Balta1701

Dude, he's a righty you're not supposed to like him! Anyway, college stats are great and yes the White Sox are going to take him unless somehow the Royals draft him, the White Sox are then going to rush him up to the big leagues by the end of 2020, maybe sooner, and we'll see how it translates. The pitchers in the big leagues are slightly better than the Pac-10.

You coulda talked me into hoping for a competitive run at a wild card in 2020 if this team had landed one of the big fish and things went right with Kopech, Cease, and some of the other pitchers. Now, if a lotta things go right, especially with the pitchers, they've got a shot to be where the Phillies were last year in 2020. That's the difference between adding an MVP caliber player and not having them.

A good amount of it is coincidence. Why is Harper not a yankee? Because Giancarlo became available last offseason when the Marlins sold and Aaron Judge turned into a monster in 2017 - otherwise he's already a Yankee. Machado, why is he not a Dodger? Because Seager and Turner cover those positions there and you're not going to rotate those 3 guys. Why are the Red Sox out? In part because they're already at $230 million, in part because they still have a year left of Sandoval's deal on the books, in part because of Betts, Benintendi, Devers, and Bogarts; no needs at those positions this year. We know those teams will go over the tax level, but we also know they'll hesitate to do it at positions where they are already deep.

Ironically, you just made the case for why Harper is such a good fit for the Phillies.

But inherent in that is your problem. If the player has to be "almost as good as Frank Thomas" to justify the pick, he's not gonna be.

Isn't the thing that they typically test for the Testosterone/Epitestosterone ratio, which gets screwed up if you just take testosterone, so a truly effective cheater trying to beat the test needs to keep his body in balance of both of them by taking an appropriate amount of both? That's why an EPO positive is also a suspension, because you're trying to raise your testosterone level with the steroids and if you take slightly too much of the EPO, you miss the balance and the extra EPO is what you test positive for. In other words, a high EPO amount can be a sign of a skilled doped athlete who has been working to beat the tests for some time.

Yes.

This is not funny in the least and you should be embarrassed.

Dude, you had me agreeing with you in general that there was no way for Preller to actually know how good he would be and that Hahn's only stupid mistake was throwing in a player that he'd never seen, but you just destroyed any urge I have to believe you with the unsupported allegation.

Not only would Lozano not be leaking to Bruce Levine (who clearly had some version of the White Sox's deal when he was talking about value beyond the guaranteed money), but Lozano also put his own reputation on the line afterwards by publicly decrying the article and the number of leaks. If that was him, and he called out himself for violating the CBA - that's an incredibly huge risk, as there's a good chance the players association lawyers will talk to him about where that story came from.

That $5 million could make an awful lot of difference between being above and below the "$40 million over the tax" extra penalty.

well of course, but 20k will show up just for a baseball game in the middle of the summer.

Less than 1 million would be a huge drop, I can't see it going that low. People will go just to go to a baseball game. That's like a 12,000 a game average in Chicago.

It got down to 1.3 million after the White Flag trade.

I think there will be serious blowback, bad blood, and a general loss of interest, but I also think it will be spread over 2 seasons because I think their very public campaign for Machado likely sold a good number of season ticket packages and early single game seats.

For a team that doesn't care, they worked hard to get under the tax line last year to get out of the multi-year repeat offender penalties. The 1 year tax rate if they go >$40 million over the tax line is higher than the multi-year repeater penalty rate that they worked to get out of last season.

Why is the first comment tagging Smashmouth?

Yeah, i should have elaborated there - the Dodgers put themselves into real risk of the highest CBA penalty, including a 42.5% tax on everything, if they signed Harper for $40 million/year. They're right at the tax line right now, give or take a few million of manuevering. The luxury tax penalty jumpes to 42.5% in year 1 if they are $40 million over. The 10/$350 longer term deal is actually more favorable to the Dodgers as it avoids the huge penalty line. They also would lose draft position if they crossed that line.

If a team is willing to put 4/$160 on the table, why would that same team not be willing to put up the next 6/$160 to put it in the range of Stanton's deal?

Depends on how much competition there is for the player. If the player wants a 3 year opt out, it's probably available - for a slightly lower guarantee from another team (if negotiated properly).

A 2-3 WAR OF is, IMO, surprisingly hard to find in free agency. As far as I can tell there were 0 available before 2018, Josh Reddick was the only one signed in 2017 (Carlos Gomez was close at 1.9). Lorenzo Cain was better than that range. But 2-3 WAR - that's the Horrible range of the FA market in my eyes. That's the range where something like 80% of players you sign seem to underperform. I looked through the entire list of everyone who got a contract in 2018 with an AAV between 10 and $20 million and the only good deal out of that entire range was Cain, out of something like 10 players.

Under that setup - with Machado's opt out being 5 years away, trading Madrigal is a reasonable option with low risk. If you sign Harper and his opt out is 5 years away, f*** it trade everyone who is useful enough to be traded other than your likeliest CF candidates. If you sign him and that opt out is 3 years away...this is a much riskier proposition. Maybe you trade 1 guy but you really start wanting to keep some depth since you don't know what will happen after 2021. Maybe you half DH Harper that year and half play the other guy, I dunno.

A 3 year opt out only makes trading any of those guys awfully risky when they're probably 2 years away from big league debuts.

At the very least, the presence of so many options in the OF contrasted with so few options in the IF should have made Machado more valuable to this team than Harper...but alas that's out the window.

a 3 year opt out makes plenty of sense for the Phillies.