Bobthe4th

Depends how much teams think he’ll be worse when drug free. FWIW he put up 3 WAR in half a season this year.

Yeah Dice-K never lived up to the hype but was a solid starter when fit. The last significant Japanese pitcher to completely fail was Kei Igawa.

If Pillar is traded (as he probably should be) the fan base are going to be pissed.

Davies is in a great spot to get playing time too. Robben and Ribery have been Bayern’s first choice wingers for years but are both likely in their final seasons (both are mid 30’s). And 18 year old Jadon Sancho at Dortmund has taken the Bundesliga by storm winning the latest player of the month. Elite young players should all be flocking to Germany, a high quality league with genuine chances of playing.

True but if Tulo can play 50+ games then Gurriel may end up playing more 2B than SS in 2019. Travis has options and dodgy knees and has a good chance of spending time in the minors if he isn't shipped out entirely.

The second part of option 3 seems unlikely, we'll probably just use Urena as first up from the minors as SS cover. Perhaps the FO will be aggressive with Bichette too and call him up if (when) Tulo breaks down.

Pendleton - your Dutch team is looking like they’re back. They won a tough group and the young players like De Ligt and De Jong are complimenting established stars like Van Dijk and Depay.

UEFA have introduced the Nations League to replace most European international friendlies. 4 tiers of seeded groups with the winners of the top tier meeting in the semi finals early next year. It’s been successful so far, with more competitive games than you normally see in friendlies. Lots of surprises too. On seeding, the 4 winners would have been expected to be France, Portugal, Spain, and Belgium. Only Portugal of those teams qualified and there are other surprising results like Germany getting relegated to tier 2! England (late winner vs Croatia), Netherlands (late equaliser vs Germany), Portugal, and Switzerland (shock 5-2 winners over Belgium after being 2-0 down) will be in the semis. England were outclassed by Spain in the first game (Spain then beat Croatia 6-0), but came back to dominate twice vs Croatia, and win a thriller in Spain 3-2. Our midfield is still weak creativitly, but we’re now playing 4-3-3 with really good wingers. 18 year old Jadon Sancho has forced his way into the squad after winning player of the month in Germany will Dortmund. Exciting times to be English. When Oxlade-Chamberlain returns from injury and Ben Foden gets more playing time for Man City (or on loan) we’re going to be a big threat at the Euros in 2020!

Mariano Rivera, Roy Halladay, Andy Pettitte, Todd Helton among newcomers on ’19 Hall of Fame ballot IMO Halladay would have made it in first time anyway, but he now should receive >90% votes.

He’s a bad batter - 10 WAR over the last 4 seasons is better than 90% of our roster in that time. Though obviously once his legs go his career is over.

IMO you'll never get old school anti analytics people to buy in when you have such large differences in WAR from the 2 most widely used sources. They can just dismiss it as being too subjective when compared to traditional stats like ERA. It'd be better if the MLB could use an official WAR stat instead endorsing one methodology. TBF Kyle Freeland had 8.2 bWAR (4th best in MLB) and 4.2 fWAR (16th best in MLB), that's crazy.

Disappointingly this would be an excellent hire for the Orioles.

Vlad for Bryant confirmed!

The right picks here. They got 27 and 25 first place votes (out of 30) respectively. I’m looking forward to watching Ohtani dominate as a full time DH in 2019!

“I’m drunk right now but I will edit my posts in a few hours”

JD Martinez wins a Silver Slugger at both DH and OF!

You have to concede that the statement "the players are NOT the game, any more than the beer vendors are" is dumb, and detracts from his more general points.

Yeah you've got a good point, it's certainly true that in baseball the difference in watching elite players vs quite good players is much smaller than in a lot of other sports.

Lol at owners dropping ticket prices for an inferior product.

Sure there would be a few minor league pitchers who could do a passable impression of an ace straight away, especially as they'd be facing worse hitters. But IMO the loss of all the All Star / Cy Young level pitchers would be a lot more noticeable than the loss of the the equivalent batters.

While in theory traditional stats might not drop significantly, the quality of pitching would be noticeably worse.

Haha, he is wrong though............. if all the beer vendors retired tomorrow anyone on this board could do their job to a similar standard. If all the baseball players retired, the quality of players and therefore quality of the baseball wouldn't recover to the same level for years.