S.

Narcotic opiate drugs are not legal in various forms without doctor prescription. And comparing the business models of black market cigarettes to heroin really isn't valid. Terrorist/criminal organizations, cartels, etc trafficking heroin across the globe is a whole different ballgame than Joe Shmo buying 10 cartons of smokes when he drives through New Hampshire and selling them for a few bucks profit in New York. A few quotes, just for reference to the magnitude of the heroin trade: Regardless, I don't think legalization of heroin is anything we will see in our lifetime. Edit: Realized my post seems a bit angry, which is not my intention. No disrespect meant to anyone. Good discussion.

I lived in Denver 4 years ago, and this was very much the case with marijuana there at the time. I knew a few people with MMJ cards who were recreational smokers with no legitimate health issues and they all said it was very easy to find a doctor who would write you a relatively bogus script for a MMJ card for the right cost and then you could buy from the dispensaries (it was decriminalized at the time, but not legalized). On the other hand, if you knew the right people, you could simply buy directly from the same people who were supplying the dispensaries with their weed, cut out one of the middle men, and save money. For some people the convenience of being able to walk into one of the many dispensaries any time they wanted and peruse a variety of strains of weed was worth the mark up and cost of acquiring their MMJ card. For a lot of people, weed is weed is weed, and if they could call up their buddy who grows and pay $40, they really have no reason to go to a shop and pay $50. When it comes to hard drugs with very serious addictions, I'm positive this gap would be even more significantly pronounced. You're not going to see a serious heroin addict rationalizing that they can spend $10 more and go legally buy their heroin. They're going to call up their dealer and spend that $10 more to get an extra .1g. In terms of the general discussion of the popularity of heroin, it definitely started getting more prevalent as the companies producing prescription opiates starting making them harder to abuse, and then continued to rise in popularity as a lot of the Florida pill mill doctors started getting shut down. As the pills were made to be harder to abuse, and the supply of easily abusable opiates started slowing down a bit, the price of pills started going up and for a lot of people with significant addictions, they could not afford to maintain their level of use with pills. From there, heroin was the obvious next step for a lot of people because they could get their same level of high for an absolute fraction of the cost.

The article is 3 years worth of stats compared ("Suzuki's has worked for two clubs in each of the last two years. Add 2011 and there is a sample of over 12000 batters faced"). You were comparing 3 games vs 3 games and 5 games vs 8 games. If you want to draw conclusions from ~2-5% of a season, that's fine, I just don't agree with it. Much the same as I wouldn't read too much into a comparison of 10-30 PAs.

I must be missing something, but what's the point of these 3 game comparisons of Ramos and Suzuki? You can't honestly think comparing 3 games caught for two catchers can give you any sort of worthwhile statistics Edit: was missing something: other one was 8 games and 5 games. Still way too small a sample with way too many variables to do an actual comparison though. Different seasons, different opponents, different parks, etc. You're gonna need a lot more games before those comparisons mean anything at all in my opinion.

His wife doesn't fly (I guess) and he has said he wants to be close to home. I assume that limits his options to only a few teams (pirates/orioles/phillies/nats/etc) that he'd be willing to play for, and I assume out of those very few teams, he's going to want to play for someone that has a decent chance of playing in the postseason if he is to sign a deal.

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This right here. Don't see it happening and would be annoyed if it did happen without trading Willingham. Last thing I want is for them to jerk around Arcia and not give him the ML ABs he should be getting all year.

I mean, yeah, that'd be sweet and all, but lets be realistic here. He's hit 32 HRs in the last 4 years combined, never once hit above 30 in a season (28 in 2009, but most besides that is 13 in 06 - 8 years ago), only OPS'd above 900 twice (one of those being the 2009 outlier and the other also in 2006). What you're suggesting is basically that Mauer is going to turn into the Minnesota Miguel Cabrera, if you're expecting his HR power to suddenly triple to quadruple and his OBP and BA to stay at all similar to his career norms.

Not happy about this one bit.

No chance in hell he gets $8M per year. I'm doubtful if he'll even get 2 years, $8M total.

Unless I'm missing something, we certainly wouldn't need to be clearing money to sign any pitcher not named Tanaka, and that ain't happening. We can dream that they're clearing money to sign an extension for an ace pitcher they're about to trade for though.

Career numbers Nolasco: 4.37 ERA / 3.76 FIP / 3.75 xFIP Hughes: 4.54 ERA / 4.31 FIP / 4.31 xFIP Pelfrey: 4.48 ERA / 4.17 FIP / 4.50 xFIP Correia: 4.49 ERA / 4.50 FIP / 4.41 xFIP Deduno: 4.06 ERA / 4.67 FIP / 4.32 xFIP

"Mike Pelfrey agrees to 2-year deal, $11M, $3.5M performance bonuses. #twins" Ugh.

To be fair, he's only had 5 PAs as a CF in the majors, all the rest of his play time has been RF. If I remember right he did play some (?) CF in Japan, but I'm not sure where I'd find NPB splits by position.

"3:08pm: The Athletics aren't going to trade Anderson today, tweets John Hickey of the Bay Area News Group (on Twitter). However, the A's are seeking bullpen depth." Bodes well for us.

I'm very happy we're making some moves, but hard to say too much until we know the details of the contract. I do worry though that our rotation is going to end up being the same as last year, with Nolasco as the only addition and re signing Pelfrey to a multi year deal. Its a start, but the following rotation isn't exactly impressive if its the end result: 1. Nolasco 2. Correia 3. Pelfrey 4. Deduno 5. Gibson So, lets go spend some more.

I'd wager its Arroyo or Salty and we're not gonna be happy about the years or dollars. I hope it's Garza and I don't really give a damn about the years or dollars (to an extent).

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And when Sano, Buxton, et al are peaking, the FA market might be trash. We might go spend 100M over 5 years on a guy who is a flop from day 1. We might still have the worst rotation in baseball and investing in a top arm might only bring us from 70 to 75 wins. Sano, Buxton, et al might not all peak at the same time. Hell, Sano, Buxton, et al might (and the"et al" part probably won't) all pan out to be good major league players. edit: I dont mean to be rude and I certainly can appreciate the optimism about our system producing a bunch of successful players, but you're constructing a hypothetical situation where all possible stars are going to align, and I dont see that as a reasonable way to plan for the future. In order for that to work, all of our prospects in the minors need to pan out, they all need to peak in the same general time frame, FA players we need to fill any holes we have will need to be available during said time frame, and then we need to be able to sign them all. I guess I just don't see any reason why we couldn't also be signing good players now, especially since our payroll obligations are only going to continue to go down based on our current roster. I'm not saying go out and throw around a bunch of 5/100+ contracts, but going after a couple decent to good pitchers now is not going to hamstring us in 3 or 4 years on it's own.

And if you wait until a trade deadline to try to add your key pieces when the rest of the team is ready to compete for a title, what happens when the pieces you need aren't available? Or how about when the asking price for those key pieces are other key pieces on our team (and they would be, if you're talking about getting a top tier pitcher at a trade deadline)?

In order to need a key piece to push our rotation over the top, we would need to already have a rotation that was near the top. Our current rotation is near or at the bottom in pretty much every way. I have no clue how you can look at the pitching in our system and think that somehow in the next few years our pitching rotation will be good enough to only need a "key piece" without seriously utilizing FA and trades in the meantime.

I probably could've just said to improve your team and taken out the "drastically". In the Twins case, it wouldn't take that much talent to drastically improve our starting pitching in it's current state, to be fair. Once you start talking 4 and 5+ year contracts it gets a bit more complicated, but the fact of the matter is our pitching is not suddenly going to get better without some combination of FA and trades, unless we're making assumptions that every pitching prospect we have in the minors is going to meet and exceed any expectations, hopes, or dreams we have about their ability. If in 3-5 years our biggest problem is a bad contract, then I'd say we've done pretty damn well. I'd much rather be bitching about a good team with a bad contract than a bad team with a rotation that bears any resemblance to what we trotted out there the last 2 years.

The phrasing and use of the term shortcut really ticks me off, in the context TR is using it in. Using FA to acquire players to drastically improve your team (especially when you have a ton of glaring problems and a giant pile of money to spend) is a normal part of the game for most teams. That isn't a shortcut, it is the norm. We are taking the long route. I just don't understand why being efficient and utilizing all avenues is a shortcut in any way. No one is saying we need to construct a 25 man roster full of big name FAs. No one is saying we need to sign 5 top tier pitchers. It's like me asking for directions from Target Field to Xcel Energy Center and pretending that the suggestion of taking 94 is such an absurd idea. Sure, I could take 394 to 100 to 494 to 35E, but that doesn't mean that taking 94 is a shortcut. Disclaimer: I'm not actually saying these two situations are literally comparable but the point still stands.

If Santana signs somewhere for 3/42, I'll eat my shoes. It would not surprise me in the least if he gets more than 4 years and/or more than $72M. Whether or not he should is a different discussion.

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