Laika

Edwin is worth about twice as much as Price. http://www.breakingblue.ca/2013/12/09/asset-vs-asset-price-and-edwin/

Actually I said I'd sell my team. Fatcow is free to buy his way in with real money if he wants!

Kevin Pillar at number nine seems reeeeeeaaaaaly dumb. John Stilson has big teeth.

Haha, I was just looking at the start to Cano's career and it reminded me a lot of Rasmus' (just looking at WAR). Age/Cano/Colby 22 0.2 2.6 23 2.5 4.0 24 4.8 0.5 25 0.1 1.1 26 4.0 4.8 Obviously it doesn't mean anything. Well, I guess you could argue that Cano demonstrates what Colby's ~98th percentile 4 year projections might look like.

Homer is on the block?

A team with a win projection in the mid to high 80s should be willing to spend a lot in order to cross that 90th win mark. The value of these marginal wins is immense. I'd like to see them spend money, not prospects (assuming than an overpay is necessary, I'd rather them overpay with money). Tanaka or Garza to fill the team's biggest need, and then something like Mark Ellis and Youkilis to provide offensive depth. I think they can win 90 with that team. Youkilis can DH against lefties, cover 1B and 3B, cover a full DH role. Mark Ellis is the starting 2B. I'd probably cut Izturis, just eat the money, and make Goins the backup 2B/SS. Would need another Kawasaki type in Buffalo though for when Reyes gets hurt. They could maybe DFA Mouser and send him there, but he'd probably prefer to be released. Some team might even claim him if Toronto pays some/most of his salary. Alternate to Youkilis would be Mike Morse, if he'd take a non-guaranteed starting role (which I doubt he'd be interested in). I'd be very pleased with something like that. I think it would be spreading stupid on top of stupid to put this team together and then stop investing in short term wins all of a sudden.

Guys like Rasmus are basically why projection systems exist. He's probably not a 130 wRC+ player, but he's also not a 90 wRC+ player. 3 wins and a 110 mark sounds pretty flipping reasonable for a 2014 guess. He could also hit 40 homers and drop 6 WAR, or he could strikeout 40% of the time and quit baseball. Who knowwwwwwws. Extremely volatile skill set offensively. But the defensive chops make his production not so volatile (even when he sucked in 2012, he was a 1 win contributor).

http://s27.postimg.org/4recgd9rn/colbycano.png

I'm thinking they'll go Walker + Franklin + smaller piece for Price, and then TB might flip Frank immediately. Seattle is looking for bankable wins, I doubt they'd be overly interested in Gose.

I wrote this about the Cano signing: click Some might be interested.

I feel like the best financial decision for both Cano and his famous agent would be to have him take substantially less money to stay in New York, if that indeed ends up being the choice. \ There's a lot of personal brand value to having Cano in New York and in pinstripes. There's also a lot of risk in him going to Seattle. You could slap a not-insignificant dollar value on that risk.

If Cano signs with Seattle, then I'll probably just sell my DDL franchise to fatcow or someone.

LF and RF, duh.

Steamer is much better for pitchers. I believe Oliver is a relatively simple 3 year weighted average, whereas Steamer uses velo and handedness and more DIPSy BABIPy regression stuffs.

So Oliver is dumb? Ok. Good to know.

He's got a profile not entirely unlike a pre-breakout Scherzer. That doesn't mean he'll ever improve though, and the Cubs will probably want a shitload.

Stability is the key. The goal here should be marginal improvements and notable gains in roster robustness (unless you can get a good deal on a single big WAR addition, of course). A better floor option at 2B + some bankable SP production would go a long way in this regard. I'm also a big fan of finding Lind a RHH platoon partner that has some actual defensive utility. That type of player can mean a lot in terms of roster robustness. You always see teams like Oakland and Tampa Bay cycling players with actual defensive utility in DH platoons. There's a reason for it.

The Blue Jays need to improve a lot less than people think this offseason. They should have won almost 90 last year. They got very unlucky with performance variance and results variance. The group is largely the same, so projecting 87 wins without any large improvements seems sane to me. Bautista, Edwin, Reyes, Rasmus, and Lawrie is a really, really good core of position players. I wonder how many teams have 5+ hitters with 3+ win Steamer projections?

Yes, very likely. Needs a front end guy.

Welp. At least Carlos Perez is getting rule 5 exposed (methinks).

Mostly because of the salary gap, of course. What's his dos equis FIP? At 77 innings, we are near enough to the predictive inflection point anyways.

Redmond's TIPS was 3.72 Steamer projects a 4.35 FIP for him. 2.4 fWAR if he makes 32 starts for some reason. I dunno. I kind of like him more than Happ for some reason. Say what you want about the Blue Jays' pitching, but the depth is certainly there. Dickey Buehrle Morrow Happ Hutch Stroman Drabek Redmond Nolin Rasmussen McGowan Romero

We need more payroll space, better trade a guy who projects to be worth 3x his contract.

lol. holy f***.

We were talking last night about some sort of line break. I threw some squiggles in there but they are probably too subtle