KingKat

I figured it was unfair to NJH to expect him to keep that for himself so I spilled the beans.

This made me wonder what became of him. Signed a MiLB deal with Baltimore this month. I wouldn't have minded bringing him back as OF insurance. His skill set is pretty limited but at least he's healthy unlike Dirks.

Holly f*** am I ever dumb. I just solicited NJH's outsider opinion on a trade that HE WAS OFFERING. Ironically, I haven't asked his opinion on anything fantasy related in over a year. I just decide like some dumb f*** that now would be a good time to consult him without first checking who even owns the team that's offering the player.

Yeah he's fine. He's probably on his last contract regardless and he's actually very fortunate to find himself in a position where his only new competition for the 2B job is a second tier prospect who hasn't played above AA. I don't think anyone would have necessarily predicted that his prospects would be as good as they are a year down the road. Certainly should be pretty easy to laugh at it now.

L54 mentionned that he had experience in College ball and has hung around (presumably) the low levels of pro ball. I can see how this could be much harder to laugh at in a world where there are no guaranteed contracts and the opportunity cost of a lost season could be huge.

The intent (I'm assuming) was to make it hard for a team to concentrate all their talent on the farm. Sadly since a lot of players (including myself) were new to dynasty that didn't stop some owners (myself again) from trying anyways.

Do you have Blue Jays in the DR. Because everything you say is true. A Blue Jay is like a really evil crow that really likes peanut butter.

If Izturis is the backup then you'd better have a starting 2B than can slide to SS. If we're talking about Izturis backing up a 2B only player like Travis then I'd rather just kick him to the curb and run with someone like Goins or Ramon Santiago as the backup. Izturis just doesn't have the defensive versatility that he had back in his Angels days and he doesn't have a strong enough platoon split to make him an attractive pinch hitting option either. He's not a good hitter, he's not a defensive specialist. At his best, he can be not entirely terrible on both sides of the ball and provide just enough value to keep a job as essentially Travis' placeholder.

Yeah I think the severity of the injury would definitely influence the quality of the mocking. Maybe they thought it was hilarious at first but losing him for the whole season after a surpisingly decent start was pretty s***** for both him and the team.

That's it in a nutshell. No one would advocate signing Izturis to anything more than a MiLB deal if he were a free agent but that's neither here nor there. He is signed and he might not completely suck. There's not need to write him off but there's reason to be very grateful that Travis was brought in to be another (potentially much better) option.

Sure it's hard to envision but it's not reasonable to just blankedly assume it can't happen either. Whatever went wrong in 2013 can't just be chalked up to regression. It's far too extreme an outlier for that. It's nearly impossible for him to be that bad again. He won't be prime Izturis again either of course but he might still be a below average but nonetheless above replacement player (somewhere around 1 WAR).

I think you have Teahen and Derosa confused. Derosa was brought in for his cWAR. Teahen was just a salary dump the Jays had to take on in the complicated Colby Rasmus trade. Teahen = sunk cost.

One of the first signs of AA's naivety was the commitment to scouting. More scouts will equal better information was a common narrative in the early years but though he talked a good game, it never really made sense and you don't really hear it anymore. Quantity of scouting information won't help you if you don't have a mechanism for seperating the wheat from the chaff and AA never talked about that. He just talked about how having a bunch of new scouts would give him an edge. But how do you know which scouts are or aren't trustworthy? Is their even much of a seperation or since it's largely guess work, do they all have pretty similar rates of success and failures? I really wonder how baseball would go about identifying a theoreticaly "bad" scout and eliminating his inputs from the overall pool. We're talking stuff that takes years to come to fruition. Add in a white boy's club culture, add in the fact that front offices are constantly in flux, add in and the built in excuse that you can always blame bad results on bad development, add in how a couple of flukes could easily cover up a lot of faiure and ultimately, it just seems like the kind of job where you could get away with sucking for your entire career.

Yeah that's the crux of the issue. It's not that a scout can't be right. It's more how could you ever filter out the noise before you've already committed resources.

SS is a minefield. Even Tulo is a worrisome asset in some ways.

Castro is a hard guy to like in some ways but he seems underrated in fantasy.

I don't have much hope for Izturis but there's nothing to lose at this point. If he starts the season the way he did last year, that will make a nice bridge to Travis who himself may only be a bridge to DSJ. If Izturis doesn't do well then it's just a sunk cost and hopefully Travis won't be overwhelmed if he's needed a little sooner.

I wanted to sell on Lester and I think my rationale was the right one. Problem with that trade is that I didn't really have any room for Glasnow and ended up having to bundle him in a bigger trade because I was out of space. I traded too many guys at once which was a rookie mistake. Had I paced myself I would have lucked into a better sell window for Lester.

Yeah I think I see it much the same way. Putting them head to head and picking one over the other would be dumb once you have access to both. Once you have solid numbers, the scouting stuff just helps you to fill out who the person is and the how the numbers were accomplished but ideally you don't put too much weight on any subjective stuff because you'll never see the end of that rabbit's hole.

That seems like a bit of a blanket statement. I don't even know how you would even measure the usefulness or non-usefulness of scouting. Are you basically saying that as soon as you can put together decent metrics, you can pretty much throw scouting out the window?

I like the part where I shut Moogy up: http://www.bluejaysmessageboard.com/images/misc/quote_icon.png Originally Posted by Moogy http://www.bluejaysmessageboard.com/images/buttons/viewpost-right.png Adding 3-5 more wins may not get them out of 5th place in the division, regardless of Cleveland Steamer's completely meaningless projections. No of course not but should the team just throw up its arms? There are ways to improve the product on the field without making long term sacrifices and that should be the first priority. If you're not in full-on rebuild mode (and clearly this team isn't) then you should at least be making whatever moves you can to round out your roster and improve your chances. Breakthrough seasons can always happen, even in the A.L. East.

Yes.

I'm pretty sure Greenwood already knows that.

No, of course not.