Balta1701

If people like Felix Hernandez, Cole Hamels start coming in and people start giving them large vote fractions, that would make it pretty hard to not put Mark! in first. Scherzer, Kershaw, and Greinke already have far more WAR accumulated than Mark! and seem deserving HOF candidates. Beyond that, Sale and DeGrom have enough WAR that they could feasibly challenge for 60+ in a few years, but obviously that depends on health esp. for Sale. Beyond them, the next guy on the list who might even have a shot at those numbers looks like Cole, and he's more than half a career away. You could legitimately be looking in 8-9 years at saying "hmph, Mark! was one of the last really good starting pitchers and his numbers are so far beyond what we're seeing from Starters today...maybe we should put him in".

Paul Konerko already had his shot and did not receive a high enough number of votes to continue on the ballot this year. https://www.nbcsports.com/chicago/white-sox/paul-konerko-misses-out-2020-hall-fame-falls-ballot-after-receiving-25-vote

I don't think Buehrle was a deserving HOFer, but I would really like to see him stay on the ballot for a number of years, so that we can develop some better context for his career.

First step - here's a multi-paragraph post from yesterday that answers about 3/4 of that. Can answer the rest once you get through that.

Notable results 1. Damaged car.

But if the White Sox aren’t confident they can surpass some given payroll number without fans, they may not be willing to offer that number yet. They do have a history of being interested in guys only as long as they can get them at a discount, and they have multiple positions of need. They could have a $75 million offer on the table and be waiting for Springer to come back to them.

This is literally said in reply to people praising someone for bashing Islam.

The trick is that you are better doing 7/$185 than 4/$170. The lower AAV gets you more ability to spend money on additional players in the early years when you are expecting to compete, the money moved to later years should be less valuable since revenue (virus aside) has gone up at a rate well above that of inflation, and if the player gives you any value the last 3 years, you get that value almost as a bonus.

To be fair, that wasn’t just fanfic. You had people such as Assistant GM Hahn publicly saying they were looking to add middle of the order bats, not bat.

Just thinking about this post. Let's say that Jimmy is right and they're not buying the big guys, that they have a major payroll limit. Obviously they still have 2-3 positions to fill. So, what would people rather do? Trade away major pieces (Kopech, Cease, Vaughn, Madrigal) to fill those positions as strongly as possible or Sign low to moderate cost FAs to fill those roles, while holding onto the young guys they have.

Sigh. It was an obvious match last offseason too.

https://nypost.com/1999/02/25/rickey-la-russa-is-no-racist-but/

If there were no minor league season...I stretch both of them out as starters with a goal of each pitching 100 innings on the season before being partially/fully shut down. I do Kopech in the second half of the year because his arm probably is in better shape to handle extra innings in a playoff stretch, and I could rest Crochet and bring him back in late September pitching out of the bullpen for a handful of higher-stress innings.

I think if you could have had Lynn for Stiever + a sweetener, there's probably a good chance that deal was done at the trade deadline. The fact that he didn't just move to us, he didn't move to anyone, suggests to me that the Rangers had to be asking for Vaughn or something of that level, making it so no team would meet their price.

JMO - I seriously doubt there are going to be "mulit-year stretches where there are no star players available in the NBA" given what we've seen the last couple seasons, the question is whether the Bulls would be ready for that right now. If the coaching was a major problem, and the system was a major problem, and the training staff was a major problem, then the assets the Bulls have and the whole feel of the organization could be a much bigger attraction in trades next offseason. Only Lauri really becomes a concern then, since he'll be at the RFA level.

If you want to sign those 2 and then trade for a starting pitcher, you have a path that works. For example, you could likely do JBJ, Colome, Trade for Lynn, and still have money left over. However, whether or not that works depends on if the Rangers are continuing to overprice Lynn - you don't trade Vaughn or Madrigal for a guy with 1 year of control, no matter what Rick Hahn normally does.

I mean, if you're doing Fetch, you should be doing ibotta as well, as if you're comfortable sharing your grocery receipts with one there's no reason not to do a couple. https://ibotta.onelink.me/iUfE/8cc13c64?friend_code=btnnjg

Well, they were a top 5 offense in baseball...with their 1b having a true career year, so there's still room for improvement even just within the AL. There's plenty of upside in Robert, Jiminez, Moncada, but there's some guys who will probably step back a little bit like Abreu, and over a longer season there's injuries to worry about...so I'll say again, if you're going to spend the money on Bauer, you should do something to fill that RF spot in better.

I mean, the answer to this depends strongly on the best trade you can make. Are there any outfielders we could trade for that are in the salary range we could afford? Are they available or are their teams not moving them? If you added Springer, now you've got only $10 million left to spend, so the right decision becomes trading for a Marquez and then signing for or trading for a cheap bullpen person. If you sign Bauer, now you have to fill RF and bullpen for maybe $10 million or less, so what do you do to fill that role?

I submitted this to B-R with Cot's referenced as an error on their page, I've got no idea why Robert is shown being paid so much more than Cots. It'll probably take a few days to see if they give an answer.

Somethin is f***ed up here. Fangraphs shows Robert getting $3.5 million this year, B-R shows him getting $7.83 million. Their contract totals are shown different.

6 years of control and unestablished at the big leagues for 5 years of control and established? Yes.

The answer to this depends on 3 factors which are not currently known: sterilizing immunity, duration of immunity, and effectiveness of vaccination campaigns. 1. Sterlizing immunity. It is possible that the Vaccine totally prevents you from getting the virus, or it is possible that the vaccine could prevent symptoms but still leave a patient contagious. In the latter case, the vaccine could actually increase transmission, because someone who was exposed to the virus and contagious would go out as though nothing was wrong, thinking they needed no mask as they had the vaccine and have no symptoms, go to bars or restaurants or an NBA game, and transmit the virus widely. At present, there is no data on whether the immunity is sterilizing, because testing that would require testing your entire population in your vaccine study with a PCR test every 2 days, which would require something like 10-20% of the US's entire testing capacity and several billion dollars per study. At this point, we hope the immunity is sterilizing, but without having studied it, one cannot say with absolute certainty. 2. Duration of immunity. It is possible that vaccine immunity could be permanent, or it could last months to years. This virus has only been widespread in human populations for about 8 months so it is literally impossible to know if you're immune 12 months later, experience with other coronaviruses suggests that people's immunity to them does decline within a couple years of getting them (so you can get the same cold virus a couple years apart and have the same symptoms), there are a handful of documented cases already of people being reinfected within a few months of getting it, and there's only been 1 country on Earth where the virus has circulated out of control for so long that we would have any idea about people being reinfected 8 months later (the US) so even if immunity declined after 6 months there would be no data on this yet. If immunity declined over a couple years or after a year, booster shots would be required constantly as long as the virus was circulating. 3. Effectiveness of vaccination campaign. If we only vaccinate 50% of the population because people can't afford it or people resist it, then the virus will continue circulating in unvaccinated populations. If there are large groups (poor people in inner cities or overseas) where the vaccine is never distributed, the virus will continue circulating within them. These 3 issues can act together. In the best case scenario, the vaccine provides sterilizing immunity for several years. In that case, if you vaccinate 90% of the human population and don't miss large groups because they're poor or the wrong race, the virus dies from the human population, and can only come back if it repeats the same jump from animals that it made last year. In the worst case scenario, the vaccine doesn't provide sterilizing immunity and the immunity is short. In that case, anyone who hasn't had their booster shot could be at risk of severe illness and death, and almost all of our defenses (masks, contact tracing) are useless because people aren't going to know whether or not they are transmitting the virus. In this case, COVID-19 would become a permanent fixture on causes of death in this country and would never leave the human population. Death rates would probably never match the Pre-COVID era and we would see a permanent decrease in average length of life. Anywhere in-between is possible, and perhaps most likely. A moderately effective vaccine campaign eliminates some of the carnage, but everyone needs a booster shot each year and some people just don't get it because they don't want to or they lose their health insurance and can't afford it, and there are populations that are never reached by the vaccine or the immunity isn't perfectly sterilizing so the virus continues circulating, and again COVID-19 remains a cause of death every year and there's a COVID and Flu season every fall.

Carlos Rodon will be too expensive to keep around in case a new pitching coach might figure out how to keep him on the field. There are 29 other big league pitching coaches, he can probably get a minor league contract with a spring training invite to work with most of them.