It’s true. Is this something I’m supposed to have a strong opinion on? Because I really don’t. Good for him, I suppose. I remain a fan of fake mustaches.
Red Sox hire Bobby Valentine
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Category Archives: Baseball
Reconstituted Meat
This feature, for the uninitiated, aims to satisfy our cravings for hot-stove information while recognizing it is for the most part nutritionally devoid. Today’s rumors three:
Teams are “kicking the tires” on Alfonso Soriano: First, note that Ken Rosenthal, who presents this information courtesy “a major league source,” gives us “kicking the tires” in quotes. I don’t know what to make of that. Does that mean it’s a direct quote from the source? Is it Rosenthal’s literary interpretation of making the little air-quotes with his fingers?
More importantly, when teams kick the tires on Alfonso Soriano, what do they expect will come out? Normally you hear of tires being kicked on frequently injured reclamation-project types, the Chris Youngs of the world. And maybe in those cases, all kidding aside, the term means only that the team is doing its due diligence: investigating all the necessary medical records, consulting doctors, and talking to kinesiologists, phrenologists and any other experts that might provide insight on whether the player will hold up for a full Major League season.
Soriano has had a series of minor injuries with the Cubs, but he played 137 games in 2011 and 147 in 2010. His issue isn’t health: It’s that he’s not very good. So unless a team thinks kicking his tires is going to shock him into walking more and becoming immune to the effects of time, he’s probably not going to be very valuable to anyone even if the Cubs do pick up a hefty chunk of his remaining contract.
A better way to put it might be that many teams are looking at the tires on Alfonso Soriano, and seeing that the treads are worn down and the sidewalls are scratched up and the tires probably were never as good as everyone said to begin with. Smart money says the Cubs would be pretty happy to get rid of him and any portion of his contract they can salvage, so maybe he does get moved. But he’s probably an emergency donut tire on a good team at this point.
The Marlins told C.J. Wilson they want him in their starting rotation: Man, the Marlins say a lot of things, don’t they? Lips grow loose after boozy nights of stone-crab claws and frozen cocktails in Miami Beach. Not for C.J. Wilson, of course: He’s str8-edge. But maybe Jeffrey Loria or some other member of the Marlins’ brass is one of those I-seriously-love-you-guys type of drinkers who doesn’t know when to shut up. “No, really, bro… whatever it takes. $160 million? Carl Crawford money? Anything, bro. Seriously, bro, I want you in our starting rotation, like, RIGHT NOW!”
And then the next morning: Oh man my head hurts, what the hell did I tell C.J. Wilson last night? I somehow forgot I operate the team that has never spent more than $60 million on payroll. Actually I think I’ve already blown our entire 2012 budget on stone-crab claws.
The last hot-stove rumor is actually an anti-rumor. But it’s so definitively worded that I thought it worth noting here. If you’re trafficking in rumors, it makes sense to qualify almost everything you write to cover your ass for when you’re wrong. So it’s refreshing to see something like this published on Dejan Kovacevic’s blog for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:
Hat tip to MLBTradeRumors.com for various links. But I assume you’re already reading MLBTradeRumors.com.
Self-awareness fail
I reached Lucchino briefly in his office this morning. He said he couldn’t talk to me. He said there would be no announcement today.
I followed that up with, ‘‘Do you have any comment on how indecisive this makes you guys look?’’
‘‘Goodbye, Dan,’’ he answered. ‘‘Nice to talk to you.’’
Click.
Dial tone.
– Dan Shaughnessy, Boston Globe.
I suspect Larry Lucchino was lying, and that it wasn’t actually nice to talk to Dan Shaughnessy.
Via Rob Neyer.
Free agents signed to new teams so far
I got a good email this morning from reader Hank, who is frustrated both by the Mets’ apparent inaction on the free-agent market this offseason and by the nagging insistence on “payroll flexibility” that keeps popping up in interviews with team brass. He suggests — perhaps accurately — that the term could be a euphemism for, well, complete payroll inflexibility: an utter lack of money to spend.
I don’t know. There’s plenty more Mets stuff to talk about on the horizon this offseason, and plenty more time to hash out what it is they mean when they talk about payroll flexibility. But there really is something to the idea, regardless of if it’s a party-line thing the way they’re using it right now.
This offseason, C.J. Wilson is the best available free-agent pitcher. Some team that believes it’s one decent pitcher away from a world championship is going to sign C.J. Wilson, and that team will likely give Wilson way too much money. If that team’s hunch proves correct and Wilson helps it to the World Series, the proverbial (and actual) flag will fly forever, and the team can rationalize away the last couple of years of Wilson’s deal when he will likely prove a financial albatross.
But since the Mets appear to be more than a C.J. Wilson away from becoming a certain contender, they are better served building up their club with more reasonably priced players. Then, next winter or the following one or whenever they reach the point when they believe they are one C.J. Wilson away from securing a World Series berth, they can sign that offseason’s C.J. Wilson — and C.J. Wilsons come along practically every offseason — because they didn’t sign this offseason’s C.J. Wilson.
What Hank said in his email is correct: Teams (especially big-market teams) can build from within and spend on free agents. But since spending money on big-ticket free agents is one of the least cost-effective ways to improve a team, it should probably be the final piece of the process, not one of the first ones. Generally speaking, of course.
And I’d like to remind everyone of one very important point: It’s November 28th.
Come March we will have a better sense of how much money the Mets had to (or wanted to) spend this offseason, and whether the bluster about maintaining a payroll between $100 and $110 million was just that. But don’t confuse rumors — or the lack thereof — with anything terribly meaningful. It could just be that the Mets’ front-office is a bit tighter-lipped than some of its counterparts around baseball, shifting the media focus elsewhere.
Thus far this offseason, only a handful of players have actually found new teams on the open market. Using MLBTradeRumors’ ever-handy free-agent tracker, I put together the comprehensive list of players signed to Major League deals with new clubs:
Pitchers
Joe Nathan (Rangers, 2 years, $14.75 million)
Jonathan Papelbon (Phillies, 4 years, $50 million)
Catchers
Rod Barajas (Pirates, 1 year, $4 million)
Ryan Doumit (Twins, 1 year, $3 million)
Gerald Laird (Tigers, 1 year, $1 million)
Jose Molina (Rays, 1 year, $1.8 million)
Matt Treanor (Dodgers, 1 year, $1 million)
First basemen
Ol’ Jim Thome (Phillies, 1 year, $1.25 million)
Second basemen
Mark Ellis (Dodgers, 2 years, $8.75 million)
Jamey Carroll (Twins, 2 years, $6.75 million)
Shortstops
Clint Barmes (Pirates, 2 years, $10.5 million)
Outfielders
Mark Kotsay (Padres, 1 year, $1.25 million)
Look over that list. Not a rhetorical question: How many of those deals do you wish the Mets had made?
I could probably make an argument for a couple of the catchers. If you buy the recent pitch-framing research from Baseball Prospectus, Jose Molina in particular seems like a bargain at $1.8 million as a righty-hitting complement to Josh Thole.
Jamey Carroll’s still pretty useful: Gets on base a bunch, plays all over the field, once was an Expo. But he’ll be 38 on Opening Day and he required a two-year deal.
And there hasn’t been anything close to an obvious miss by the Mets, where the player and terms seemed to perfectly fit their (supposed) budget and needs but they let him slip away. Maybe that will happen, and then we can yell about it and say they were lying to us about the payroll figures and everything else. But right now it’s hard to kill the Mets for not spending money when a) it’s silly to spend money for the sake of spending money and b) pretty much no team has yet spent money.
What I’m thankful for
It’s Thanksgiving, as you probably know. And I am of course thankful for all the awesome things I should be thankful for: My friends and family, my job, the food I’m about to eat, shelter, indoor plumbing, football, etc.
But in addition to those staples, here are three things I’m thankful for this year:
Change I can believe in: Fans are understandably down on the Mets. They’re coming off their third straight losing season, their owners are mired in a very public financial mess, and they might be on the brink of losing to free agency one of the brightest stars the franchise has produced in decades. And that all sucks.
But it’s comforting to know — or to be able to believe, at least — that the Mets’ current front office seems both capable of and dedicated to making the best possible baseball decisions to turn the club into a regular winner. It’s going to take time, of course. And I understand if you don’t believe me — the current front office has been so hamstrung by the decisions of the last one that it hasn’t yet had a lot of flexibility to show what it will do with what should be a big-market payroll. That’s a discussion for another day, though.
Point is, I haven’t yet lost faith in Sandy Alderson and the SABRos, and for that I’m thankful. Maybe there’s some blinders-on optimism in play here, but that’s fine by me: It’s nice to enjoy a sunny outlook about your favorite team’s future for once, and I’ll seize this opportunity as long as I can. If and when they start making short-sighted, reactionary, terrible moves, I’ll lament them. For now, I’m going to celebrate that somewhere in the eye of the ferocious hellstorm of nonsense whirling around the team stand (or appear to stand) a couple of calm, reasonable dudes making shrewd decisions geared toward building a perennial contender.
Banh mi sandwiches: How great are banh mi sandwiches? I’ve had three since I moved back to the city. They’re not readily available in Westchester — or at least not that I could find. So I’ve set out on a quest to find a Hall of Fame-caliber banh mi, and I’m not going to stop until you read that glowing review here on this site.
There’s a combination of flavors and textures in the banh mi that’s not found in most sandwiches traditionally produced by Western cultures. It’s the exquisite product of cultural interchange: Southeast Asian flavors with delicious, crusty French bread, and you just know if you trace back the history there’s all sorts of unspeakable colonial awfulness involved (kind of like Thanksgiving, really) but if you’re staring at the sandwich you can overlook it all for a second and revel in the years-later byproduct of imperialism.
Whoa, that got heavy. I want to go back to talking about the sandwich: The taste of a good banh mi floats around your mouth like a spicy, vinegary butterfly. It’s eminently filling, but somehow refreshing — a big, delicious sandwich that leaves you feeling like maybe you ate something healthy for once. I think that’s the cilantro. We should brush our teeth with cilantro. I’m also thankful for cilantro in general.
Beavis and Butthead: This is kind of a two-part thankfulness item. I’m thankful that Beavis and Butthead are back on TV because Beavis and Butthead are hilarious. I don’t know if you’ve caught any of the new episodes, but I find myself laughing nearly as hard and as often as I did when they ran the first time, back when I shared an age and general mindset with the show’s heroes.
I guess the thing is that Beavis and Butthead are kind of timeless: A couple of lazy dudes who love explosions and rock and hot women and who enjoy making fun of stuff that sucks. I hear that. And the new version of the show does a really good job sending up the various reality-TV fare airing on MTV these days, which makes sense: How could Beavis and Butthead watch music videos all day today if music videos almost never air anymore? Today’s version of the characters would be (and are) watching Jersey Shore, making fun of it as almost everyone who watches Jersey Shore does.
And that the show has remained funny upon its return gives me hope for the forthcoming fourth season of Arrested Development, which was announced last week. Since the first three-season run of that show was as close to perfect as anything I’ve ever seen on television, I’ve been a little nervous that the long-rumored movie or this newly announced fourth season could sully (in my opinion, at least) the show’s legacy. But if Mike Judge could pull off what appears to be a successful return, maybe Mitch Hurwitz and the folks responsible for Arrested Development will too.
Matt Kemp badass
I’m going to go 50-50 next year. I’m telling you, y’all created a monster. I’m about to get back in the weight room super tough so I can be as strong as I was last year. … Forty-forty is tough, so 50-50 will be even tougher, but anything can happen. I have to set my limits high so I can try to get to them as much as I can. I’m going to try for 50-50, which has never been done. I’m serious. If I don’t [get there], it means I let y’all down and lied to you, and I don’t like being a liar. I know y’all are over there thinking I’m crazy, but hey, I’m trying to take it to another level.
– Matt Kemp.
Awesome. I’m not sure I’ve mentioned it in this space, but Kemp’s one of my favorite players in the league. I was pretty disappointed to hear about his contract extension because it dashed my dreams of the Mets’ signing him next offseason, even if I knew how unlikely that was to begin with. The absurd terms of the deal made it a little more palatable, but still. Man is Matt Kemp sweet.
Via Big League Stew.
Reconstituted Meat
I’ve been thinking more about Patrick Flood’s “Too Much Bacon” post from the other day — not the down-the-road stuff about paying for Web content so much as Flood’s very valid point that the glut of hot-stove information is overwhelming and very likely driven by the pursuit of page views.
And it led me to another food metaphor, or at least a food-related metaphor. Anyone remember this incredible sequence from Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution?
Every part of it is amazing, obviously. Oliver thinks he’s going to shock these kids out of eating chicken nuggets, so he shows them the disgusting way in which some processed chicken nuggets are made. The kids appear duly grossed out until he puts the nuggets in front of them, when they all ultimately admit they’re hungry and want to eat the nuggets no matter how they were prepared.
So when considering the way I want to approach this blog during the hot-stove season, since it is nominally a sports blog affiliated with a sports network and since I do want to maintain some sort of sports-based bent on this site, I wonder: Who do I want to be, in this equation?
I don’t have the stomach to peddle nutritionally devoid nuggets to the hungry masses, no matter how tempting the profit line. And though I can understand the urge to scarf down those nuggets, I don’t really want to be the children either, chewing up and digesting everything in sight without considering the source.
But I also have no strong desire to be Jaime Oliver, tilting at windmills, preaching in vain to try to prevent people from catering to their most base instincts.
Most of my heroes are, well, trolls — those content to remain detached from the action and make fun of it. That probably reflects poorly on me, but it is what it is. Oliver’s show and this segment were introduced to me by Stephen Colbert, whose take on the nuggets bit was absolutely perfect.
All of that is a long-winded, sausage-factory (and excuse the mixed food metaphor) way of saying I probably shouldn’t ignore all the hot-stove stuff even if I think most of it is tiresome. And I think most consumers of offseason rumors would admit that they recognize how few of them come to pass and how little it all means, sort of like the way Oliver’s nugget-eating children guiltily smirk away their trans-fatty transgressions.
So I want to start indulging just a few of a the rumors a couple of times a week here: To examine their sources, their likelihood, and their potential benefits to the actors involved. Because hey, it’s baseball. It’s supposed to be fun. And we’re hungry.
I’ll probably settle into some sort of regular format eventually. Or I’ll get bored with the whole thing and scrap it entirely. Who knows? Check back often to find out!
Here we go:
Wait, but are the A’s also talking about it or are the Reds simply talking about it amongst themselves? And are we talking the Reds’ front-office decision-maker types here, or just like, members of the Reds, sitting around talking about how great it would be if they could make a deal for Andrew Bailey because they heard he makes awesome chili or is easy to fleece in poker or something?
Oh wait! The A’s are very willing to trade Bailey. Maybe the chili gives you disgusting gas. Actually the odds of Bailey being traded are about 100 percent, and he’s even more available than Gio Gonzalez — which makes sense because Gonzalez is younger, way better and under team control for longer, and maybe also, you know, seeing someone.
Anyway, it strikes me that maybe the A’s would be best served hanging on to Bailey, not just to troll reporters everywhere but also because there are a slew of free-agent closer options available this winter — many of whom are coming off injury or frequently injured. Let all those chips fall where they may, then when the chips get hurt, you’re holding the only chip. That’s just Moneyball, or something.
Oof, half dozen teams.
Jack Wilson can’t hit at all. I’ll confess I haven’t seen a ton of Wilson the last couple years and I don’t put too much stock in small-sample UZR data, but he’ll be 34 on Opening Day and he’d have to be among the best defensive middle infielders in baseball to be worth carrying his bat.
Seems hard to believe a half dozen teams would have more than a passing interest in the man, except maybe on a Minor League deal or in terms of like, “oh hey Jack Wilson’s still going? That’s interesting.” Of course it’s certainly possible, because more than a half dozen teams have done stranger things.
Red Sox sign Chorye Spoone: Wait, that’s a real guy? Dickens team? Dickens team.
Obligatory. Lyrics NSFW:
Mets sign Adam Loewen
The Mets have signed outfielder Adam Loewen to a Minor League deal. OH START PLANNING THE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP PARADE NOW I AM SO SMART AND FUNNY! I’M TOTALLY BUYING SEASON TIX CUZ THEY SIGNED ADAM LOEWEN GET IT GUYS LOL? MORE LIKE LOESEN!
Seriously though, this is a nice move.
Loewen came up through the Orioles’ system as a big-time pitching prospect before enduring elbow problems and related control issues and flaming out after 164 pretty bad Major League innings. He became a full-time position player in 2009, manning the outfield corners and first base.
That year, Loewen posted a .236/.340/.355 line in 391 plate appearances in High A ball. The next year, Loewen hit .246/.351/.412 in 537 PAs in Double-A. In 2011, he hit .306/.377/.508 in 585 PAs in Triple-A.
Notice anything?
The 2011 line happened in the Pacific Coast League in Las Vegas, which is about the best place in the world to hit. So that should be taken with about the Dead Sea’s worth of salt. But here’s a guy who had all of two professional plate appearances from 2003-2008 and managed to not embarrass himself in 2009, then improved in 2010 and 2011.
Hell, look at it this way:
| Year | BB% | SO% | ISO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2009 | 12.8 | 29.2 | 0.119 |
| 2010 | 12.3 | 26.4 | 0.166 |
| 2011 | 10.4 | 23.2 | 0.202 |
So he’s not walking more, but Loewen has struck out less and hit for more power as he has advanced. Some of that has to do with the park and the PCL, for sure. But because he’s so new to being a full-time professional position player, Loewen’s a good upside play for the Mets on a Minor League deal. I don’t know anything about Loewen’s defense and the Mets already have a couple of good lefty-hitting corner guys in Daniel Murphy and Lucas Duda. But hey, the more the merrier.
So how old is Albert Pujols really?
Over at Baseball Nation, Rob Neyer and Jason Brannon debate whether Albert Pujols could be older than his listed age.
Brannon — arguing that he is older — makes one very good point: If Pujols were admittedly 17 or older when he immigrated, he would have been ineligible for high-school baseball and thus unable to put his ridiculous awesomeness* on display for college coaches.
But Brannon keeps coming back to a couple of silly arguments, namely that Pujols supposedly lied to his wife about his age to get a date, and that there must have been a reason so many scouts missed on Pujols.
Telling little lies in pursuit of the opposite sex is a tradition that long pre-dates Pujols’ entrance to this country, and is in my opinion very, very different than lying about your age for professional gain. Not that it necessarily means Pujols didn’t lie about his baseball age, only that the two things probably have nothing to do with each other.
And as for the scouts, they straight-up screwed up. Even if Pujols were several years older than he claimed to be, he was still destined for a Hall of Fame career. Say Pujols is, I don’t know, 40 years old right now. Say he was 28 when he was playing JUCO ball in 1999 and 30 when he was ranked the 42nd best prospect by Baseball America. He was still on the brink of dominating Major League pitching for at least 11 seasons. That’s a massive whiff by scouts everywhere, no matter how old he was.
Also, Brannon notes that Pujols’ OPS+ has been in decline for four straight seasons, which is true. What he fails to mention is that the first two of those — 2008 and 2009 — were the best two of Pujols’ career by that stat, and they correspond with what are supposedly his age 28 and 29 seasons. So nothing really out of the ordinary there.
There’s certainly plenty of empirical evidence to suggest Pujols is older than he says he is: He looks it. But there were two dudes in my middle school with a full meadow of chest hair by seventh grade. (I know because their gym lockers were on either side of mine and it made me very uncomfortable.) Maybe Pujols is just one of those pubert guys, as unlikely as it seems.
Finally, I wonder to what extent it matters. Pujols is such a bizarre outlier in terms of talent and consistency and healing ability that maybe there’s some chance he is 35 and he’ll still be pretty awesome six or seven years from now anyway.
Or maybe he’s actually 31 and he’ll start falling apart sooner regardless. Until we have more concrete evidence, this is all just speculation — some of which might factor into some teams’ decisions while pursuing him on the open market, but none of which should affect the way we appreciate the tremendous things he has been doing for the last 11 seasons.
*- But the ridiculous awesomeness itself probably does not hold up as evidence of Pujols’ advanced age. This is Albert Pujols we’re talking about, no? We’ve all seen the Bryce Harper video, and Harper hasn’t yet proven to be a Top 10 All Time hitter. Smart money says Albert Pujols looked pretty damn impressive playing baseball at every age. And there are plenty of stories of various future greats needing to show birth certificates in Little League.
And it plays
From the Good Phight, via Tina:
The archive has been updated.
Tedquarters 