2010-11 Hot Stove League

Mike Quade named Cub manager!

http://sports.espn.go.com/chicago/mlb/news/story?id=5703131

well we had eric wedge yesterday named as seattles manager.

Ted Lilly is the first free agent to sign afaik. 3 year deal with LAD with moneys not disclosed just yet.. Maybe some time today.

I thought Beelzebud discouraged these announcements in October.

Not entirely sure.. They didnt announce the specifics to the deal, just that he agreed and that he would be taking a physical today. Its not like A-rod declaring his free agency during the last game of the world series.

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=5704546

brave release melky and saito

Saito is a great pitcher. I didnt mind when my team non tendered him because he sprained his elbow to the point where he said he couldnt brush his teeth. Then he got that weird platelette infusion and hes been ok since.

Lilly deal is 3/33. Not awesome but not embarassing. But check back with me in 2013.

I realized only now that Lilly's been really good the past two years -- maybe better than any point in his career. Seems like a good deal.

A's pitching coach Curt Young moving on after team offers only one year:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/10/24/SPC61G1D6T.DTL

john farrell as torontos new manager.

woot!

so it's Sandy!

http://sports.espn.go.com/new-york/mlb/news/story?id=5731925

The dry, underachieving Diamondbacks: now with Alan Trammell, Don Baylor, Eric Young, Charles Nagy.

Trammell/Baylor: guy who should've won MVP, guy who shouldn't have.

I think that's the first coaching staff comprised entirely of guys I remember watching as players.

http://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2010/10/white-sox-marlins-discussed-trading-ozzie-for-stanton.html

WHAT

When was the last time a manager was traded for somebody?

I know the Mets sent someone to Washington in '68 for Gil Hodges.

The Mariners got Randy Winn for Pinella.

Loria should be taken out into the streets and beaten if he traded Mike Stanton for anyone, let alone a manager.

Larry Parrish named Braves hitting coach.

Riccardi is a Met now.

I wonder what Razor thinks?

http://www.3rdbasecoachoflife.com/

The Milwaukee Brewers named LA Angels bench coach Ron Roenicke to be their new manager.

Loria should be taken out into the streets and beaten if he traded Mike Stanton for anyone, let alone a manager.

just because

The Brewers have closed their critical manager-player generation gap (by six years)! Hurrah!

Jayson Werth will almost certainly not be a Phillie next year thx 2 SBoras

"While it is not our intent to negotiate the terms of Derek's free-agent contract in a public forum," Close told AOL FanHouse, "we do agree with Hal's and Brian's recent comments that this contract is about business and winning championships. Clearly, baseball is a business, and Derek's impact on the sport's most valuable franchise cannot be overstated. Moreover, no athlete embodies the spirit of a champion more than Derek Jeter."

...except Edgar Renteria

Texas declines "mutual option" on Vlad:

http://sports.espn.go.com/dallas/mlb/news/story?id=5761304

Poor Vlad, he looked really bad as a DH and even worse in the field. Retirement impending?

A couple AL teams should have room for a player who had a top 20 OPS in 2010.

Rangers may still re-sign him

Papi will be back with the Sox.

Beltre has declined his option.

Well beltre was expected to decline his option. Just really hope they come through on some FA's this year. Would also like them to resign V-Mart, cuz salty aint it.

aramis ramirez coming back to the cubs, wonder if he will suck again

not alot of 3B options floating around out there.

The problem with Vlad is that they overplayed him. He was great in the first half.

Ah maybe he's just hurt. His World Series will be one to forget, kudos to Tejas if they re-up after that.

Would also like them to resign V-Mart, cuz salty aint it.

Yeah this.

I don't really mind about Beltre - last season sorta has to be an outlier right? But it's true that there aren't too many 3Bs on the table.

beltre is the only good free agent 3B as far as i know, even if you assume he's gonna hit like 30-40 points lower than he did this year on his slash line

the next best option is felipe lopez or jorge cantu which is a pretty steep dropoff

oh or they could keep bill hall around i guess but still not ideal

I'd take Cantu! He's bounced around teams and leagues, but I think he still hasn't really reached his peak

what's the deal with manny and the white sox? is he around for the coming season?

well of course beltre is a contract yr special...don't think he'll be the same next season, especially for the money he'll want. Wish the sox would make a big offer for Cliff Lee, but you know the Yanks are going to throw a gazillion dollars his way

it's like an irony of the one year contract that beltre's degree of success last year makes it very likely that attempts to resign him will, in one way or another, have an unhappy outcome.

if they don't get it done with beltre i think they try youk at 3B for a full season and sign a stopgap at 1B, then pray anthony rizzo turns out better than lars anderson did

Playing half the year in Fenway instead of Safeco probably had as much (if not more) to do with Beltre's year -- right?

The Myth Of The Contract Year Slugger

http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/13/yankees-phillies-astros-business-sports-bloomberg-baseball.html

what's the deal with manny and the white sox? is he around for the coming season?

― congratulations (n/a), Friday, November 5, 2010 7:58 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

to answer my own question, he's a free agent and the white sox (I hope) probably won't re-sign him since he sucked pretty hard

Anthopoulos pulling a few unexpected moves. trading a ptbnl or cash for Olivio then not picking up his option and then declining Gregg's aswell.

Yeah sure, but I get the impression the A's have enough A's type players...

DKnobler DKnobler
Giants will get Orlando Cabrera from Indians, source says. #tradedeadline

INTERESTING considering the Renteria/Cabrera rivalry.

Wait, woops -- Renteria is a Red.

REMEMBER WHEN DESPISED, UNDERACHIEVING, GRAYING SHORTSTOPS PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL PLAYERS REMAINED ON ONE TEAM FOR MORE THAN HALF A SEASON AT A TIME?

well that is interesting, looks like the Giants will not get that catcher after all.

still can't believe Colorado traded their ace.

xxxp

i figured orlando cabrera was beneath even the giants, but sabean really is full of surprises

i kinda think that the rockies are insane

Backstory on Renteria in case (and probably ~why~) you missed it:

Giants typically overpaid for Renteria, gave him $19M/2 years.

Renteria showed his appreciation with multiple stints on the DL for the bulk of those 2 years, playing very below average baseball with the exception being the big hit in the WS.

The Giants offered him $1M for 2011 which he declined and took $2M from the Reds.

here's keith law on the ubaldo trade, for those that are interested

The announced deal (pending a physical) for the Cleveland Indians to acquire Ubaldo Jimenez would constitute a very good return for the Colorado Rockies but is absolutely the wrong move for Cleveland given the team it has and the position of the franchise for the next several years.

The main problem for Cleveland here is that it is incorrectly evaluating its own team -- the Indians shouldn't be buying, and while I could forgive them for not selling, that would be the smarter move for a team still trying to rebuild. Since a fluky 30-15 start driven largely by a schedule with more cupcakes than a Sprinkles bake shop, Cleveland is 23-36 and has been outscored by 77 runs in that span -- that is, it has been outscored by over a run and a quarter per game. Superman isn't going to close that gap, and while there are things to like about Ubaldo Jimenez, Superman he ain't.

The other problem is that it's unclear what Ubaldo they'd be getting. Jimenez looked like one of the top three or four pitchers in the National League for the first three months of 2010, but he faltered in the second half and has not fully recovered this year. His fastball velocity is down to above-average when it was previously at or near the top of the scale; I saw him in a start in 2009 when he was 95-99, and saw him again at the end of last year when he was a full grade below that, and he's sitting in the 93-94 range.

More to the point, why on earth would the Rockies trade him? They're not the Los Angeles Dodgers, fighting bankruptcy while the putative owners bleed the franchise dry. They're not the Houston Astros, headed for a long fallow period before their next crack at relevance. They're a recent playoff team that gets its next-best starter (Jorge de la Rosa) back from Tommy John surgery at some point next year and with one of the half-dozen best players in the game in Troy Tulowitzki at shortstop. And they had Jimenez signed to a ridiculously club-friendly contract for the next three years (counting the club option for 2014 that evaporates with the trade). They had every reason to keep him, and the fact that they traded him for a good-but-not-revolutionary package gives me even more pause. He'd help Cleveland this year, probably adding a win or two, but that still makes the Indians a team headed to the wrong side of .500.

The best Indians prospect in the deal is lefty Drew Pomeranz, the fourth overall pick in the (weak) 2010 rule 4 draft who would be the player to be named later (Aug. 15th, to be exact, since that's one year from the date he signed his first pro contract). Pomeranz has had no trouble so far in pro ball, including three starts in Double-A after a recent promotion.

He'll mostly sit 89-94 with an out-pitch curveball in the mid- to upper 70s, and showed real improvement with the changeup when he appeared at the Futures Game earlier this month, potentially resolving one of the concerns about him coming into the year (that he might not be effective enough against right-handed hitters). Cleveland also did a good job cleaning up his arm action in the back -- he used to separate high and show the ball to the center fielder -- although even the cleaned-up version is complicated enough that I couldn't project more than average command. But a big, durable-bodied lefty with three average or better pitches is a potential No. 2 starter.

Right-hander Alex White was also a first-rounder, going 15th overall in 2009, and even at the time Cleveland executives acknowledged there was a reasonable chance he'd end up in the 'pen if he couldn't find a usable breaking ball to go with the above-average fastball and above-average or better split. White pitched well in limited time in Double-A this year, was rushed to the majors, then suffered a finger injury (not good in a guy who relies on a split-finger fastball) from which he is just returning -- but the slider still isn't an average pitch. He has shown an ability to get groundballs, especially with the splitter, which makes up for the fact that he doesn't miss a ton of bats, and can cut himself off slightly which limits his command. I see him as a two-pitch late-inning/high-leverage reliever if the slider doesn't come, but I know several teams that rate him as a No. 3 starter or even a fringe No. 2 because they're willing to project the breaking ball.

Joe Gardner is an intriguing throw-in with an average-at-best fastball who works down in the zone and has consistently produced high groundball rates in pro ball; if his control ever improves to solid-average he'd have a chance to start in Colorado because he'd suppress home runs. Matt McBride is a 26-year-old organizational corner bat.

Cleveland was two outs away from falling to .500 on the year tonight and yet is acting like a serious contender that is in win-now rather than rebuilding mode. It makes no sense, and if Jimenez can't regain the form he showed before the midpoint of 2010, then the Indians have damaged the long-term state of the franchise by trading away the entire careers of two top pitching prospects to get him.

thanks

Dejan_Kovacevic Dejan Kovacevic
All hail the #Pirates first legitimate in-season trade acquisition aimed at contention since SS Shawon Dunston in late 1997.

Yeah uhhhh

well i am pleased with it. d. lee is only slightly less useless than lyle overbay, but the pirates gave up v. little to get him (though 15hr in the fsl is pretty good)

really, any deal in which the pirates are not acquiring matt morris is a step up

What's missing from Keith Law's analysis is that the AL Central is a weak division and will remain weak for the next few years. So it makes sense for a .500 team to trade for an all-Star caliber starter, especially if he has two-plus years left on an insanely cheap contract. Getting a pitcher that good for that cost/length of time nearly unprecedented.

Boston pulls out of Harden deal after seeing med report (shocker)

The uhhhh was more a reaction to '97 Dunston than '11 Lee. They really needed to improve 1B in some way.

Law believes Ubaldo will add "a win or two" to "a team headed to the wrong side of .500," so he probably didn't feel the need to mention the division's lousiness. Either that or he had a word limit he couldn't exceed. Would you really make that move -- for a pitcher whose velocity is down significantly -- if your team was 23-36 with a -77 run differential in its last 59 games? I don't THINK I would.

One-third of the Indians first 45 games were against the Mariners, Orioles, Royals, and Twins (when the whole league was beating up on the Twins). Yeah, two of those teams are in the Central, but the Indians have gone 4-8 against Central teams, with one series split and the rest decisive losses, since that 30-15 run.

Starting Monday, the Indians go on a seven-game road trip against the Red Sox and Rangers. The Tigers improved their rotation and have the division's best offense. The White Sox are gaining on them.

Then again, the Indians ALSO have a home stand against the Mariners, Royals, and A's.

I don't think I'd do the Ubaldo trade. If I was trading my two best pitching prospects I'd try to get an all-star caliber bat and even then I'd think twice about it. I'm hoping he fails his physical.

Michael Bourn to the Braves for Jordan Schafer and three pitching prospects. (LHP Brett Oberholtzer, RHP Paul Clemens, and RHP Juan Abreu)

The uhhhh was more a reaction to '97 Dunston than '11 Lee.

haha i know

I keep hearing that Jimenez's velocity is down but his peripherals are nearly identical to last year (HR/9 is slightly but is still excellent). I haven't seen him pitch, but his numbers suggest he's been a bit unlucky but is otherwise still a really good pitcher. And the Indians aren't just adding a win or two this year, they're adding 4-5 wins both next year and the year after (assuming he's healthy), in a division that's usually decided by 1-2 games, and it'll cost less than the signing bonus for their first round draft picks.

Maybe there are some red flags about Jimenez's performance this year that I've overlooked, but to me this seems like a good trade for the Indians.

Ken Rosenthal
Source: #Mariners, #Cardinals discussing Bedard. Ball in Cardinals' court.

makes little sense unless it involves another move ?_?

furcal for double-a outfielder alex castellanos

Isn't he some right-wing CNN commentator?

i've never been so happy about acquiring an aging shortstop hitting .197/.272/.248. you know theriot was a steaming pile of shit when the debate now shifts to whether or not he's better than skip schumaker at 2nd.

wow, the astros gave bourn up for nothing

It makes me wonder if Houston had a ranking of Atlanta's top 25 prospects but looked at it upside-down.

braves bitch

damn, Bourn would've been a great replacement for Sizemore in center

padres trade mike adams for minor league pitchers robbie erlin & joe wieland -- both are SPs in AA in their early 20s, really good trade for the pads i think

Padres said they wanted Erlin and Wieland for Bell or Adams. Rangers went and got Koji Uehara ... and then made the trade anyway? Weird.

Rangers gm making it impossible for Ron Washington to fuck up bullpen management during the playoffs.

wieland just no-hit the best team in the texas league on friday

now he will probably join that team

Does this mean Feliz is a starter next year?

Pitcher Bedard to the Red Sox

whoa

Bedard to BOS: Federowicz, 2 other minor leaguers to LAD, Trayvon Robinson, Chih Hsien Chiang to SEA for Bedard, Fields.

that's a really good deal for seattle

Apparently Bedard is going to re-sign in Seattle anyway.

morosi is saying that the red sox got robinson, so we'll see what's going on

Classic Bedard piece:

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=2978076

i have no idea what the dodgers are doing

3:14pm: This appears to be what's gone down, from Gordon Edes:

Red Sox get: starter Erik Bedard, reliever Josh Fields (both from Mariners)
Dodgers get: catcher Tim Federowicz, reliever Juan Rodriguez, starter Stephen Fife (all from Red Sox)
Mariners get: outfielder Trayvon Robinson (from Dodgers), outfielder Chih-Hsien Chiang (from Red Sox)

They need a catcher, and Federowicz is a good defensive guy.

Don't know about the guys they gave up.

trayvon's been good, though it's hard to tell in albuquerque

federowicz homered today before being pulled

Trayvon has been flashing a ton of power, but thats been in the PCL which is not worth much on planet earth.. Supposedly his defense is middling and his arm isnt great.. Either way whatever it is the Dodgers got back is a bunch of crap. Ned is a fucking idiot and he keeps getting free passes because McCourt is even worse.

This team - why u braek heart?

the dodgers got a bunch of crap, have exactly three players in their line up that should be starting for a major league team, and just traded a major league ready prospects that has OPS'd .866, .842 and .938 in the past three years

b-b-b-but this fed ex guy is Boston's #21 prospect. and the other guys are uh...? Trayvon was def top 10 in our system and we got a bunch of fucking shit in return.

really good deal for seattle -- both the guys they got have huge minor league numbers but a lot of scouts are skeptical, but they need to scoop up anyone and everyone they can that is putting up power numbers

breakdown from the dodgers perspective

http://www.truebluela.com/2011/7/31/2307957/trayvon-robinson-dumped-ned-collet

so, the Rox traded Jiminez to prevent an injury?

http://mlb.sbnation.com/2011/8/1/2308528/ubaldo-jimenez-trade-indians-rockies-news

Move the Rockies to Montreal.