Signing Darvish would mean trading for a batt and adding two significant salaries. I'd rather just sign the bat and only add one salary.
JDM
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And the (early, unreliable) word is that Darvish isn't going to cost as much as JDM. ERod/Santana wouldn't necessarily have to be the other pieces, either. I'm sure a package involving Porcello or Pomeranz could also fetch a hitter.
That would be an excellent plan. I like Erod but I wonder how big of an issue his knee is going to be going forward. Plus really like Santana and think he'd be a good buy. However even if you keep ERod and sign Darvish over JDM you can always go into the season with what you have and add a guy like Frazier who is just a year removed from having some really good power numbers. Nothing like JDM but him plus Yu would be a solid get. To be honest I'm not sold that the Sox won't go after him if JDM keeps playing hard ball or ends up back in AZ.
There are probably some short contention window teams who'd rather Porcello's 2/$42M than the multi-year asks of Darvish, Cobb, Arrieta, or Lynn. The Twins, Giants, Mariners, Mets, Brewers and Angels are all in and could use a durable starter.
Even if we assume that 2017 is his new baseline, that puts him 40 points of wRC+ behind Martinez last year, and and 10 behind his worst season since changing his swing (going into 2014). And that's an assumption built on the hope that Santana's .363 BABIP won't regress.
I don't think Santana is the answer to this team's woes.
"Short contention window teams". Isn't the consensus around here that the Red Sox are one of those? Seems like all the talk and motivation behind blowing past the luxury tax cap this winter has been about 2018-2019 being a go for it now window.
Additionally, wouldn't signing another starter long term, such as Darvish, put a bit of a crimp in the team's ability to extend Sale in a couple years, particularly if Price doesn't opt out (and they absolutely have to operate as if he's staying)?
And frankly, and I don't mean this as a slight to the man, but Dombrowski seems too simplistic in his approach to ever be one to plan and execute these types of multi-step manuevers to re-make a roster. I know we're all used to the Theo/Cherington-era approach with multi-team trades and outside the box thinking, but nothing about Dombrowski's resume suggests that's his M.O.
Trading Porcello for parts or JBJ and/or Rodriguez for Santana combined with a Darvish signing just doesn't strike me as a Dombrowski move when he could continue to wait out Martinez or, to a lot of people's dismay, keep his powder dry, roll with the roster he has, and address any issues as they present themselves during the season.
Fwiw, Santana for whatever reason has been significantly better away from the nominally hitter-friendly Miller Park: .853 to .788 OPS career, .902 to .847 last season.
More importantly, he's only 25 and trending up sharply.
Age 24 Big Papi: .282 / .364 / .446
Age 24 Santana: .278 / .371 / .505
What's not to be excited about?
More importantly, he's only 25 and trending up sharply.
Age 24 Big Papi: .282 / .364 / .446
Age 24 Santana: .278 / .371 / .505
What's not to be excited about?
The Giants are at the cap and probably don't have any bats Boston would be interested in. And as offensively challenged as they were in 2017, they'd be pretty reluctant to move offensive pieces anyway.They could definitely use another SP, but I think they're done making moves this offseason.
Haven't been too close to this... Hoping for a general answer:
Are there any particular dates that will drive action / decision on JDM?
I know of these
Arbitration: mid-Feb
Spring Training: mid-Feb
Opening Day: Mar 29
Are there any other 'key dates' to be aware of?
Are there any particular dates that will drive action / decision on JDM?
I know of these
Arbitration: mid-Feb
Spring Training: mid-Feb
Opening Day: Mar 29
Are there any other 'key dates' to be aware of?
They are, yeah. But I’d think they’re more likely to land a FA starter than, say, Minnesota.
Apparently Dombrowski both zigs while others zag and plays checkers while everyone else plays chess. You’re right that he’s way more simplistic that Theo or Ben, but it’s weird to me to frame this as merely an aesthetic difference instead of a qualitative one.
Lack of starting pitching, plus a theoretical logjam with the acquisitions of Cain and Yelich.
https://www.brewcrewball.com/2018/1/25/16934798/milwaukee-brewers-shopping-domingo-santana-brett-phillips-danny-salazar
Edit: they apparently turned down Chris Archer, but I'm not sure Archer at age 29 making $25M a year is as interesting a piece as 24 year-old, cost-controlled EdRo.
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posted elsewhere but apparently Mookie's hearing is today. Not sure how long a ruling takes
But is that going to be a real driver to JDM decision?
I guess what I am asking is - what, if anything, will 'force some action' on JDM? For instance, I think the start of spring training would be one such thing - you don't want this to linger into that period. Certainly opening day is a trigger. Is there any other trigger(s)?
EdRo has four years of control remaining and Santana has five.
Seems fair given Santana’s defense. The Brewers would probably want a pre-arb guy with less injury history, but I’m not sure there’s a lot of arms out there on the market with that many years and upside. Corbin, Duffy, Teheran, Salazar, and Sanchez too expensive or close to FA, and Taillon, Archer, Ray and Fulmer are too valuable.
MLB-ready guys in EdRo’s value tier would be something like Bundy, Manaea, Norris, Foltynewicz, or Rodon.
Well then this makes a ton of sense. They need to make this happen - sign Darvish and go win a World Series
Archer's not making $25M a year. He's got 2/$14M guaranteed left on his contract, with team options up to 4/$34M. He is worth several Domingos.
Nothing is going to force any action until Martinez decides to take action. If he doesn't sign anywhere before spring training starts, that's on him. If he waits until Opening Day, again, that's on him. Absent any actual competition for his services, for the Red Sox to do anything more than keep their offer on the table at this point would be monumentally stupid. Having him sign tomorrow rather than February 15th or something isn't worth paying an extra million or two per year, or adding a year (or options) to the offer.
Their only other choice is to move on and sign or trade for someone else. Given their relative inactivity on this front seems to indicate they're willing to wait and if necessary, go into spring training, if not the season, with what they have already.
D'oh, my bad. I read his contract total as his AAV. That'll learn me to come up from the Port Cellar.
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If JDM does in fact hold out into the Spring or even the regular season, I wonder to what degree that will impact his signability. Obviously his value for this year will decrease proportionally to the amount of time that he misses, and the risk that he will somehow "lose it" due to lack of practice increases (even if it's only a slight risk). If he sits out now, he's wasting what should be the most valuable time on any contract that he would sign.
Is there a predictable inflection point whereby its unlikely he'll get anything but a short show-me type offer? If he ends up sitting out the whole season will he become basically unsignable?
I don't think there are completely clear answers to any of these questions, but they are definitely relevant to the question of whether there might be a point at which JDM feels a dramatically increased pressure to accept the best available offer.
Boras' reputation adds an additional dimension to this, as losing this game of chicken in a very dramatic and public fashion (eg: JDM is forced to take a short deal or worse yet changes his stance too late only to find that there are no longer any offers on the table at all) it could be very damaging to Boras' brand. He could turn JDM into some sort of martyr to start a crusade against the CBA, perceived collusion or whatever, but that seems like a huge risk going into next year's bonanza offseason.
Is there a predictable inflection point whereby its unlikely he'll get anything but a short show-me type offer? If he ends up sitting out the whole season will he become basically unsignable?
I don't think there are completely clear answers to any of these questions, but they are definitely relevant to the question of whether there might be a point at which JDM feels a dramatically increased pressure to accept the best available offer.
Boras' reputation adds an additional dimension to this, as losing this game of chicken in a very dramatic and public fashion (eg: JDM is forced to take a short deal or worse yet changes his stance too late only to find that there are no longer any offers on the table at all) it could be very damaging to Boras' brand. He could turn JDM into some sort of martyr to start a crusade against the CBA, perceived collusion or whatever, but that seems like a huge risk going into next year's bonanza offseason.
You raise many concerns, but most of them will not be realized.
The player and the agent will negotiate the best deal available to them. The loss of playing time could impact the contract value due to lost productivity at the MLB level, but that loss of value will be mitigated by the desire to sign a happy, contributing player.
Likewise the probability of a "show me" contract is low, as the more affordable the total contract becomes, the greater the player's addressable market becomes.
As a legal matter, if in the unlikely event there is collusion and in the unlikely event the agent and other plaintiffs have evidence, the legal recourse can largely be decoupled from contract action.
In the case of being a martyr, in my experience no one wants that role. In negotiations, the secret to success is simple: Never appeal to a man's better nature. He may not have one. Instead, appeal to his self interest.
Posted this in the MLB discussion thread, but if anyone’s in the mood to panic over here, JDM’s been friends with new Diamondback Alex Avila since they were eight.
https://amp.mlb.com/122610778-familiarity-lands-jd-martinez-in-right-spot-in-detroit.amp.html
https://amp.mlb.com/122610778-familiarity-lands-jd-martinez-in-right-spot-in-detroit.amp.html
The reason everyone likes this is because it’s highway robbery. Rodriguez is currently all Hat, no cattle. He’s an inconsistent #5 starter who is currently recovering from a serious injury that required surgery and could easily become a chronic problem. Sure, h could break out and put it all together, which is why we view him more positively than his production or health suggests, but I’d be shocked if he has anywhere near as much value as this Board is ascribing to him.
Why would that induce panic? Because there's one more reason he might want to go back to AZ rather than sign elsewhere (Boston or otherwise)? Big deal. The guy's going to do what he's going to do.
If the Red Sox get outbid for him, that's one thing. But there's not much that can be done if he wants to play with his childhood buddy rather than take a more lucrative offer somewhere else. Seems silly to worry about it.
Because if they don't sign Martinez ... THEY LOSE THE OFFSEASON!!! And, worse, all the bandwidth trees slaughtered in these threads would have died in vain.
Panic was just me being glib. But sure, you're not wrong. Seems silly to care about baseball at all, if you think about it.
That's a description of winter 2014 Felix Doubront, not winter 2018 Eduardo Rodriguez. Rodriguez has been a slightly better than average pitcher in his first 350-ish innings through age 24. For a LHP especially, that's nothing to sneeze at. If he's a #5 starter, he's a damn good one.
He’s thrown 350 innings over parts of 3 seasons. That’s a part time player, not a rotation anchor. He’s need an innings limit in 2018, probably even if he’s healthy.
And, As I said, he’s also currently out of commission following major knee surgery. That’s the very definition of “past performance is not a guarantee of future results. As a risk manager, you should assign a not large but materially larger than 0 chance that he doesn’t even pitch effectively in the majors ever again, and probably a better than 50% chance that he breaks down and misses major time again in the near future.
And after all that, the Red Sox top 4 starters are Sale, Porcello, Price, and Pomeranz. Rodriguez is competing for the 5th starter job with Steven Wright, who was an All-Star when last himself seen healthy as well as the best pitcher by ERA in the international league last season in Velazquez, and a guy who threw a no hitter in Johnson. He’s the very definition of expendable, which Milwaukee knows.
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I wouldn't go quite as far as Plympton on ERod, but the suggestion of trading him for Santana is one of the more delusional wishcast trade suggestions I've seen in a while. What happened to the "pretend to be a fan of the other team" rule for these things?
IMO Santana isn't in the Yelich and Ozuna tier of outfielders that would bring back a treasure trove. He's had one good year and regression is entirely possible.
That said - you make a good point. The Brewers are going for it. It doesn't make much sense for them to roll the dice on damaged goods. They can take their time and make the right deal.
We're not nominating him for ace here, but your language is seriously misleading.
As for the 350 innings over parts of 3 seasons, let's break that down. In 2015, his age 22 season, he came up at the end of May and then threw 21 starts -- no durability issue there. He pitched well, too.
The following season, for reasons I forget, he started in AAA, and came up at the end of May again. After a good first start, he pitched poorly over his next five starts, culminating in a 9-run horror show at Tropicana. He got sent down, started two games in Pawtucket, came up after the ASB and only missed one start the rest of the way, again pitching very well through the second half.
Last year, he was one of the better pitchers in the league before his knee problem sidelined him in early June. After he returned, he was not as good, and in retrospect clearly wasn't 100%, but he wasn't terrible.
Rodriguez in his brief major league career has had one truly terrible month, June 2016. Before that month he had a 3.81 ERA with 101 K/37 BB and a .697 OPS allowed in 127+ innings. Since his return after the All-Star break that year, he's had a 3.85 ERA with 229 K/78 BB and a .692 OPS allowed in 215 innings--despite being evidently hampered by injury for a substantial piece of that stretch. Who knows how quickly or completely he can come back from surgery. But suggesting that he's inherently or essentially a marginal pitcher is just willfully ignoring the evidence.
"Lose" is such an absolute way of putting it. Go big or go home DD will have failed to upgrade a team with upcoming playoff aspirations though, in what many felt was the most easily identified and (in JDM's case) obvious way possible. It's not like the speculated need to do so there started yesterday either, or even after the 2017 season ended for that matter.
But on that note, I'd also expect just as many or more "NOT UPGRADING THE 2017 LINEUP AT ALL WAS ALWAYS THE PRO GM PLAY THIS OFF-SEASON. IN DD I TRUST!!!" here.
Maybe, but then again what other young and cost controlled starters better then Edro do you honestly see being on the potential trade block atm? That might line up on the other side with a serious return interest in Santana, of course.
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It's not a particularly saturated market. I think it's a reasonable deal if E-Rod is healthy, but have no clue how long he'll be out so think it's risky for a team trying to contend.
Well the Boras propaganda machine seems to be in full spin mode. BR helping to push the idea that JDM will hold out into Spring Training or beyond.
Lumps in a Passan speculation that JDM is willing to wait till mid season playoff aspirations raise the offers for him.
http://syndication.bleacherreport.com/amp/2756401-mlb-offseason-1-bold-prediction-for-each-top-free-agent-trade-target.amp.html
Lumps in a Passan speculation that JDM is willing to wait till mid season playoff aspirations raise the offers for him.
http://syndication.bleacherreport.com/amp/2756401-mlb-offseason-1-bold-prediction-for-each-top-free-agent-trade-target.amp.html
Let him wait. He's only costing himself money. The notion that a hold-out threat is going to bridge the $50-80M gap that the report suggests exists between existing offers and his desired deal is foolish at minimum. No player is worth an extra $50M just to get him signed before spring training or Opening Day versus mid-season.
"Recently, one of the best free agents available this offseason met with a friend, and he admitted something shocking: He was preparing to sit out until the middle of the season. The market for his services this winter was so thin, the offers so incompatible with his production, that he worried he was going to need an external force to compel teams to pay him what his numbers say he's worth. Maybe it would take a playoff race."
Interesting to speculate on JDM availability into the season and the playoff race. The presence of a middle-of-the-order hitter in the market will suppress the prospect acqusition cost of a similar hitter in mid season salary dump situation.
A contending team could add JDM "for only money" and preserve it's minor league talent.
But the post steroid era age driven production decline will continue to be a drag on JDM 7/$210M aspirations. As will the one and done play-in format.
Mr. Boras and his media allies face well informed front offices - to their detriment.
Just to note, that player is not necessarily JDM. Just cutoff from the quote above: “Martinez could well be the mystery player from that report.”
And I'm sure if he waits until mid-season that he will be really ready to go against pitchers in mid-season form
The other thing is that I'm sure no one is telling him that being signed to a big money contract in the middle of a playoff race just ratchets up the pressure on him.
There's enough pressure to live up to a big money contract that we've all heard about; doing so without a spring training and facing pitchers who are in mid-season form seems to be a PR nightmare waiting to happen. Maybe JDM can handle it but I'm sure there are multiple players who wouldn't be able to.
Not to mention that most teams looking for playoff help at the trade deadline aren't necessarily looking to take on a new 7 year commitment. Most deadline deals are of the rent-a-player variety.
Exactly this. The bat market floods the closer we get to summer. Cruz, Mauer, Smoak, Dozier, Beltre, Donaldson, Machado, Jones, Span, Lowrie and whoever else all might be available.
Is there a precedent for this? Recently we've seen guys like Kendrys Morales hold out until close to opening day or into the season, but those were guys who were more or less victims of the qualifying offer. How about for a guy seeking such a large deal (assuming this is JDM, which I do).
I'm sure Boras sold him the world to get him to switch a few days before the biggest payday of his career.
Holding out is the only leverage play Boras has, and it's a weak one. I wonder if the Nats will bail him out again and Boras sells it as Harper insurance.
Holding out is the only leverage play Boras has, and it's a weak one. I wonder if the Nats will bail him out again and Boras sells it as Harper insurance.
Not really, and I highly doubt the bluff would hold up here.
It would be one thing if JDM was a lot younger, but sitting out until mid-season would cost him roughly $12-13m and with the odds stacked against him of ever getting it back. That is just too much money to leave on the table for a guy turning 31 this year, and who hasn't banked a substantial amount more then that over the course of his career. Especially in a surrounding market where a lot of lower tier but still serviceable vets are going to be left begging for jobs.
Guessing he ultimately makes the money work for Arizona (with an early opt out) under a worse case scenario, and goes scrabbling back there with the same accompanying "this is where I really wanted to be" fluff piece that we are are probably going to be see a lot of elsewhere on the offensive side of the leftover FA pool.
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I think you might be missing my point here. Right now we are in a situation where a team or teams are offering a contract worth $X and the player says, "I'm worth $Y" where X is substantially less than Y. The player's reaction to this is to say, "OK, well if nobody is going to give me $Y, then I'm just going to sit out until someone does." IF this statement is genuine and isn't just a ruse, then we are looking at a situation where the player's sense of his value and teams' sense of his value are likely to be increasingly divergent rather than convergent. It's entirely possible that part way into the season, X becomes something substantially less than X. The amount of time he sits out may reduce his value in a non linear fashion because the longer he sits out the more additional time he will likely need to get back into shape. I'm wondering if there is a point where he sits out long enough that teams begin to doubt whether he can get back into shape at all (or at least decide that there is some new level of risk that he won't be able to), or if his decision to sit out becomes viewed as a character issue whereby teams become reluctant to sign him at all.
In this case, you aren't looking at a situation where the loss of value is mitigated by signing a happy, contributing player. You are looking at a situation where a person may have backed himself into a corner and has to take an offer MUCH lower than the offer he had before (let along the one he wanted), in which case you are perhaps signing a player that is not only unhappy and resentful but may or may not be able to contribute at the expected level due to rust.
I agree that the probability of a "show me" contract is low, but the point of the questions I was raising wasn't to determine what the probability of a given outcome is. What I'm wondering is whether there is an inflection point past which JDM's actions result in teams perceiving the risk of signing him as high enough that they would be unwilling to give him a long term deal at all. I think that is a real possibility if he isn't just bluffing. The affordability of JDM's contract isn't even really an issue as so far the player has not yet shown a willingness to be flexible in his demands. You posit demand for the player increasing as the contract becomes more affordable, while I am positing the value of the player decreasing while the contract expectations remain constant due to the player's inflexibility. If the player remains inflexible as his desirability actively decreases over time due to his sitting out, when is the crisis point reached where the player effectively has to decide to either eat a massive amount of crow or basically retire?
I can't recall any precedent for a case like this. In cases like Morales or Stephen Drew, they passed on the QO then got no bites as free agents. I'm not sure I'd define them as holdouts since it wasn't that teams weren't meeting their demands so much as they weren't making offers at all.
With Martinez (assuming he's the mystery player), he has offers on the table (according to his own agent). They just aren't satisfactory. Holding out on that is unusual just in the sense that a player in that position eventually comes around to the notion that they're not going to get the contract that they want so they have to take the contract that is offered.
The moment he starts missing regular season games, that's money lost that he's not going to recoup. A deal signed mid-season will be pro-rated, and most likely won't be long term either. I just don't see where a 5/125 type offer now is going to be topped simply by holding out until a team is desperate enough to sign him in May or June or something.
Barring an Aaron-Boone-like-injury to a key offensive player on a GFIN team (this is a very limited pool) this whole "I'll just sit it out until I get the mega-deal I deserve" ploy seems like a very dangerous game to play. At some point in time, everyone and everything under the sun "jumps the shark." We may be about to witness Boris doing his best Fonzie impression.
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