Balta1701

I will place any bet that anyone wants to offer that the Cleveland Indians will not win the AL central.

Come on man, Grandal is not the best catcher in the game, not even arguably. There’s one clearly better. You can make an argument for second best although I think this season everyone will agree Smith is above him. Was this just bait?

There were only 39 pitchers in all of baseball last year who threw 160 innings. Every team will have to do something along these lines - either load management or replacing a guy on the IL.

I’m going to guess he gets 2, maybe 3 minor league outings and then is up by April 15-20. You’d probably be ok with 3-4 innings in his first big league outing. One Offday or Lopez start or rainout buys that much time.

Just so we check this - if he’s called up on May 1 or whatever, the remaining $3.5 million doesn’t become guaranteed if he’s called up, right? If he’s cut on June 1, he gets like $750k? Asking since I’m not sure I’ve seen a contract structure like that.

What do you define as “working out”? It seems to me his job is basically to throw 30 innings before May 31 with an ERA of like 5, but make it so they don’t have to use Mr. offday as their 5th starter so that Kopech, Cease, and Giolito don’t overwork and so that the bullpen doesn’t get crushed. Is that “working out”?

I've heard a fair number of poeple complaining while he did that last year right?

They are going to bring in someone else somehow. Just a question of who. They know that if someone has a minor injury or sprains an ankle then they're basically out of non-bullpen arms right now.

No, when it’s a total of 30 games in a season because of an out of control virus it doesn’t typically count as a solid sample. For comparison, Zack Collins wasn’t a badly scored framer in his first 12 games over 2019-2020. He was quite poor when the sample got larger in 2021. https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/savant-player/zack-collins-641470?stats=statcast-r-hitting-mlb

No offense to B>W here, just illustrating a point.

Well unfortunately that’s not true at all as 2019 was the worst framing season in his career. 2020 was respectable but in a very short sample set. https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/savant-player/james-mccann-543510?stats=statcast-r-fielding-mlb

The last time the White Sox traded away a catcher who was hopeless and a disaster behind the plate and where it was emphatically declared he would never become a good framer, it took him two seasons to become one of the better framers in the game and a solid overall defensive catcher.

There’s no harm in talking about this. Cease is a guy who could completely and legitimately jump into that discussion. Kopech it’s very unlikely this year, but there’s no reason why you can’t put him on the list for this year in case he comes in like top 10 after 130 strong innings, and get people introduced to him now in the process.

Whether it’s Cueto, Teheran, or paying a price in a trade that he wouldn’t pay yesterday, there are always other options.

Didn’t he just burn a lot of bridges with testimony about drugs in the locker room?

I’d much rather have an extra pitcher and an extra position player, with guys already getting hurt.

The F***? So we are illegally retaliating for being a part of a union negotiating team? Please go admit that in court.

For those who actually care… https://www.espn.com/mlb/insider/story/_/id/33646494/trade-grades-which-world-series-hopeful-upgraded-most-craig-kimbrel-aj-pollock-swap

Fangraphs graded Vaughn's year last year in LF as having a better throwing arm than any of Pollock's previous 3 seasons in LF. He's been a worse LF than Vaughn last year and a decent CF outside of a horrid 2019. I'll let you figure out how that works.

And ironically I bet the Dodgers wouldn’t move Bellinger but moved Pollock.

The buyout is $5 million if he opts out. So he gets to choose, a $5 million check or a $10 million salary next year. If he’s good, he just takes the $5 million. If he’s bad or seriously hurt, he takes the $10 million. Its $15 million this season and a player option for $5 million if you want to think of it that way, just a payment due in November.

He would. That is just an extra $5 million if he suffers a career ending injury.

Bellinger is being paid $2 million more.