caulfield12

So how much are we willing to give Gonzalez? 3 years seems kind of pointless, unless we're also getting Harper or Machado. 4 years, and potentially 5, seems what to be this particular free agent market is looking like, especially for a current 29 year old. The one caveat being he accumulated 4.3 fWAR over 5 years with the Astros (not counting the one really good season), meaning his average was actually BELOW 1 for the majority of his career. So to predicate a pretty darned big contract for a hitter with one outlying 4.0 season...who has already (arguably) reached his peak, that doesn't seem to make sense unless the White Sox were looking to compete THIS year. Even if you average his last THREE years together, he's still below 2. And yet he's likely to get $45-70 million from SOMEONE. Just doubt it's the White Sox, not when we already have guys like Yolmer and Leury on the roster. The risk of him NOT being that 4 war player is just way too great.

Responding to the potential interest in Marwin Gonzalez expressed in the Heyman article: Not sure Gonzalez makes sense...but I thought he was older than 30 for some reason (actually 29, will turn 30 before next season). Definitely could play OF and 1B/3B, veteran presence, lots of post-season experience, the whole question is whether he would be better off on a team that would be contending right away, versus two years from now. Of course, the usual caveat, depends on years/$$$. Buy on the dip, or buy into his "over-performance" run in 2017/18 being over?

https://sports.yahoo.com/sources-indians-looking-move-trevor-bauer-corey-kluber-mlb-trade-market-heats-232621659.html The Indians’ austerity comes after getting bounced in the first round of the AL playoffs with a club-record payroll that neared $150 million. Cleveland’s current projected payroll is around $120 million, according to Baseball Prospectus, though it could drop prohibitively after 2019 even if the Indians did hold on to Bauer and Kluber. For $8.5 million, they could buy Edwin Encarnacion, Jason Kipnis and Yonder Alonso – who this season will make a combined $44.3 million – out of club options. Bauer and star shortstop Francisco Lindor will be in arbitration, starter Carlos Carrasco will make a reasonable $10.25 million in the first year of a new three-year, $37.5 million contract he signed Thursday, and MVP candidate José Ramírez ($6.65 million) and closer Brad Hand ($7.58 million) are under team-friendly deals. Young standout starter Mike Clevinger will be in his first year of arbitration. Owner Larry Dolan bought the Indians for $323 million in 2000. Since then, according to Forbes, the franchise value has increased to more than $1 billion, and the team profited more than $30 million in the 2017 season.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/06/opinions/arresting-huawei-exec-is-a-case-of-spectacularly-bad-timing-andelman/index.html

I don’t see that direct link with military spending and Michigan, WI, IA and PA. It was simply the Dems doing a terrible job of convincing lots of middle and lower middle class Americans they had a dynamic and actionable plan to improve their lives in any significant way. The actual revenues from the tariffs are pretty insignificant, compared to the overall budget imbalance. The stock market is still up around 35% from Election Day, 2016, although near correction territory now...and off 20-30% for some of the technology bellwethers. Goodbye, FIRE movement, we hardly knew ye. Fwiw, China is very quickly positioning to move manafacturing to countries like Vietnam and Malaysia to avoid the tariffs...the main companies being hurt are entities like Huawei, ZTE, Apple and everyone along their supply chain, particularly chip and semiconductor manufacturers...or Foxconn’s deal with Wisconsin, which is likely to be blown up. As far as the politics of it all, if the GOP tries to move forward with the Ryan/Mulvaney/Norquist plan of gutting SS and health care...they’re going to destroy any remote chance they had of winning in 2020. As it stands, Trump will have an incredibly difficult time, and that’s without facing the headwinds of a recession. Other than a few corporate elites, the majority of “flyover” voters are pissed about the tax cuts and even more pissed about health insurance being held hostage with nary a solution in sight. With a Federal debt fast approaching $22 trillion, there’s just no way to convince young people, Hispanics or suburban white collar women that they should do anything less than fight desperately to protect their futures, and the imperiled financial futures of their children and grandchildren.

Cue Hoosiers soundtrack with Coach Norman Dale cameo...and the swinging gate play for Chitwood, errr...Holliday.

If they bring back Shields, they deserve every attendance woe and 0.1 broadcast rating they receive. It would be just...not sure if there are words to describe the apathy that his reappearance would engender. Yet you could just imagine Don Cooper pushing for exactly such a move behind the scenes.

Oops! Not so fast. I think Trump now has to hoping someone like Tim Cook, Howard Schultz or Jeffrey Bezos is “kidnapped” by the Chinese while travelling to a business meeting in Asia in a reprisal after the same just was done to the Huawei CTO in Vancouver. Since that transpired over the weekend while Trump was simultaneously blathering on about the supposed concessions that the Chinese made at G-20...it’s going to really piss off the Chinese, not to mention the whole tech sector is getting massacred. Bye bye, Mnuchin!

Well, if you trade off Fry, Boone Logan is still out there lurking SOMEWHERE. Plus, maybe they can convince Buehrle to return if they sign Harper, lol. Thome's ready to suit up, too.

KW is just itching to pull the trigger on Adam Jones.

Unless we are also bringing in the children of Joe DeSa and Ivan Calderon...? In all seriousness, Carlos was one of my favorite White Sox players growing up, and I liked him as a prospect before the injuries took over his career, but his son's not going to be a "plus" hitter in his early to mid 30's, when the White Sox legitimately need a DH. Of course, neither is Nelson Cruz, but at least he wouldn't cost anything and it might boost the attendance by a bit...plus it would be pretty cool to have both Nellie, Thome and Abreu all mentoring young Mr. Jimenez.

It would be a bit weird to shore up the bullpen with Familia AND Colome when we've let go of a number of our top offensive contributors from last season (granted, that's not saying MUCH). I guess it's that whole Harper/Machado OR BUST line of thinking that's out there right now...but normally, the bullpen is the last element a contending team will fix before their window of contention opens up. This would be a bit backwards, unless we're just intending to trade them before 2020/2021.

Familiarity breeds contempt? Utility infielders are not quite like back-up QB's, although McEwing was incredibly popular in StL during his playing days, just like Jose Oquendo before him.

Leury or Yolmer?

Just to put this in perspective, Eovaldi's deal for $68 million/4 years (proposed) would be essentially a tie with Abreu's original deal and just a tick ahead of John Danks' 5 year, $65 million contract.

Only if you could keep Goldschimdt long-term, and even then, there were signs of a decline last year in terms of elite bat speed. This would have been the equivalent of dealing Collins, Dunning and one of 4 minor league outfielders not named Robert for a one year, all-in attempt without first having secured Machado or Harper. Plus the whole NL to AL adjustment. The Cardinals have no choice if they want to compete with the Brewers and Cubs.

The odds are stacked against starting pitchers with 2 TJ surgeries...especially with max velocity styles. I tried to find it, but there aren’t more than a handful of starters who have thrown 250 or more total innings after a second surgery. Something like 2 or 3. They would be better off finding a solid 2/3 guy with a repeatable delivery or going all-in on someone like Cole when the timing is better. I get the point, would you rather have two Eeovaldi’s or one Corbin, for example...spread out your risk...but it’s those $45-60 million contracts that all added up over the last decade to hamstring the club financially. If we’re going to fail, at least do it swinging for the fences on the caliber of players who are not lightning in a bottle, everything has to go exactly right...maybe if we didn’t have so many young pitchers already in the “high risk” category it would be a different story, or if we could easily afford an eventual $160+ million payroll.

I was actually surprised Baez was so low...he still would have topped the Sox, but he was hyped like the second coming of sliced bread and a surefire MVP winner in July and August. I get it, his defense and base-running are big factors, but he wasn’t anywhere close to the MLB leaders for this specific metric.

Narvaez was the highest ranked at 109, Abreu at 106 and Palka at 99. Kevan Smith 97 Avi 91, Davidson 92 Castillo 88 Moncada/Rondon/Delmonico 87, Anderson 85 David Bote 79, Yolmer 78 Tilson 75, Leury 72 LaMarre 67, Engel 63

Maybe Trump can rail against the "rise of the computers" instead of Powell...that might play better with his base, the idea that algorithms are deciding their futures with little to no human input. Railing against the inverted yield curve and its predictive reliability for forecasting a recession might not go over quite so well. Or we can just default back to "it's Mnuchin's DAMN fault!!!" Some attributed the dramatic declines to a lack of buyers, but Cramer already knew the culprits: complex algorithmic programs set up by professional money managers to sell when the odds of future market losses increase. In other words, when an event that often precedes a recession occurs — in Tuesday's case, short-term interest rates trading above long-term rates in a so-called yield curve inversion — some trading algorithms will automatically begin selling securities because the chances of an economic slowdown just got higher. Cramer, host of "Mad Money," drew a comparison with football. Some plays can seem very risky, but when you consider the percentage chances of them going right, there's no choice but to implement them in the field. These programs make the same kind of calculation. So, when the two-year and the five-year yield curves inverted on Tuesday, some hedge funds' programs automatically sold the S&P 500, which tends to fall in times of economic weakness, and others automatically sold shares of the big banks, which suffer when long-term rates are lower, Cramer said. "Why? Because historically, this situation has produced negative results for the bank stocks and these hedge funds are trying to get out ahead of others who fear those negative results but just don't know they're going to fear them. It's a footrace," he explained. "This curve, as they call it, overrides whatever you hear about good employment or consumer balance sheets or robust lending. It's predictive." Worse, the charts are signaling more pain ahead: based on Cramer's analysis, many hedge funds likely sold the S&P 500 when it dipped below its 200-day moving average because, in the past, that move tended to bring more downside. "Here's the problem: there are now so many hedge funds using the same algorithm, same programs [that] there simply aren't enough investors willing to take the other side of the trade. If we all know that stocks go down on certain triggers, then who the heck would want to buy stocks?" Cramer said. "That's how you get a day like today, where the market goes into free-fall," the "Mad Money" host continued. "When the percentages are against you and the algorithms are in charge, ... nobody wants to try to be a hero and bet against them." https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/04/cramer-this-sell-off-was-caused-by-a-computer-driven-footrace.html?__source=yahoo|finance|headline|story|&par=yahoo&yptr=yahoo

They're likely to wait on Voit/Bird/Sanchez...don't see them being desperate to make a big move at this point unless they miss out on all their off-season targets first.

The M's are seemingly better off waiting for a potential rebound (obviously, this never happened with Shields, enough to find someone to assume the contract)...and that would save them quite a bit of money, if he could somehow put up 2-3 fWAR the first half of the season before the trade deadline. Right now, the "buyers" are going off his 2018 season and ignoring his overall solid performance record in terms of their financial demands. That said, compared to the money that Donaldson's getting for one year, it's not out of the realm of possibility that getting $20-25 million back from Seattle would make it more than a fair contract for the acquiring team. What type of prospects would have to be included would depend on the desperation of the acquiring team. At the very least, they should wait until Spring Training and see if there are any significant injuries to corner infielders on contending teams.

That was MONTHS ago, wasn't it?

https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/04/investing/stock-market-today-dow-jones/index.html

https://waitingfornextyear.com/2018/07/cleveland-indians-have-the-worst-outfield-in-baseball/ Let’s not forget the Indians pretty much had the worst OF (with Brantley) in baseball, not counting the Sox. While everyone is already counting on Jimenez for 4-5 war, the Indians should be getting Zimmer back, they can try Yandy Diaz...they can also get virtually any top OF prospect back for Kluber and also theoretically have the ability to sign a Brantley replacement (Pollock, McCutcheon, Adam Jones, Nelson Cruz, CarGo, Markakis, etc.) Yet another option would be putting Jason Kipnis out there.