Princess Dye

I wish Brandon Hynick was awesome. That would be great.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Dec 8, 2010 -> 11:31 AM) The key to me is $27.5 million dollars, not 10 versus 13. Is your concern that he'll be unable to play 1B and produce in year 3? Or that there are going to be tons of holes we can't fill by year 3 and will want that money? The way I see it, there is a decently aged core and some money coming off the books by then that will mitigate that. And our best prospect is a 1B.

To compare, freaking Michael Cuddyer signed a contract (in 09 or something?) for 2yr/24M with option for a 3rd. Paulie's mother teresa if he went up to his old team and said "pay me like Michael Cuddyer." instead his agent took a hard line approach so they could end up at that point anyway. Perfectly fine with that.

Above all, we can't really judge this until we actually see what they do with the bullpen.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Dec 8, 2010 -> 10:57 AM) I want JJ Putz as my damned closer. PK precluded that from happening. This is the same Putz that hasn't put a complete year together since who knows when. Last year he was close to doing it but wasnt available down the stretch. With relievers you're better off trying to catch lightning in a bottle with quality young arms. If we had signed Putz, you can just turn around and say signing Putz precluded us from signing Rafael Soriano. At some point you have to pick a direction and fill out payroll with a combination of guys that involves some sure entities and some risk. I'd rather take gambles with the bullpen than with 1B.

Also if you ask me, PK knew the Sox wouldn't overpay for bullpen arms, but probably realized that if he caved some, they could get Dunn and really have a special offense. Bullpen arms, no matter how much you plan, are a chaotic entity (ie Cotts/Politte)

QUOTE (iamshack @ Dec 8, 2010 -> 10:54 AM) The White Sox are NOT the Yankees. Not even close to a fair example. True, but we're known leaguewide i'm sure as a team that pays up.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Dec 8, 2010 -> 10:51 AM) I guess I am naive then. I thought PK, our captain, wasn't every guy in the league. I mean, they hire agents with different reputations. Joe Crede seemed like the most down to earth guy in the world, but he perhaps got Scott Boras to handle all this ugly stuff for him. It's quite possible PK told his agent: "I want to be at least near my market value but give them a hometown discount of x-dollars so they can get relievers" And then his agent may have taken this direction and decided the way to get it is demand 15M for days on end until the Sox caved on a final 1M or something. Agents separate their client from the negotiations so they dont have to go on that messy path to get to where they want to go. It still may mean PK was understanding of team needs from the beginning. Did you want to pay PK something along the lines of 2 yr/20M?

QUOTE (iamshack @ Dec 8, 2010 -> 10:47 AM) Then you and your agent try to hold us up for $15 million a year. Nice Pauly. Every guy in the league does this. If you don't hold out for the highest price you can, someone else will. If PK knew from the onset he'd be giving us a hometown discount, then it was in his best interest to play hardball until the last possible second. It seems like the wall of 1B free agents is about to break. I can remember McGwire giving like this gigantic hometown discount to the Cards in free agency, but I suppose we can look back and think he had steroid guilt or something.

To draw a perhaps useless parallel, PK has perhaps known JJ Putz a year. I dont think i'd give any coworker of mine 50% of my next raise (after I had a productive year) much less one that's been working here a year. "give a million to your grandkids' kids" vs. "give JJ Putz an extra million"

QUOTE (iamshack @ Dec 8, 2010 -> 10:37 AM) What angers me is that these ballplayers who are already incredibly wealthy, and claim that their number 1 priority is to win, seem to forget about that come contract negotiation time. Couldn't the guy survive on $10 million a year so we could have signed Putz? Or some other bullpen arms? PK's demands have the potential to hamstring us a bit here, and it frustrates me to no end that the guy doesn't care about that. I'm happy the guy is back. His bat is definitely going to be needed. But I'm also going to look at him in a much different light now then I did just a week ago. Players have seen other players get killed on investments. Lose all their millions b/c of some jerk they trusted. Then think about what he's paying agents etc. and how this deal is supposed to set up his grandkids and his extended family, in-laws...it's actually not as black and white as "he's greedy." We have no idea how many cousins he has that just got laid off or have gigantic debts. I'm sure a big part of it is he wants the Sox to respect him with the final $ amount, but another part can be family related stuff that of course we'd all relate to, albeit in a distant, non-millionaire way. We don't know for sure that PK's deal affected Putz. Putz was signed cheaply, but PK or no, I have a feeling we're going to be spreading the rest of that remaining $ over several arms.

QUOTE (Jordan4life @ Dec 8, 2010 -> 10:29 AM) It's not complaining. It's showing legitimate concern for the possible long-term ramifications of the deal. I was on the fence about all this Lee/PK stuff, but basically it comes down to how much cheaper DLee was going to be. I dont know if we can knowingly complain until we see what Lee gets, from who, and what the 1B market was like. One thing I won't listen to is people pretending that LaRoche's career .339 OBP in the NL was something for me to drool over.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Dec 8, 2010 -> 10:24 AM) Because before you know it, you're paying out a bunch of money to players that are no longer on your baseball team. As long as Jerry is willing to pay for a winner each year, we can't really complain about payroll restraints. He's shown he's willing to consistently pay like winning teams do (KW's streaky decision-making fully aside from this). We have no idea what JR's thought process is. It may be that they've calculated Konerko makes so much money for the organization based on ticket sales/merchandise that perhaps having him here the next two years pays for that deferred money ahead of time (and then some). Point being, without inside information like this, we can't know how to judge how much it does/doesn't restrain us. Maybe they figured PK's popularity will pay for our bullpen arms moreso than D-Lee's supposed discounted price would have.

Another thing to consider is that contending teams very often give multiyear contracts to aging, still-producing players. That's just one of the responsibilities of being a winning organization these days. Yankees don't get 1 year of Andruw Jones for 500K, and they dont get 1 year of Carlos Peña to be Andruw Jones like at 10M. They pay their older past-allstars a multiyear contract. If Konerko had taken one year, there's also no guarantee we would've been able to sign some all-star 1B the following year. Looking at our pre-Dunn FA record of late, I'd say it's actually very unlikely.

QUOTE (bigruss22 @ Dec 8, 2010 -> 10:14 AM) DLee contended for more MVPs than Konerko. In the NL. I was all for DLee at like 2yr/16M. But something tells me he gets more than that now.

Last year Peña was a bad version of Andruw Jones, but with a full year of at-bats. No thanks. We're here to contend. Also, Peña fits the roid profile, and while not young to begin with--we all know those guys do not age well unless they continue treatment.

QUOTE (bigruss22 @ Dec 8, 2010 -> 10:07 AM) Why can't people be concerned that Konerko will regress big te, or that his hip comes back and haunts him, or his chonic thumb problem that he gets shots for throughout the year starts to get much worse? I think there is a ton of risk in this deal and I think DLee will be better than Konerko. Throw in the draft picks and setting up an opening for Dayan and signing DLee just made to much sense. Great point about the draft picks. But how often do you get a chance to sign a guy who contended for the MVP at this price? Other teams surely were not given this sweet deal for the third year deferring. If GMs are to take advantage of unique situations and pounce, then I'd call this deferring a little more advantageous than getting boom-or-bust-very-often-bust MLB draft picks.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Dec 8, 2010 -> 10:05 AM) But the other 1b options could be signed for 1 year. Huge difference. If someone was bidding for Konerko multiyear, you can bet they were having side conversations with Lee for two years as well, since he's career #s wise an identical cheaper player. Based on our payroll restraints, it can be sort of said PK signed for 2.5 years.

Is there any hope at all for Viciedo playing RF?

QUOTE (iamshack @ Dec 8, 2010 -> 09:59 AM) I don't like his inconsistency at all. Not for a 1b hitting in the middle of your lineup. Basically all the 1B options could be called inconsistent as of late. LaRoche, Peña, Lee, Viciedo. For the vets in that group, each is coming off a down year. PK off a career year. PK doesnt complain about injury, so the hypothesis can be made that his awful 08 may have been bumps/bruises related more than he let on. When healthy his best years seem to trump those of the other guys (if you account for Lee beating up on NL pitching)

QUOTE (jphat007 @ Dec 8, 2010 -> 09:55 AM) Nightengale broke it. He must have a really good source or two in the org. Yeah, but Heyman's tweets just had this knowledgeable confidence all along that this thing was in the bag.

QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Dec 8, 2010 -> 09:53 AM) Eh, your argument to assets may be valid, but there is also a defined limit to how much you can pay your entire roster. This is why losing Deng would have been more valuable than keeping him at that contract level. Perhaps, but then you also have to convince free agents to come here. The Bulls were only able to pull that off in the year where there were like 15 great free agents. Horrible winters etc. The one we finally signed is a guy from Alaska. Ben Wallace was a big name signing but there was no competition for him due to age. For the Bulls I much prefer the approach of cornering guys into coming here via drafting them. Then keeping them if they're solid, looking to trade them perhaps for assets later (we technically got JR Smith for Tyson Chandler).

Side note: Man, Heyman is well connected.

in today's market a 5th place MVP candidate at a power position should make more than 12M per. The third year could hurt obviously but we have no way of knowing. It could also hurt to have Kerry Wood on a multiyear deal. In a whole different way.

The whole thing is we were never going to get top of the line relievers anyway. The Sox already openly stated that. Unless Quentin can net something, we likely are relying on our two lefties as being the two best pen guys.