.

Hopefully someone also with thick skin for criticism of not being teh clutchyness or whatever.

"The 16-person Today's Game Committee consisted of Hall of Famers Roberto Alomar, Bert Blyleven, Pat Gillick, Tony La Russa, Greg Maddux, Joe Morgan, John Schuerholz, Ozzie Smith, and Joe Torre; major league executives Al Avila, Paul Beeston, Andy MacPhail, and Jerry Reinsdorf; and media members/baseball historians Steve Hirdt, Tim Kurkjian, and Claire Smith." Wow. These are no dummies, but I sure don't get the choices they made here.

One way to save time would be to run an idea past others who have studied the problem too. I (or you) can look up some of the SABR types who have done studies - they are usually pretty approachable, at least if you don't initiate with the sterotypical "everybody out of the swimming pool, there's a new lifeguard on duty" kind of self-introductions.

It wasn't too many weeks ago that FalVine were talking about trades moreso than free agents. Now, not even very much of that.

I think it was two mods expressing similar states of mind, and Glunn offering a caring remedy. It's better to address burnout symptoms early than to wait until they are full-blown. Saying "I'm OK" to be polite, only to have to later say, "oops, no, I'm not OK," would not be a good outcome. OTOH there's no urgency to add someone. The workload recently has been low.

All defensive stats are going to suffer in this respect, by comparison to the offensive ones. The sample size is smaller. Batters face on average 10-15 pitches a game, from which they compile the plate appearances in the stats. They face by comparison 2-5 decisions/opportunities in the field depending on position. Many of the pitches seem like no-brainers (take or swing), but then many fielding chances are likewise ones that any competent player will make - and yet, sometimes fielders muff the easy chances, and likewise batters will swing at pitches in the dirt. All in all, the two sides of the stats coin are not symmetrical - batters are put to the test on each pitch, and that's why it takes less time for offensive stats to stabilize and have meaning.