9 years is way too much time to commit to any pitcher or player. Can’t fault the Astros for not doing that. Our best chance to keep him was after the 2018 season when we negotiated a contract extension for Verlander. Time for some of the younger pitchers to step up. Whitley needs to figure out whatever it was that made him struggle so much last year and find a way to contribute soon.
Cole’s contract is almost half ($324 vs $680) of what the entire Astros team cost for Crane to purchase. Its 3 times what Drayton paid in '92.
You keep saying that about Cole and 2018, D Ward. Cole made it clear then he was going to FA.
The contract is insane.
Yep, 8 outs and a great DP pitch.
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Sadly, I agree 100% with your paragraph #2 assessment. In baseball the window doesn’t stay open long. Unless you are the fucking NYYs. In which case, you can afford to rebuild the house.
You know what Cole would have called Crane if he had re-signed in Houston? Partner.
This is the article that I remember reading regarding contract extension talks last year. I got the impression from his comments that we never made an offer. He may have told Houston that he preferred to wait until after the 2019 season. Either way, it doesn’t matter anymore.
Sometime after that Cole was quoted saying he had “earned the right” to go through the FA process.
And Hinch is talking about 120 IP or so for McCullers next season. That sounds like middle-relief to me.
Yes. A lot of folks around the web/twitterverse put McCullers in the rotation as if he’ll be a workhorse.
Endurance/effectiveness are not guaranteed.
LMJ’s innings pitched per season in his professional career:
2012 (Rookie): 26
2013 (A): 104.2
2014 (A+): 97
2015 (AA/MLB): 157.2
2016 (MLB + rehab): 89
2017 (MLB + rehab): 126.2
2018 (MLB): 128.1
They’ve rarely gotten more than 120 IP out of him in good health, much less coming off TJS.
The way he handled himself in the 2017 playoffs coming in late in the game, I have always thought that he might make a decent closer.
If he could spot his fastball more reliably he could pitch in any role he wants.
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You and over half the scouts in MLB.
Seems to me that the competitive balance tax scheme isn’t doing a whole lot of good. It’s just painful enough to deter teams in the second tier of revenue from competing for top free agents year-in and year-out without deterring teams at the the very top of the revenue pyramid. The Yankees exceeded the luxury tax threshold last year. They’ve already blown past it this year with the Cole signing, and it won’t really force them to make any tradeoffs on any other part of their roster–I mean, it’s a good bet that they’ll throw another 8 figures at Brett Gardner before this off-season is over and make a handful of other mid-level signings besides. Meanwhile, a team like the Astros might have been able to beat the Yankees’ deal from a pure “do we have enough money to pay his salary” perspective, but only by making grim cuts to other parts of their roster (albeit maybe only in future years).
I don’t know how to fix it, but I would think a real competitive balance scheme would require a bigger impact on the on-field product, not just dropping a few (million) bucks into the swear jar. Exceed it by X%, you lose X% of your draft and international budget. Exceed the threshold by 10%? You lose your 26th roster spot. Exceed it by 15% for two years in a row and everyone on the roster–even those within the first six years of team control–gets an automatic player option they can exercise in the offseason (this would effectively act as a hard cap, probably). You’d have to actually make it more difficult to field a competitive team, not just more expensive.
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I didn’t recognize him w/o the long hair and beard. They actually showed that on Astros broadcast a couple of times last year when they were playing the pinstripes. A foreshadowing of things to come.
You’ll be seeing a lot of him with short hair and clean shaven. The Yankees have a strict policy about both hair length and facial hair.
I dunno, a lot of this is going to be pretty toothless unless you enforce all of the steep penalties in year one. Otherwise it ends up being a non-factor for the perennial huge-payroll orgs like NYY/BOS/LAD who can more easily withstand the financial penalties and loss of draft picks for a short window, while also discouraging smaller-market teams from adding several big-money FA pieces to keep up with the Joneses.
Another problem is that if you enforce all of it in year one then we’re basically talking about the NFL’s hard cap and associated penalties, and we’re probably long past the point that owners and players could ever agree on anything like that. With that in mind, at least tightening the payroll gap would be a good place to start. The NFL requires, at least by design, all teams’ spending to be within 11% of each other; in MLB the lowest team payroll in 2019 was less than 1/3 of the CBT threshold. Whether it’s better to enforce that on the low end (salary floor), the high end (lowered CBT threshold and/or tiered CBT), or both, I don’t know.