Odds and Ends: Howard, Cormier, Gerut

What a weird article (the Howard one). The first 90% show a great understanding of baseball's salary structure and economics.

Then he goes and starts compare Howard to Teixiera (a player with nearly twice as much service time), proving that he basically wrote the rest of the article by luck.

Anyway, I don't see any place in the article where he's suggesting they ignore service time (other than the Teixiera/Cabrera comparisons). He's saying that they should sign him long-term rather than go to arbitration. That doesn't mean at all that he shouldn't be paid commensurate to his service time - surely the service time would be priced into his new contract, as it was with Pujols, Utley, and every other player with a contract that bought out arbitration (or in Tulowitski's case, even pre-arbitration) years.

If he was suggesting a contract which ignored service time, he'd be asking for $120M+, for sure - not contracts comparable to the Pujols and Utley deals.

If Gerut's knee is fianlly okay he could make a good fifth outfielder for the padres. Better then davanon at least.

I for one am looking forward to the eventual divorce of Ryan Howard and the Sillies.

Thanks, dark. After I posted, I remembered the Jason Dubios trade. I forgot we traded Jody Gerut for Matt Lawton. I remember how Dubios was hyped to play a solid LF with power, but was bad. Not a good Hendry forsight there.

Actually ~ I like taking a chance on a guy like Dubois if you have the open spot; he was looking like a stud in the minors. I can understand why the Cubs and other clubs would want to give him a shot. If you compare Dubois to Murton you will find that Jason actually had a better looking pedigree ~ just in the Slugger instead of On-Base mold.

What I cant understand is how the potential of Dubois would be flipped for injury-prone, light-hitting Gerut ~ then that injury-prone light-hitting accusation would be flipped for juicer, major disappointment and total head-case Matt Lawton…. As sad as it sounds, Dubois has actually had the most productive time in the Majors since those string of trades started happening. His 77 OPS+ the rest of the way easily beats the OPS+ of 2 and OPS+ of 5 Gerut put up for the Cubs/Rats and Lawton posted a 55 OPS+ for the cubs, was canned, signed with the Yanks posting a 39 OPS+ and peaked his head up in Seattle the next year with a 52 OPS+ before being suspended for steroids and disappearing from the game…

Ahh, its great to reminisce on the lesser-known happenings of the game…

I did not specify when I posted Dubois being bad. I meant on defense. He has some pop. Like you posted, it does not matter.