KingKat

This is similar to the Marlins signing Jose Reyes when they already had Hanley Ramirez. When you're a bottom feeder looking to make a big splash, you sign big names regardless of positions. It's not going to work anyways so what's the difference. Big splash is big splash.

What a dumb reply. It's documented (in a book no less) that after the Marlins trade, AA was hoping to get another pitcher through free agency and that he went to the Mets after the market dried up and asked them what he needed to give up to get Dickey. In other words, if something had happened in free agency the trade never happens. This is the similarity. Did I imply a similarity between the players? No I didn't so work on your reading comprehension before tossing out insults.

Reagins was after some free agents and when that didn't happen he inquired about Wells. It's not unlike AA inquiring about Dickey once he missed out on free agent pitching.

ftfy?

Didn't he also say something about the prices being too high? Maybe he scoops up whatever's left at the end of the offseason but it's a good bet he won't be the gm to meet Garza's demands.

That's the Blue Jays way. Remember Shanon Menchkerson?

I look forward to the Jamey Carroll era.

Which is nice but AA seems to have all but ruled out signing free agent pitching.

Not going to bookmark at work.

Has anyone else been accidentally giving a lot of hits to Breaking Blue dot com. I get that wrong pretty much every time I type the URL.

So at worst, he's Anthony Gose like.

Presumably projections whiff on Pujols because they go by his listed age.

Or Stroman becomes a reliever and Sanchez busts alltogether and you miss out on whatever value they had because you didn't trade them now (i.e. Snider, Arencibia and others that were kepth until they lost the last shread of value).

Behind the Angels? Well that sure didn't work out.

Were the Blue Jays really projected as favourites last year? They were the Vegas favorites which really doesn't mean anything because that just means they became a popular bet. I seem to recall they were that the projections had them around 90 wins (maybe even a hair below).

I think I was an adult before I coud make sense of that logo although the primary colours and general roundness still appealed to me as a child.

If I didn't already know that the letters are supposed to be JB, I would be totally confused by this logo. It's a fail for me.

That's a bit misleading. He wasn't a top pitch-frame by per game average. He was a slighltly positive pitch framer with a ton of playing time.

I don't see what OLD has to do with anything. I'm pushing 40 and I love analytics while lots of young fans talk in nothing but clichés like grit and hustle. Framing debates as young versus old just seems like a good way to have a chip on your shoulder.

Well I can't speak for others but I'm totally on the pitch framing bandwagon. I don't really see that as merely a new stat because it's a whole new dataset. It's information that we simply didn't have before and it's information that has yet to be accounted for in WAR or elsewhere. Until it gets rolled into WAR, there's no way I'm going to feel comfortable evaluating a catcher's worth that way. My opinion on Molina has absolutely gone 180 but frankly I don't see why it wouldn't in light of new information. I used to hate the way Molina refused to drop to his knees to block pitches. I used to agree with all the announcers who harped about it. Now, I realize that Molina's reluctance to drop to his knees behing the plate may have had something to do with his commitment to being as quiet as possible behind the plate and I'm fine with it (the skills aren't necessarilly mutually exclusive, some catchers are good at both, some at neither but I won't argue with what Molina does anymore because his overall approach nets positive results).

I wonder how Koreans feel about playing for the Mariners. Do the strong ties to Japan appeal to them or repel them?

He sort of did. The end game was to extract as much money as they could from the Yankees. They thought they could use the Mariners as leverage but they overplayed their hand and now Cano has to actually play for them which he can't be too thrilled about. I mean if all Cano wanted was to play for the biggest sucker, he could have had Boras do that.

That's a very interesting comparison. Why would someone be comfortable writing off Snider and not Arencibia when Snider is the younger player and was the much better prospect both in terms of prospect rankings and statistical performance. "I'm getting that Aaron Hill feeling with Travis Snider" is a more justifiable statement than the orginal although neither really makes sense because Aaron Hill had a far superior Major League track record than either Snider or JPA.

Nice job rewriting history. People hated John Buck getting playing time over Arrencibia. Molina was just a backup and wasn't even getting much playing time anyways. And you know something... even knowing everything we know now about JPA, there isn't a single reason to regret feeling like he should have had more playing time at the time. So he didn't turn out to the catcher of the future, how exactly did not playing him help determine that? Oh right, it didn't. Of course you play him hoping he does well but if he doesn't there's still value in giving a young guy some playing time. In a lost season it's a no-brainer. I don't think Goins is the 2B of the future but that doesn't mean I don't think it was helpful both to him and to the team to get playing time last season.

That episode was the subject of an excellent analysis: http://harvardsportsanalysis.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/calculating-the-fresh-prince-of-bel-air%E2%80%99s-usage-rate-and-what-it-can-tell-us-about-ball-hogs/