Balta1701

If there's something actually newsy watch either the thread title or the pinned whaling news thread.

Don't forget there's a few other details - for the luxury tax you average the total over the years in the contract, it's not the price per year, and each team has $14.4 million in benefits that they are required to include in the tax total. The Nats are very close to the line right now.

Right now their rotation is Severino, Paxton, Tanaka, Happ, Sabathia, Gray. They're currently 6 deep. They've been iffy on if they'll trade Gray given medical issues on Paxton, Tanaka, annd Sabathia, but even if they did they still have a full-ish rotation.

This would be idiotic from his side. The situation won't be different next offseason and might even be worse - if extra pitchers hit the market teams could chase those. The White Sox or Phillies could bow out. He should at the very least lock in the mutli year deal that leaves him with hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank for the rest of his life. If he wants a chance out of that - put in an opt-out after the 2022 lockout/strike.

Honestly? I think we're at a stalemate perhaps for the next couple weeks. There's no downside for the Machado camp to hold out until someone meets their price, they don't have to agree to the best offer until February.

Spotrac has him still as a FA

They had Neil Walker for that role last year, so now they have some semblance of IF depth again.

It randomly showing up in all threads is penance for all the times people said that trading away prospects was the right thing to do because it never came back to hurt us.

Ok, there's a trick here now that I'm only just catching - ESPN is using a Gb/FB rate that includes line drives as air outs, while MLB.com is not including line drives as air outs. HOWEVER, MILB.com is unclear on which it is using. If MILB is successfully breaking out line drives for A ball players, then you're right, and Madrigal's #s are poor but not the worst in the league. I didn't catch this beforehand. BUT - if MILB.com's statistics are lumping together anything hit in the air, including line drives, as air outs, then the # being reported by MILB.com would compare correctly to the big league number reported by ESPN, not to the number reported by MLB.com that has subtracted out line drives. If I had to guess - a traditional score table from an A ball game will show ground balls versus anything in the air, but will not break out line drives. I could darn well be wrong on this, but I did not catch this previously and MILB.com doesn't say whether their air outs # has included line drives or not.

If Moncada seriously improves next year and Madrigal is as good in the minors as people tell me he's going to be - then I think Madrigal + either Dunning or Hansen (whoever has the better year, hell maybe both of them) is the start of a serious offer for Blake Snell. You do that, with an infield of Machado, Anderson, Moncada, the catchers up, Eloy in the OF, and another year of pitching staff development - now you've got something that looks like a contender.

Madrigal as he was last year in our minors will not get on base at well over a .300 clip in the big leagues. The biggest red flag is his ground ball rate - it was substantially higher than literally anyone in the big leagues. If he comes up rapidly and is doing the same thing, with better defenses and better pitching in the big leagues, his numbers will plummet. You may not care about HR from him, but he needs to hit line drives and put the ball in the outfield - his HR numbers may not matter, but his 2b and 3b numbers do because those are things that guys get when they are hitting the ball hard. People have said that we shouldn't put stock in those numbers at A ball last year because he was coming off a long college season and he also had a wrist injury, I can understand that, but I also don't know that a wrist injury leads to such a high ground ball rate as much as an approach that hits the ball on the ground. If we're going to rush him upwards, then at the very least we need to see a dramatic drop in that ground ball rate and a lot more extra base hits - the extra base hits will tell you that he's hitting the ball with authority into the outfield. It may not translate to HR power, but he will not be a strong big leaguer without that.

Personally, I'd rather trade a guy than reshuffle people across 4 positions to accommodate someone. If Moncada strikes out 220 times this year again, then Madrigal can earn his spot. If both play excellent and Madrigal is a top 10 prospect next offseason - then Madrigral could be the #1 guy in a trade for someone spectacular.

I guess this wasn't clear enough so let me try it again. if Manny Machado refuses to play any position other than SS that is a huge personality red flag. There are some things I don't care about - I don't care that much when a veteran slams his bat down rather than running out a popup. I don't care if a guy is a little cocky. there are some things that are a much bigger deal. I care a lot about a guy refusing to do what is best for the roster and hurting the franchise. I care about a player overruling the manager. Manny Machado does not make the lineups. Most of the personality things people have cited for him, I think they don't matter and I think people pay no attention to them when other players do them. Manny Machado insisting he was a 3b and causing the White Sox to shuffle 4 positions would be an enormous personality red flag. So big that I'm pretty sure I'd say F*** it and look elsewhere. He'd make my team better now but he's going to be a big problem soon when he insists he has a right to that position.

Not unless your top 10 cy young contenders include Rodon, Lopez, and Giolito, and Don Cooper goes down as the greatest pitching coach in human history while we're at it.

You can't use health as an excuse to worry about Robert while people are telling me that Madrigal's ridiculously bad ground ball rate and lack of power aren't a worry because he was just banged up and that's not a problem for Madrigal.

Another point I think is important - I'll minimize all the other aspects of Manny Machado not working hard or having a bad personality or having bad hair or whatever other point people want to use to insult him for not being like them. But if Manny Machado wants to come to a team and insist that he needs to be the SS and him getting that position is so important that the team needs to shuffle 4 players around to make it happen - that's a much bigger attitude red flag than anything else I've seen. What's going to happen in a couple years when he loses a step, is no longer even a tolerable SS, the team has drafted a SS candidate, and Machado refuses to move? Manny Machado now makes the lineup card out?

Yoan Moncada has definitely not been playing all positions since little league and I think I'd say the same thing about Tim (wasn't he a football player?)

We also happen to have another fairly highly touted prospect in the minors who should stay at CF as well.

No team is going to put its actual best offer on the table until the agent says that they will sign the contract if the team puts a certain contract on the table. They're not going to let you walk out of the room with their actual best offer.

I thought that about this offseason. A better reason why they might not be players for Trout is that Moncada, Giolito, and Lopez all will be in their arb-1 year that offseason and if any of them are any good that's tens of millions of payroll increase right there, and Rodon will be in his final year of arbitration. That's the year payroll for the young guys starts going up.

He put in all this effort to convince us that Yonder Alonso was his family just so that Alonso wouldn't be stuck in Cleveland.

You guys know Google is not this difficult to use right....

10/280 comes no where close to topping a $34 million a year AAV.

https://twitter.com/hgomez27

I think that the slow drip of rumors is far less catching to the casual fan than a big surge of signings that they can all follow at once. Get 5 or 6 deals done at the winter meetings, you get a major slot on ESPN that day, you get people tuning into MLB network, you get big press conferences the next day, you take over a week of time. What do you think has more attention in Chicago right now - the slow drip of twitter rumors or Cody Parkey?