Omar Minaya “is thought to have signified a willingness” to offer five years to Jason Bay.
A deal between the Red Sox and Padres for Adrian Gonzalez “is not close, and might not happen at all.”
The Cardinals are negotiating with Matt Holliday, and “one Cardinals person expressed faith it could get done.”
But “a baseball source familiar with the negotiations” for Holliday said he and agent Scott Boras “are still looking for something that they’re not finding.”
I keep forgetting that Jose Reyes will ever play again. Sweet.
Will Carroll at Baseball Prospects passes along a fascinating video.
I love this. I absolutely love this. The media creates a bugaboo: Tony Bernazard is the source of all the Mets’ problems. Then the media gets Tony Bernazard (rightfully) fired, the Mets don’t magically improve, and now the media wonders if the Mets would be better off if they still had Tony Bernazard.
Sam Page examines the metrics surrounding Jeff Francoeur’s defense. Sam’s a lot more optimistic than I am, but I think mostly the research speaks to how we don’t have anything like a perfect defensive metric yet.
Here’s a friendly reminder to come join me at the Blue and Orange Hot Stove Huddle tomorrow night at River on 43rd and 10th in Manhattan. More details of the event are here.
Numerous personalities from your favorite World Wide Web sites will be on hand to discuss the Mets and the MLB offseason.
I am told there will be a series of discussions moderated by Will Davidian of BlueAndOrange.net.
I’ll participate in the last of them, meaning I’ll have to either lay off the booze to save from embarrassing myself in a public forum, or realize that I’m going to embarrass myself regardless of whether I’ve been drinking and end up so tanked that I fight Joe Janish of MetsToday.com and get kicked out of the bar before I even have the opportunity to drool out nonsense about the Mets’ offseason strategy.
Which will happen? You can only find out if you go.
Helpful hint: It’ll probably be the former, but I can’t guarantee I won’t fight Joe Janish stone-cold sober.
Little-known fact: I once wrote an article about Japanese pitchers that was so loaded with falsehoods it inspired Japanese baseball expert Patrick Newman to start the excellent NPBTracker.com.
That, ironically, is probably my greatest contribution to the baseball blogosphere.
Anyway, with word surfacing that the Mets are about to sign Japanese reliever Ryota Igarashi, I turned to NPBTracker for info. Patrick posted a profile of Igarashi in May. He wrote:
Igarashi is known one of the hardest throwers in Japan, and jointly holds the record for fastest pitch* by a Japanese pitcher in an NPB game with a 158 kmph (98.75mph) fastball….
Although he doesn’t throw quite as hard as he used to, but still runs his heater into the upper 90’s, and augments it with a hard splitter that he throws at around 90mph. He’s also got a slider and a curve that he’ll mix in occasionally, but is primarily a fastball/splitter pitcher.
Igarashi’s weakness has been his control. Over the course of his career through 2008, he’s allowed 221 walks and thrown 42 wild pitches over 517.1 innings.
So it sounds a tiny bit like the Mets are signing the Japanese Fernando Rodney. Anyway, see for yourself:
Reading this article from Bill Baer on Baseball Daily Digest about how Mariners GM Jack Zduriencik turned the franchise around after a miserable 2008 season reminded me to remain hopeful about the future of the Mets.
Of course, Zduriencik and the Mariners haven’t won anything yet, but in a remarkably short time he’s made Seattle appear primed to become a regular contender, and restored a ton of fan confidence.
And the article reminded me of this, probably my favorite sports blog post of all time, from Tirico Suave: Using the Animal Kingdom To Demonstrate Bill Bavasi’s Tenure With The Mariners.
The video makes me laugh so hard every time I watch it (all due respect to the goat), for a variety of reasons, probably more for what actually happens than the metaphoric value assigned to it by the good folks at Tirico Suave. Anyway, it’s this:
This was supposed to be baseball’s big bear market year, I thought. Right? Was I the only one hearing the the streets would be paved with cheap, talented free-agents, and All-Stars would be non-tendered by their folding teams, and anyone getting more than the Major League minimum for a small-market club would be trade fodder?
Doesn’t appear to be the case. The Brewers signed Randy Wolf to a three-year, $30 million contract. Multiple bad catchers have been signed for multiple years at multiple millions of dollars. The Cardinals have reportedly offered Matt Holliday an eight-year deal. The Rays have said they’re willing to “overextend” for just this year.
And, as Tim Dierkes points out, 39 players were non-tendered, as compared to 36 last season, and they formed a pretty typical non-tender class.
I don’t know the mechanics or the economics here, but I’m beginning to think maybe the financial situations of Major League clubs weren’t as doom and gloom as they were made out to be in September. It’s almost as if they’re still making money hand over fist.
Were there a few surprising non-tendered players? Sure. Were there a few trades obviously prompted by the arbitration system? Of course. But does it seem like there’s some huge economic disparity that’s going to choke the life out of the game anytime soon? I doubt it.
That gap exists, of course. I’m just not certain it’s growing wider. And of course, it doesn’t matter how much money you have if you don’t know the right way to spend it.
So Jorge Arangure’s Twitter, via Matt Cerrone, tells me that the Mets are interested in Fernando Rodney. And Cerrone says Rodney’s seeking a three-year, $30 million deal.
Remember yesterday when I said the Mets hadn’t actually screwed anything up yet and so we shouldn’t kill them just for their inaction? Yeah, if they’re actually interested in Fernando Rodney, and if they actually sign Fernando Rodney for any significant money, that’s screwing something up.
Fernando Rodney is eminently average. He throws very hard, which is nice, but he lacks control, and missed time in 2008 due to shoulder tendinitis, and is 32. He has a career 105 ERA+, just barely above league average, and a 1.424 WHIP, too high for a late-inning reliever.
Rodney is the prototypical example of a guy who will be overpaid because of the closer label. If you’ll recall, that’s precisely what I whined about the Mets doing all last offseason.
But I figured, with the way the J.J. Putz thing blew up in their faces, they learned from that mistake. And I hope they did.
If they go out and give a big contract to Fernando Rodney, who’s honestly probably not much better a bet than Bobby Parnell moving forward, it will show that they haven’t.
Rex Ryan wants to see how Mark Sanchez looks before he settles on a starter for Sunday’s game.
My guess? Smoldering.
Again, I’ll stop posting this picture when it stops being funny, and that hasn’t come anywhere close to happening for me. This is what it looks like at 2:22 on any given afternoon on Mark Sanchez’s yacht.
Look at how sexily Mark Sanchez answers the telephone.
You think Kellen Clemens picks up the phone like that? Hardly. He probably doesn’t get to the phone in time, so the answer machine picks up, but then instead of just letting it go to the tape, he picks it up late, then drops the handset, then falls down trying to pick it up again.
A lot of help from Repoz at the Baseball Think Factory today.
John Harper deems yesterday “Black Monday” for the Mets, details why the Mets were never really in on John Lackey or Roy Halladay, suggests that no players will come to the Mets because they suck so much, then, I think, alludes to the fact that the Mets should focus on improving their farm system. I’m with him on that last part.
Jonathan Mayo at MLB.com wrestles with the idea of allowing MLB teams to trade their draft picks. When it’s time for a new collective bargaining agreement in 2011, I have a feeling the whole draft system, and slotting system, and draft-pick compensation system is in for an overhaul.
Alex Belth pens a requiem for Hideki Matsui’s time in the Bronx, and alludes to Matsui’s massive porn collection. According to some reports, he has 55,000 adult videos, meaning he could give a way a porn tape to every single fan at a sold-out game at the new Yankee Stadium and still have enough left over to watch a different one every day for the next seven years. Simply put, Hideki Matsui rivals the Internet in porno ownership.
Twitter is exploding right now. Honestly, go to Twitter; it’s on fire. The whole Internet will soon be engulfed in flames.
Apparently the Red Sox have closed on a five-year, $85 million deal with John Lackey and the Phillies, Blue Jays and Mariners have agreed on a deal that will send Roy Halladay to the Phillies, Cliff Lee to the Mariners and to-be-determined prospects to the Mariners.
OK, Mets fans, here it is:
Don’t panic.
It’s probably best to wait until the dust settles to figure out exactly what happened today, but on the very surface, well, I dunno. On multiple occasions I wrote why the Mets shouldn’t trade for Roy Halladay, because one year of Roy Halladay and the opportunity to sign a 33-year-old pitcher to a longterm extension at market rate did not seem worth the cost in prospects.
We don’t know yet what exactly the cost in prospects will be for the Phillies — it should be mitigated by the inclusion of Lee — nor what deal Halladay will get, but it’s safe to assume they’ll still be committing a huge sum of money to an aging pitcher. Granted, Halladay’s been something of a horse, but no one is impervious to Father Time.
Look: I know the idea of Roy Halladay on the Phillies seems terrifying. I’m scared myself. That lineup, with Halladay and Cole Hamels at the front of the rotation in 2010? Yeah, that’s not going to be easy to compete with.
But how much better is Halladay, for 2010 alone, than Lee? I don’t know. And how much better will the Phillies be for the deal if it means they sign Halladay to a contract that could ultimately be crippling?
As for Lackey: Many Mets fans, myself included, way preferred Matt Holliday to Lackey at the offseason’s outset. I still do, for that matter. The movement for Lackey mostly developed, it seems, when news surfaced last week that the Mets had made an offer to Jason Bay.
But the Mets haven’t actually signed Bay yet, and no one has signed Holliday. So there’s more waiting to be done there. Let’s see what happens before we kill the team. Remember that they don’t play games in December.
Would I have committed five years and $85 million to Lackey? Probably not. Of course, as a sabermetrically inclined baseball fan I’m contractually obligated to assume what Theo Epstein does is correct, so maybe he knows something I don’t.
And since the market for pitchers was set by the three-year, $30 million contract Randy Wolf got from the Brewers, maybe Epstein saw Lackey as something of a bargain.
Still, it seems like an awful lot of cash to commit to a pitcher who hasn’t thrown over 200 innings since 2007, however minor his injuries were. And I don’t buy the argument that he deserves A.J. Burnett money simply by being better than A.J. Burnett; Burnett is wildly overpaid.
Again, and for the millionth time: I know you’re starting to feel impatient. I feel that way too. And, as pessimistic as I am about this front office’s ability to build a perennial contender, I’m certainly not saying, “just wait and see, the Mets will be fine.”
I don’t know that’s the case. But I also don’t know that they screwed anything up by not acquiring Lackey or Halladay.
Tedquarters 