Things are quiet in Baseball. But we still find stuff in spite of all that. If I can find a bargain or two when nobody is looking, why can’t Eppler.
Enjoy some National Date Nut Bread Day (some yeast-based religions recognize this holiday on September 8th) Links:
______________________________
Everywhere In Baseball
Holly Dazed: Baseball gets into the spirit of hte season! On the West Coast we lead with the Mariners and their magical Safeco After Dark…………Then we move off to the Midwest, where the Twins are the toast of a Paul Molitor-led choir singing a special version of Carol of the Bells……….
Opti-Mizers: Prevailing wisdon is that opt-out clauses are great for the player because it gives them the power to nab a raise if they do well, AND hold on to great pay even if they don’t. But there is a growing current of dialog that it’s a great thing for the wealthy teams, too. They can afford to put up the initial salaries, and they get the best chance to reap the premium years and let some other team get saddled any salary raise thereafter. Dave Cameron over at Fangraphs begs to differ. He see that players will only opt out if they are being paid under market compared to their production. So the team holding the cotract will either have to pay that raise to keep that player, or pay to replace him. Either way, they are impacted negatively if the player chooses the opt-out. He has a point, but it does still appear to be a problem that only the wealthy teams can afford to deal with………..
Ouch: The Hardball Times digs into the 2015 injury report and the one thing that jumps out to me is how dmaned bad the Rangers are at keeping their players healthy, and the report shows how this Rangers problem goes back year after year after year………..
Deep Thoughts: Something has been going on among the brains of those who deal with these things, that I admit has never entered my pea brain. Defensive shifts are opening up a door to the potential of altering how games are scored. And this is yet another corner of baseball where we will see old school versus new school……….
Executive Shuffle: Changing a GM has a huge impact on an organization. In surveying those impacts around the league, FanGraphs trips over the comments of One Random Un-named Front Office Exec who comments on the Angels: “I’m not sure what happened in Anaheim. But say it’s a GM firing a manager, and then he fires a second manager and a third manager. At some point, if you keep firing guys, maybe the problem isn’t the managers. It’s the GM. You can flip that. If you have a manager who has run through a couple of GMs — same with an owner who’s run through a few GMs —- then you have to ask if maybe it’s not the general manager. It’s the manager or maybe it’s the owner.” Yeah. maybe……….
The Cuban Gambit: The pipeline of talent from Cuba has been decimating Cuban baseball. It also allows for wealthy teams to circumvent the traditional draft system that MLB has in place to try and equalize the chance for each franchise to acquire good players. So both Cuba and MLB are alies towards changing hte current system, but it may be too late. The well might already have run dry……….
The Good Life: Yankee Stadium, land of the uber-wealthy, is conducting some sort of fan surney looking to enhance the game experience. And the questions being asked are rather odd………..
Flipping Out: Bat flips reach new heights in this Venezuelan walk-off grand slam……….
____________________________
