Laika

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

What program do you prefer? I've used R a little bit for graphing but I don't really remember most of the language. I should probably refamiliarize myself with R.

Transaction Analysis geeks might like this http://www.breakingblue.ca/2013/12/01/a-primer-and-review-on-value-calculations-part-1/

How many teams, what are the stats, and what are their salary situations? Two seasons in a row in the PL, I've drafted Ike Davis and rostered him through several horrendous months before dropping him and watching him put up numbers for someone else in the second half. Luckily last season he got hurt so it wasn't a wholly regrettable drop. Ike Davis is a cancer! Avoid him. He's also a pretty replaceable fantasy 1B, although he does have some big power upside.

If you mean Dickey today, then sure. Maybe that's fair. If you mean Dickey from pre-2013, then you're insane. Even right now, I'd probably prefer the next 2 years from Dickey over the next 2 from Smurf_DJ_zinga. Dickey quietly came back huge in the second half, his velocity came back and so did his run prevention skills. He might be 39 but he's not on the same trajectory as most pitchers. RA can probably pitch into his mid 40's if he feels like it.

In context, Dickey was >>>>> Samardzija

We're still feeling it out but yeah, I'm thinking that might be the formula.

If you post breaking news (or whatever), it would probably be beneficial to shoot a quick tweet out. Just your article title and the link would be fine. @BreakingBlueMLB password = heisenbird And a few notes about the article just published: - Title shouldn't be a question, especially since it has been confirmed. - Rumours needs a u! - Probably shouldn't say according to reports from MLBTR, since MLBTR themselves don't really ever report anything. Just say who MLBTR says broke the news. In this case, Nolasco has signed with the Twins, as first reported by @ChrisCotillo - Link portion of @AlexHalsted missed the D (I can't just make these edits because you have the article open / "currently editing")

I can't get my head off of this subject. I'm just not really seeing the 9M or 10M figure anywhere. For anyone else who cares, this comment thread has an abundance of information. Tango, MGL, Swartz, and others commenting on a pretty good study. http://tangotiger.com/index.php/site/comments/how-much-do-wins-cost I also found this 1-2 year old Swartz study that looks like it found about ~6M in 2011 with a trend of roughly ~6% inflation. So say 7.25M this offseason. This corroborates the more recent study from the first post. http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/a-retrospective-look-at-the-price-of-a-win-part-two/ More than anything though, I've found the question to be extremely complicated. It's obvious that the cost/win in free agency isn't the cost/win in all of baseball. The most efficient way to add wins is through league min and low arb players. The Rays pay like 2 million bucks per win, or something like that. The Blue Jays probably paid a near free agency rate for all of their wins above replacement last season. A win near the 90 win mark is worth a lot more than a win anywhere else, so value is very relative. $/WAR value calculations might be more dubious than informative in some circumstances. I'm wary of the entire exercise.

Chris, please don't leave too soon. We plan on riding your nerdy coat tails somewhere.

It's definitely something that I want/need some more information on

Chris and Nox have both said that 9M is more corrector, but I haven't read their source material or anything. I have no idea what numbers to actually use. Fangraphs still uses things closer to 5, I think. I've used 5, 7.5, and 9 so far. I've actually written an entire post about value calculation questions in order to kind of crowdsource an ideal method, but I'm not sure if it would get enough attention to be worth posting yet.

Yeah, there's a chasm there. Hard to really like a guy with that run rate in those types of parks. I'd probably take Vargas for 32 before I'd take Nolasco at the same amount, and Nolasco wants like 80M or something goofy.

Crunched some Jeff Smardzjzjzj numbers in our first Bird Seed news recap re: how much him, Sanchez, and Stroman are roughly worth. http://www.breakingblue.ca/2013/11/24/bird-seed-mccann-peralta-samardzija-nolasco-anthopoulos/

I've been hesitant to because I want to standardize our value calculations first. I'm going to need help from the community at large to do so, so I'm currently working on a post to that end. Hopefully after I get that sorted, I/we can go back and examine McCann and Peralta, and anyone else.

We could pick our consensus top 20 and then Ace could write them all up, if he wants. And then put them out 2 at a time or whatever. I think Ace should write the meat of all of it since that's his forte, but Chris and I could give some input on their profiles and what that means in terms of their chances of working out, etc. Maybe it would be a pretty good list since we have two angles going on. Ace is like our resident youtube scout, and Chris and I are the stat-filter BR couch analysts or whatever