Laika

Players subject to international cap restrictions shall be considered prospects, and as such, ineligible to be taken in the Rule 5. They can be selected in the next rule 4. Or, if they somehow hit AA and hit Yahoo's database while they are still unowned, they are waiver claim bait. Players who are older and aren't subject to international cap restrictions can be taken in the Rule 5. (Ryu, Tanaka, Abreu, Adelmyis Diaz, Alex Guerrero, Miguel Alfredo sauce whatever, etc.) If these weren't already common sense, then they are new rules. I think that covers all the bases. Only point of question might be players who sign big league deals despite being subject to international cap restrictions. We could just say that all big league deals by an international make them rule 5 eligible regardless of age.

.270+, good walk rate, 20+ dingers? I've been doing a lot of DDL MiLB rosterbation lately. I feel like my group of 12 is pretty excellent for the first time since we booted up.

As you may have noticed, I actually immediately disagreed with my thought and deleted my post accordingly, but nonetheless I appreciate you looking into it and I especially like this line of reasoning that you whipped out: "Eliminate all game leading off PA (which always have .87 LI), the number 1 spot gets a 1.016 LI/PA. You would think this location would be the lowest due to worst part of the lineup in front of them, but it's not."

See I thought you just meant people wearing nice suits lining up to hand him contract offers. Suiters. No?

You're right, it's not like we have a huge sample of buyers and adding some more product is going to drive down the average price of a pitcher here. In this case, it comes down to specifics. There could be a team that will meet Ubaldo at price X whether or not AJ is on the market. OR, it could be that Ubaldo only has two suitors with money, and one of them will now end up signing AJ. In that case, AJ would knock down Ubaldo's value, essentially stripping away his bargaining power. So we are both potentially correct or incorrect. Suiters.

Well, not really. We won't see. Ubaldo will sign for whatever he signs for and we will never have any idea what he would have signed for had AJ quit baseball!

No dumb logic. A number of the teams in on Ubaldo will also be in on Burnett. That's all that matters. I'm not even sure why you would think my logic was off there. Just seems kind of weird, "one year deal for a small number of teams", exactly, a one year deal to one of the small number of teams still looking at FA pitching.

You were looking for "suitor", Ivy League...

Not only is AJ Burnett a prime target, but his presence in the market depresses Ubaldo's value. Thanks for this news, everyone!

Just career ratio. I plop their platoon skill around projected wOBA using the ratio of their career PA vs. LHP.

No, I have his .307 Steamer splitting .282 vs vs. LHP and .317 vs. RHP assuming that Steamer uses the same PA ratio as his career.

He actually has quite a big regressed platoon split. Demonstrated split = 13.95% Regressed = 11.37% (league average for LHB is 8.6%) So that's .282/.317 around a .307 wOBA projection. .304/341 around his career wOBA.

"Turning to the mound, Heyman said that Ubaldo Jimenez may now be willing to drop his salary demands and could ultimately land in the three-year, $39MM range." How about Drew and Ubaldo for under ~$80M total?

"Turning to the mound, Heyman said that Ubaldo Jimenez may now be willing to drop his salary demands and could ultimately land in the three-year, $39MM range." Wow, if that happens and Toronto lands him, then AA's ostensible decision to wait the market out will end up being f***ing near genius.

That might be part of it, lol. And justifiably so.

If he's getting signed as a 2B, it's best to compare him to Infante. 4 yrs/$30.25M for Omar. Is Drew cheaper? Is he better or worse? WAR/150G = 2.15 for Drew = 1.76 for Omar Omar older by 2 years; can't play SS. Omar's production has been heavily recent. Drews is more sporadic through his career.

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/2014-zips-projections-boston-red-sox/

Didn't even realize that Drew had a .337 wOBA last year. I kind of thought he slapped it around a bit and just fielded his way to a good year. Still don't really like the way his K rate has trended, but since the ISO went up with it, it's hard to complain. His ZiPS in Boston is: .239/.312/.393 Steamer: .232/.314/.378 These are both probably low. They are being sandbagged by the data from his time in the offensive purgatory of catastrophic injury recovery. Massive upgrade at 2B in any event. I tend to agree with the above poster who said, "This makes alot of sense if we can also sign [ubaldo]. I don't think Drew is worth the money and loss of pick, but if he is only a 3rd rounder ... then it wouldn't be so bad...".

I don't think I like the idea of using 2 bench spots on catchers. Kratz > Thole. In spring, they need to find out if Dickey and Kratz (or Navarro) work together comfortably enough. If so, Thole shouldn't make the team. Gose Kratz Muni/Goins/Izturis (puke) Someone like Baker, maybe. That's my bench. Or, you know, they can run with 9 relievers and teach Gose how to play shortstop. They'll probably do something retarded like that and then act surprised when injuries completely crumble the 2014 foundation.

Jeff Baker career wOBA splits: .375 vs. LHP .285 vs. RHP Jeff Baker regressed wOBA split, plopped on top of his 2014 Steamer projection: .329 vs. LHP .292 vs. RHP

When your offense is: C Joe Mauer 1B Prince Fielder 2B Jason Kipnis 3B Adrian Beltre SS Jed Lowrie CF Andrew McCutchen OF Matt Kemp OF Coco Crisp UTIL Anthony Rizzo BN Chris Carter You could probably win a division with 8 middle relievers.

Lackey and Duffy are far from s***. Erik Johnson is making top 100 prospect lists (for some weird reason).

What did the minor league draft take, a week? Maybe it takes a week.

Official cutdown deadline will be Sunday, February 16th at 11:59 pm. The waiver draft will start on proboards about a week after that. Maybe two weeks depending on people's schedules. (There is no rush for the waiver draft - we have weeks between the cutdown date and the start of the season to get it done, and it will probably only take a few days to complete once we start) Yeah, you can feel free to add your own prospects as soon as the waiver draft is over. You could even select your own prospect during the waiver draft if you really want to. Although, there's really no benefit in "freeing up" MiLB roster space until we get closer to our June MiLB draft. Remember, we have an official MiLB cutdown deadline before the June draft anyway. Also remember that there are no demotions - if you call someone up and they gets sent down IRL, you only have one NA slot to hide them in. All cuts are final. People should only make early cuts if they have no interest in further trying to trade their deadweight. We'll give anyone who has already posted early cuts a day or two to renege, if they want (not that we'll necessarily re-add any names to their rosters on the spreadsheet).

Weekly BS continues to be excellent, Gord. Maybe once the season kicks into swing there will be enough content for 2 per week, give us some more steady content.