southsider2k5

He seems to at least have a pretty good relationship with the Latin players. I am sure there are plenty of others through the org as well.

For my two cents, it isn't the per year that would scare me most, it is the years. I would rather give him a front loaded heavier in dollars, versus longer in years.

The Verlander deal also has a third year vesting of some sort.

I would take Verlander for sure, even for the extra millions on the front end. The dude basically has no injury history outside of the one TJS, and gives you 200 innings no matter what.

He'd also be a lot cheaper and cover our needs better.

If we were to chase a young A's position player I would rather it be Seth Brown.

Good for Houston.

He probably only signs that deal with LA, but that's the kind of deal I would like to see the Sox been in on.

Take Rodon at 5/150 and Nimmo at 5/110, or right around their estimates. Give Rodon another shoulder or TJS injury and/or Nimmo a fall back to his previous three years worth of games played and those are disasters of contracts.

At full market contracts with their injury histories? That is big time risk.

Unless I had some good feeling on what the problem was last year, I wouldn't spend a lot on talent either. If this really is a worst case scenario adding talent to this mess is a gigantic waste of time and resources. 1 year deals, sure. Top of the market long term deals? Nah. The deals I would add would need to be movable. With there being a non-zero chance of this being a complete failure, don't send good money after bad. Find some defensive pieces and more innings? Sure. You don't want to do anymore harm either.

As I said before, you don't really have a choice. Tony and his boys burned this down to the ground where there is no value to be had almost anywhere. You let your most consistent hitter walk for free anyway. Your best bet for the future is letting your foundational guys see if they can rebound to the point where they are good again and/or worth something again.Maybe one or two of them rebounds and the rest are really done, which gives you the basis for a rebuild. Maybe things go back to normal because Tony was the worst possible scenario. Maybe everything really is a 5 standard deviation worst case scenario. But you don't really have a choice if you want to get the most value out of this mess.

So really it is 2/20 or 1/12.

I am really excited to see if that Vera led grouping can start to do something as they hit the more advanced minors such as Birmingham.