ashbury

Perhaps you didn't live during the Cold War. But, you've never made microwave popcorn?

To whom? If you mean us arm-chair GMs trying to pretend to keep up with the pros, perhaps. Not to the ones who designed the stat, though.

OK, here goes. I just think these players want too much money I don't. At least, not phrased anything close to that way.when they aren’t worth it. It's how the salary system works, with many years of absolute team control.Every player available has question marks attached to them. True of essentially any free agent any year, thus meaningless.I think owners and gms have seen too many long high dollar contracts not work out and thus don’t want to have another bad contract or players into their late thirties on their teams. This might be our one point of agreement, to base a discussion on. Teams appear to be coalescing around a common form of forecasting.There is no collusion, It's way too early to make a firm statement either waysimply the players aren’t that good anymore Players in general have never been betterand the agents, specifically Scott Boras, think they’re players are fantastic Agents work under the direction of the individual players and will be fired if they don't deliver.and should be compensated for past performances. Forecasts are based on past performances, with tweaks for downward progression of course, and again the CBA agreed to by both sides has limited the market to specific playersHow many big time free agents have the Astros signed? How many have the Indians signed? It just doesn’t work to build through aging players. Straw man argument, since no one is saying to build that way.I for one am glad the owners are taking a stand. I don't see a sudden principled stand, I see a convergence of methodology.In reality, these players all make too much money for what they do. Now we really part company. The revenue in this industry is there regardless of how it is divvied up. There are 3 choices for who gets what share of that money: ticket scalpers, owners, and players. For the players to be worth less than they currently are, as partners in an enterprise worth billions, pro sports would have to change dramatically.Stop being greedy and you will get a contract. Players operate by self-interest, teams operate by self-interest. You could just as well accuse the teams of being greedy by not ponying up. I don't think either position is accurate.Pretty simple.Anything but.I'm not especially interested in a big back-and-forth, particularly as it represents about six further tangents away from the thread topic, but you felt I was ducking you so there you have it. But I'm not sure this lengthy version is any real improvement in conversation going forward, over the short version I posted first. It's not my preference to seem like I'm tearing into someone so unrelentingly.

Not to mention, Santana was aware of the multi-million dollar implications of his IP vesting clause. The simplest explanation, that he went with informed medical opinion to try rest and treatment first, seems the best.

He's now been traded twice for legitimate major league pitching, so evidently the scouts see something.

I disagree with essentially every point made in this post, and that being the case, it's probably best to leave it at that.

Close. If you send a guy down, and he stays for more than a certain total number (20?) of days, then the option is exercised. An option, once exercised, covers the entire season; you can bring him up and down, subject to certain other rules. A player has 3 options for his career, and once they have been consumed then the waiver process must be used in order to send him down, which means some other team could grab him if they have room on their own 40-man. Options aren't needed in the years before a prospect is added to the 40-man roster, although if you hang onto the guy long enough without adding him to the 40-man then you can lose him in other ways (Rule 5 draft, minor league free agency, maybe something else I'm forgetting). Finally, just to close the loop somewhat, a player can't be in the majors (25-man roster) unless on the 40-man, so the decision to bring up a prospect has long-term ramifications for him and tactical implications for the team's roster management. There are exceptions galore, even to this somewhat complicated overview. The Wikipedia page seems to have a pretty good explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_League_Baseball_transactions#Options And, as was previously pointed out to me, anyone who wants to read such governing rules, unfiltered by well-meaning people, can find them oficially at https://registration.mlbpa.org/pdf/MajorLeagueRules.pdf . It's interesting to note that this is at the Players Association website - it's part of the collective bargaining agreement.

What's your takeaway on this?

This is a nitpick, I know, but it's kind of the opposite. An option is exercised when you send someone already on the 40-man roster down to the minors. If anything, it slightly raises the chance of one of the young guys not getting sent down to start the season, and maybe they never get sent down and then no option gets exercised. Here endeth the nitpick.

Moya came to us from Arizona in exchange for catcher JR Murphy.

If total payrolls wind up reflecting the growth in revenues, then what we're seeing may be just a reallocation of money from the very top players to the next tier down. We won't know until everything shakes out, and even a one-season blip may not reflect a real trend. I hope the players don't go off half-cocked on this; conversely I really hope the owners aren't colluding.

Article comment threads don't usually go on this long, especially not ones based on a timely rumor. Start a new thread with a title that correctly names which week Darvish will sign, and see who joins you in conversation.

Approves: http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/pollyanna.jpg

Sylvestarrrrrrr.

February 6 is April Fools Day this year, right? Right? Please?

Why not both? "Thufferin' thuckotath, matey, ye'll be walkin' the plank if ye don't sign for just three years - yer dethpicable."

They don't throw sliders in the dirt during BP, though. PS, get well soon!

That's gotta be Small Sample Size. Otherwise, you're arguing that, say, Buxton gets an initial read on a long fly ball, says "I might be able to reach that", then thinks twice and says, "nah, that one's on Gibby".

Too bad the two guys he passes up in the pecking order don't get the same benefit.

I'd try him at high-A. He'll go only as far as his bat will take him, because his glove seems to be legit, and his season numbers in CR weren't good, but I'm willing to give him a mulligan for the horrific first two months and accept his .721 OPS from June onward as a cherry-picked indication of learning. He'll only be in his age-20 season this year, so "merely" keeping at that OPS level through constant learning the rest of the way up the system would mean he'll get to the majors as a useful player and probably a starter eventually. No doubt his bat is a risk - I sense that his manager may have done additional cherry-picking of games for him to start - but to me it's questionable that another year begun at Cedar Rapids will actually do anything for him, confidence-wise or other-wise.

Chief has raised an important point because people vote with regard to "values" or "being one of us" as much as on the issues. I'm bothered by pressure to stand for the national anthem, and resist the idea of it being a punishable offense to fail to do it, moreover I'm also less worked up than some if somebody uses the anthem as a means of protest. It's not literal free speech, but it's free expression. And I don't like the idea of citizens pointing fingers at each other over things like this. I remember attending the equivalent of a city council meeting at our little village in the mountains of Nevada, where someone made an issue of another attendee (there to give a technical presentation on a controversial topic later on) not putting his hand over his heart and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of the session. "I'm Canadian," the second guy growled. You might say, sure, but USians need to do it - but the finger pointing is corrosive and I think we should stay away from it. But back to Chief's electoral point, short of opposing actual legislation it's not the hill I want my candidate to die on. No Trumpian Satire here this time.

Yuge.

It's a direct lift from Trump's speech yesterday, if that gives you a better hint. https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/05/politics/trump-speech-treason/index.html

This source says the Astros players' share of post-season money is $30.4M (divided up as they see fit, of course). It goes on to state that they derive from 60% of this and 60% of that, so I infer that the team gets something like a 40% share of the total, or about 2/3 of the players' share - i.e. about $20M. The article is full of good nuggets. I'm embarrassed to say that my other source, once again, is the Out Of The Park baseball game, and it seems to concur, giving the WS winner about $20M. Losing the one-game Wild Card seems to net a team about $1M, so it lines up at the low end too. OOTP is a bit eccentric about how closely it follows any given MLB rule; using it as a research source is perhaps a bit like using an Ernest Hemingway novel for a question about proper fishing technique - the basics might be close but there could be artistic license.

Concur. Colin Kaepernick and his ilk are like death and un-American. Un-American. Somebody said, 'treasonous.' I mean, Yeah, I guess why not? Can we call that treason? Why not? I mean they certainly didn't seem to love our country that much.