Laika

Sent him a trade offer by email last Monday. He responded quickly but said he'd get back to me on the weekend because he was very busy with school. Never got back to me on the weekend. Did say, verbatim, "I'm still here".

His UZR/150 over his entire career is almost exactly zero. Not exactly "poor"

Hard to believe a playoff hopeful doesn't want Utley as a primary 2B or even UTIL / 2B backup. Maybe I'll just keep him.

lol, Lupul has as many shots as Buffalo

Pretty much everyone who is the type of person that makes an account and posts on a Blue Jays message board would geef a fawk.

My issue with Smoak is that he never even displayed power in the minors. 31 homers in 1150 PA and an ISO just over .160 is thoroughly sub-par for a 1B prospect, especially a college 1B. So it's not like Safeco f***ed up his power development and his confidence.... Well at least it's not likely. I think he just doesn't have power that plays at first base. The tool isn't there despite the frame.

Oscar had a Canadian passport... hurts all Canadians too.

I think it was Domonic Dunne?

Dinger, BTS, and I have discussed the issue and decided to compensate Boxy for the sudden and unexpected loss of Oscar Taveras. We stress that this does not set a precedent for valuable compensation for all untimely deaths or retirements. It will always be a case-by-case basis. The main factors here are seen as such: 1) the sheer upside and long term value that Oscar Taveras held in a dynasty format like this (talent + age) 2) the utterly unexpected nature of the loss (contrast with a long rumoured retirement, or a sudden retirement in a player's early 30's) 3) the state of Boxy's team 4) the combination of 1) and 3) (relative value of Oscar to Boxy's team). We have decided to give Boxy a first round draft pick immediately following the 'lottery' picks in this summer's MiLB draft, and a guaranteed 2nd overall pick in the 2016 MiLB draft (lottery will occur for picks #1-5 and Boxy's guaranteed pick will be labelled as 1B). The 2015 pick will be labelled as 5B in the spreadsheet. It will technically be the 6th overall pick, so any MiLB pick numbered 6 or greater will be one slot worse. The 2016 pick will not be tradable by Boxy until the rest of the 2016 draft picks become tradable. The 2016 pick will be in addition to Boxy's normal first round pick. If Boxy finishes in the bottom five in 2015 and wins the draft lottery for the 2016 MiLB draft, the guaranteed 2nd overall compensation pick labelled 1B will turn into a guaranteed 3rd overall compensation pick labelled 2B. Please note that Boxy did not approach any of us asking for compensation. He never so much as hinted at it. Also please note that while this 5B pick immediately depresses the value of later draft picks by a small amount, Boxy's MLB team just suffered a rather sudden and catastrophic loss relative to every other team in the league. If your draft feels "wronged" by this unilateral compensation, take a minute to reflect on how your MLB team was just given a sudden leg up on a competitor (using the most liberal possible definition of "competitor"....) On the issue of whether or not this is "fair" compensation, we would argue that very few people in this league would have traded Oscar Taveras for a 6th overall pick + a 2nd overall pick two drafts from now. We are not trying to approximate the value of Taveras here, although that is of course part of the consideration. If you are strongly against this compensation please send a PM to me on proboards. In lieu of a vote on this issue, if a fair number of people privately express disagreement with what we have done here, we might consider changing what we have awarded Boxy. RIP Oscar

Oh so he went after Atlanta... lol. He probably wanted a three year deal or something like that. Who really cares.

Pretty sad when you have coaches bailing on your team every other season.

Crazy to think that if the Cards made the World Series, he'd be alive right now...

Shocked that North would deal Homer for those two prospects. Almora doesn't hit for power, walk, or run - possibly the worst utilization of tools in the minor leagues. Appel smells like a rich man's Deck McGuire.

I think you mean "less".

Lind isn't that good though. In the last 5 seasons he's been worth 2.4 wins total.

Hey, even if he can trade Lind @ $7M for a cheap and good reliever with some control, that could be a great move. Platoon DHs can carry some value but I'm not a huge fan of what they do to the roster.

I think it's plausible that they'd trade Alvarez given the emergence of Harrison and the fact that Pedro is entering arb2, but I guess I don't really see what the Pirates would want with Lind unless they don't like Ike Davis anymore.

Money being = would you want Melky or Markakis?

Pedro Alvarez would be a pretty sweet get for Lind. Sounds like Pitt could roll with Harrison at 3B. Toronto would get the age 28 and 29 seasons of a guy who is slightly better than Juan Francisco in every important way. I'd much rather go Alvarez-Reyes-Lawrie than Lawrie-Reyes-Goins/Kawasaki. They would NEED to sit Alvarez against most LHP though, so maybe get a RHB MIF for the bench and run the platoon with Lawrie bouncing from 3B to 2B. Charlie Morton would seem pretty redundant - not much different from Happ who is under control as the SP6 for similar monies.

Man, I feel like some team could make a huge profit out of a Colby Rasmus / Chris Young platoon in LF.

Not sure what to think about the Melky situation. On one hand, let's say "in a nutshell", I would never advocate for signing a free agent with Melky's profile. You can spend 30 or 40 million much more efficiently. On the other hand, you get the sense that if the Blue Jays don't sign Melky then they won't do f*** all this offseason, and they'll be happy to roll into 2015 with Pompey+Pillar/Gose as their two outfield positions (puke). I mean, I guess I kind of hope they manage to get him on a responsible deal like 3/$30 and he can somehow remain a league average LF for most of that term. Letting him walk and making no additions would probably crush team morale too, for whatever that's worth.

I wouldn't say that it's even true. It's just like any area of research though, future breakthroughs happen within the foundations set by past developments. It's not really possible to reinvent DIPS - but something like TIPS can be just as ingenious within the context of today as DIPS was at its inception. A lot of the steps forward today are more technical, less foundational, and within sabermetric niches. But that doesn't mean that they aren't important or aren't as creative and cool as the foundational discoveries which they operate within. So I would say that it's not that teams have diluted sabermetric research at all by hoarding intellectual capital, it's just the nature of research in general within any fairly new field. I mean, in some ways, you could say that there haven't been very many equally important leaps forward in genetic research since things like the discovery of the structure of DNA, the development of PCR, and the sequencing of the genome.

That's weird. I must have exited the document too soon.

The author's point seems to be that sabermetrics has been consumed by MLB teams operating like Wall Street firms because any public sphere sabermetrician who shows any sliver of actual competence or ingenuity gets gobbled up by a team almost immediately. What historically has been a collaborative outsider's hobby is now a war of secretive, proprietary discovery. Due to the great motivating power of market competition, a wonderful open source journal of baseball knowledge is now utterly and thoroughly an arms race of encrypted and guarded secrets. As such, sabermetrics as we know it is dead. I would reject his thesis based on the very nature of how ingenious discovery seems to work. If you've ever read one of Taleb's books you're probably at least somewhat convinced that game-changing discoveries cannot and do not come from targeted research. It is extremely difficult to cure cancer by hiring the five smartest research oncologists you can find and telling them to go "find a cure!". No, game-changing discoveries overwhelmingly tend to come from think-tank style environments - large groups of competent people collaborating for the sake of discovery with no particular goals aside from discovery and research on their own. Any actual leaps forward happen randomly from the collective goop of the think-tank environment. Think-tank style research environments for sabermetrics are stronger than ever, and they can't be harmed simply by MLB teams plucking out a few big dogs like Mike Fast and keeping their outputs under lock and key. Nobody can really know what aspect of baseball will be the subject of tomorrow's next big sabermetric thing, but what we do know is that it is far, far more likely to pop out of a Fangraphs "community research" page, or out of a blog like "Breaking Blue", than it is to pop out of the fingers of someone like Colin Wyers who sits down at his Thinkpad everyday and tries to find the next OBP level market inefficiency. Front office analytical departments aren't reinventing the wheel every day, what they're doing, in large part, likely amounts to basic application and implementation of publicly available saber knowledge, and very small tweaks on commonly available aspects of sabermetrics.

Do you think there's an exploitable opportunity with NHL FD or DK pools? i.e., if you buy in every day for $2 in a 50/50 pool with 50 or 100 entrants, and submit an optimal lineup, would you probably make a real profit? (or whatever other investment / pool arrangement)