caulfield12

And one wonders why this organization has the longest playoff-less streak in baseball by far, with the Padres and White Sox both breaking theirs last season.

Mather addressed the team’s payroll and watching the financial bottom line. He said he believed top prospects Jarred Kelenic and Logan Gilbert likely will not start the season with the team as a way to manipulate their major league service time and keep them under club control longer. Mather said the club attempted to sign Kelenic to a long-term contract and was rebuffed in its efforts. “Jarred Kelenic, we’ve been talking about him for a year and a half now, he will be in left field in April,” Mather said. “He’s a 21-year-old player who is quite confident. We offered him a long-term deal — a six-year deal for substantial money with options to go farther. After pondering it for several days and talking to the union, he has turned us down. And in his words, he’s going to bet on himself. He thinks after six years he’s going to be such a star player that the seventh-, eighth-, ninth-year options will be undervalued. He might be right. We offered, and he turned us down.” https://www.seattlepi.com/sports/article/Mariners-president-Kevin-Mather-apologizes-for-15968549.php

He's a Michigan, Northwestern and Harvard Law grad. No less than a hedge fund, venture cap group or investment bank (see Billy Beane's plan if forced to give up A's as it looked due to conflict of interest with overlapping ownership groups.) Then again, I think Hahn would drive his Home Depot employees nuts. These days, that's arguably the much more demanding job. He would certainly never stand up to management for the benefit of low-level employees or risk his own position.

Yeah, that kind of ambiguous phrasing is what we've come to expect from Hector... whereas the likely result will be somewhere ranging from a 750-825 ops, the most trustworthy prediction range for the best collegiate hitter regardless of his debut season or 2020.

https://www.startribune.com/why-modern-baseball-is-unkind-to-thirty-somethings-like-brian-dozier-trevor-plouffe/600024936/?ref=nl&om_rid=48311239113&om_mid=2399915465

https://www.royalsreview.com/2020/12/29/22204730/royals-sign-ervin-santana-to-a-minor-league-deal

Go high with Cruz, or go value with Moreland....just stop going for the mid-tier declining veterans. Still think they should have signed Odorizzi, but whatever. If they had tried Collins/Mercedes, at least they would have some answers to their questions. Even going back to Semien, they never gave him a full season to prove himself before cutting bait. If Mercedes was left-handed, he would be more valued by the organization. Collins seems like the kind of hitter who could have had a decent career before the era of 95+ fireballers exposed his slider speed bat and hitch in his swing.

https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/mlb-offseason-grades-yankees-lack-urgency-mets-dodgers-padres-get-high-marks-cubs-red-sox-underwhelm/ B for White Sox, with puzzling TLR hire the main point. For some reason, poor Hector Rondon and Carlos Rodon keep getting their names mixed up by writers.

What would be interesting would be to crowd-fund with Sox fans and put together similar deals to BLA for someone like a Colas who aren’t peak of the market players but interesting nonetheless. They used to hold the Cubans captive basically until they signed similar deals to get off the island...which certainly adds to the unsavory/iffy ethics, but once stateside, they’re certainly freer to seek out financial propositions that are not using their own safety or family’s safety back home against them. Despaigne has accused Puig of helping Cuban authorities to arrest several human traffickers, in order to curry official favour while plotting his own flight. The claim is contained in a 10-page affidavit the boxer filed in Miami, as part of a lawsuit against Puig by one of the purported traffickers who is currently incarcerated in Cuba. Despaigne said he liaised between the baseball player and Raul Pacheco, a Miami-based air-conditioning repairman and recycling business owner who was allegedly part of a group that offered to extract Puig in exchange for 20% of all his future earnings. Pacheco reportedly has past arrests for burglary and credit card fraud, according to public records. After several failed attempts to escape from Cuba, smugglers spirited Puig, Despaigne, Puig’s then girlfriend and a santería priest to Isla Mujeres, a fishing village on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula, near Cancún. According to the reports, the smugglers detained the group in a motel while they haggled with Pacheco over Puig's worth. A team allegedly sent by Pacheco and some of his associates ended the stand-off and, shortly thereafter, Puig entered the US. Despaigne said that eventually an envoy of a smuggler boss known as Leo confronted him in Miami, demanding payment. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/18/la-dodgers-yasiel-puig-kidnapping-gangster-drama

Well, maybe it feels like the equivalent of a “pre” reverse mortgage...and yeah, Tatis is paying off huge, but the majority of minor leaguers, 90%, never make it for a single pitch or at bat to the majors. So it’s all supposedly based on this algorithm which somehow identified his potential before Keith Law launched the bandwagon officially.

Whatever we say about the DR, it is pretty clear most or all of the father’s (Tatis) $17-18 million has been depleted...or he would never have signed with an agency like BLA (similar deals to extract Cubans with buscones, the Puig escape/kidnapping the most famous example of a “future earnings” loan shark approach). Big family spread across DR and Florida. That and the fact that he asked for another $10 million in more immediate signing bonus money, although endorsement money is already starting to roll in as well, like video game covers and regional SC promotional deals.

“When we signed him he wasn’t considered a Top 40 prospect,” Big League Advance CEO Michael Schwimer said about Tatis. “At the time, talking to investors, the amount of money we were offering him was a sizable portion of our bankroll. But we trusted the model (proprietary algorithm forecasting every single minor leaguer’s future MLB earnings.)” Tatis’s father also played professional baseball, tallying over $18 million in career earnings, according to contract data from Spotrac. Considering how difficult it is to make it to MLB from the minor leagues, the risk mitigation can be worth it for some athletes to take the quick money — only about 10% of minor leaguers make the big leagues, according to data from MotherJones. Big League Advance, which was founded by Schwimer in 2016, has investors including mutual-fund manager Bill Miller, former Goldman Sachs GS, +1.53% partner Steven Duncker, former President George W. Bush’s brother Marvin Bush, and Cleveland Browns executive Paul DePodesta (see Moneyball). Big League Advance gave a total of $26 million to 77 baseball players in 2017, including Tatis. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/fernando-tatis-jr-s-340-million-contract-will-be-shared-with-a-firm-that-invested-in-him-as-a-teenager-11613679240 Fwiw, Bill Miller’s Legg Mason Value Trust set the all-time record beating the S&P from 1991-2005, fifteen consecutive years, and made him an investing legend....then crashed so badly in 2007-08 that he basically lost most of his investors and eventually control of LMVTX and LMOPX. The Major League Baseball Players Association, however, made it clear in a January 2016 memo to player agents that it did not approve of BLA. The memo said the union “categorically” did not endorse or approve of BLA and its products and warned the future earnings the company sought from players were “significant.”

Rosenthal: The deal that will cost Fernando Tatis Jr. part of his contract Fernando Tatis Jr. will not get the entire $340 million. Taxes will cut into his new 14-year agreement with the Padres, of course. But Tatis also must pay off a previous obligation, a deal he made during the 2017-18 offseason, when he was turning 19 years old and preparing for his first full season at Double A. It was then that Tatis entered into a contract with Big League Advance (BLA), a company that offers select minor leaguers upfront payments in exchange for a percentage of their future earnings in Major League Baseball. Neither Tatis nor BLA has revealed the exact percentage he owes the company. ... If Tatis, 22, chose 10 percent, he would owe the company $34 million over the course of his contract; if he chose 5 percent, the number would be $17 million. He said after signing with BLA that he wanted to hire a personal trainer, eat better food and get a better apartment. He used the money to upgrade not only his training regimen in the U.S., but also his offseason practice field in his native Dominican Republic. https://theathletic.com/2397422/2021/02/18/fernando-tatis-jr-padres-extension-big-league-advance-mlb/?source=dailyemail

https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/padres-made-mlbs-best-offseason-better-with-tatis-extension-now-theyll-try-to-vanquish-baseballs-top-team/

https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/padres-made-mlbs-best-offseason-better-with-tatis-extension-now-theyll-try-to-vanquish-baseballs-top-team/

They're also getting eight years of control before the player hits age 30. There's never been a similar contract in the history of the game. One can easily argue the bust rates for Moncada and Robert rate are still elevated. If Tatis puts up another year or two playing at a 6-10 fWAR clip, then he's suddenly looking at $500 million and out of their price range. It's the same reason the White Sox might have missed the boat with Giolito. As he repeats and builds upon previous success, he becomes prohibitively expensive the closer to gets to 2023. Eventually, you run into the same issue the Cubs have with Bryant, Rizzo, Baez and Contreras right now. Being stuck between competing and rebuilding for 3-4 seasons.

Stubbornly doubling down on mistakes more often results in... Here's what doesn't make much sense...they could have had Mitch Moreland for $2.25 million as the primary DH and occasional 1B. For his entire career, a 102 OPS. That's all they have ever needed, really, just average or slightly above average production. 2018 102 OPS 2019 112 2020 139 Obviously, he's not going to reach those numbers again for a full season, but that would be almost the perfect transition to Vaughn, and a nice playoff-experienced veteran presence coming off the bench in the latter stages of the season. Not to mention the fact that he's a better defender than Abreu.

I prefer the South Park version that was shown in Bowling for Columbine.

Aligning the world economies numerically doesn't do much, because of the massive inequality between the Top 15-20 countries and the rest of the world, not to mention China and India, which have more billionaires than the US now but also even more issues with income imbalances between the very richest and then the bottom four quintiles of those countries. We can assert that the DR is "one of the top 1/3rd economies of the world." Sure. China is #1 by Purchasing Power Parity, but the average household income is still just 1/6th that of the US, for example (GDP per capita.) Statistics are only as good as the data and person behind those numbers. By the way, for PPP, the DR is 65th. $3.20 - $5.70 per day is the range of "daily poverty" wages for the majority of the world. So the Dominican's $16 per day for a worker, in my opinion, still makes it poor, or relatively poor. In my idea, anything below $20-25 per day is one of the poorest countries in the world, but we can agree to disagree. Average Monthly Salary 19,900 DOP ($344.03, or $81/week, $2/hour) ( 238,000 DOP yearly) LOW 5,020 DOP AVERAGE 19,900 DOP HIGH 88,700 DOP

The direction is that their assessment on DH's for over a decade has been so many standard deviations from the norm piss-poor that it's better NOT to waste any more money/resources on veteran free agents at this point. Essentially, their incompetence finally forced a new plan or strategy, which is relying on the farm system instead. The flaw in the Collins' logic is that the only way to find out if he can be an everyday player is to play him 70% of the time, because, if nothing else, he seems to really struggle coming off the bench because he's got that slider speed bat and so many issues mechanically. The problem is that they can't really afford to waste the first 6-8 weeks of the season "figuring things out." We had the same dilemma with Joe Borchard in the early 2000's, or Brian Anderson in 2006 (Balta's favorite topic, Rob Mackowiak.) What realistically/likely will happen will be more Leury Garcia at DH, rotating regulars in and out, Grandal as well when the back-up's on the field. Can you honestly picture TLR giving Collins those at-bats? He's the ultimate, old school, veteran-reliant manager. Guessing that a player similar to a Keith Moreland or Pearce or Smoak will show up on the waiver wire at the last minute and they will get the opportunity first.

The point is that how many thousands of kids in San Pedro de Macoris have the dream of becoming a major league baseball shortstop? What are their odds of making it? I would also wager that before that Tatis, Jr., contract was signed and the $10 million signing bonus paid out, that the Giolito family was worth more than the Tatis family. Heck, practically everyone in the US today considered to be wealthy has at least $50-100 million in net worth, and California real estate alone puts their family in that category. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita Dominican Republic ranked 68th in the world, basically the equivalent of Thailand. Certainly richer than Venezuela, for example, but it's also an economy highly reliant about tourism and cheap intensive labor/exports/agriculture and fishing.

I wonder if Giolito or another graduate of Harvard Westlake signed the same deal...would you be saying the same thing? Something like "Talk is getting World Serious for White Sox.” That’s what we should be hearing, if Reinsdorf had the vision to offer a fair, long-term extension. And why exactly are we attacking a player from one of the poorest countries in the world (and whose brother happens to play for the White Sox) providing generational security for his family? All those hedge funds and individual investors who became overnight millionaires for speculating on GameStop or AMC generated what value for the economy, exactly? Aren’t they the definition of greedy and reckless? At least a baseball player brings joy and happiness and inspiration to poverty-stricken kids all across Latin America. Heck, the White Sox are providing 5-7% of the remittances supporting the Cuban economy. With that money, the government is subsidized to provide better health care for all its citizens, actually recirculating in a positive, utilitarian way rather than being hoarded.

For your next trick, are you going to defend Josh Whedon if I attack him? I’ve heard far too many rationalizations about morally dubious actions or behavior being classified as “entertaining” or “refreshing” over the last five years to put Bauer, Tim Anderson and Fernando Tatis, Jr., in the same category. But, to each his own.

The Royals should get a commission for resurrecting Rosenthal’s career. https://www.fangraphs.com/players/trevor-bauer/12703/stats?position=P Also, if you look at Bauer’s entire career, only 3 seasons (extrapolated for last year) out of 7 with over a 2.8 fWAR. He’s a ticking time bomb.