Thursday Morning Reading
At RotoAuthority we have some thoughts on Matt Cain‘s 2006 projection.
Viva El Birdos suggests that John Rodriguez may be a good fit for the Phillies’ fifth outfielder vacancy and also pines for Ryan Church.
The White Sox look to bolster their weak starting rotation with the signing of Hideo Nomo, three-time sixteen game winner.
AllCubs defends Greg Maddux against the haters.
Deadspin finds Barry Bonds‘s latest stunt just a taaaaaad bit contrived.
A little more feedback on my Fantasy Guide, still just $9.99:
"The RotoAuthority Guide has completely changed the way I approach fantasy baseball and is the perfect complement to any strategy or experience level! The guide’s insight has given me confidence that I have a winning strategy and a chance to win my league without spending big bucks."
-Stacey L.
Coming soon: my interview with Will Carroll, discussing all things Mark Prior.
In Defense Of The Jack Wilson Signing
Yesterday I noticed that the contract extension given by the Pirates to Jack Wilson was universally panned throughout the Internet. Maybe someone somewhere liked the deal, but I haven’t seen it in print yet.
While I won’t go as far as to say I liked this extension, I will say that I don’t mind it. Faint praise, yeah, but let’s not tear the Bucs a new one over this just yet.
I have to admit that the Pirates didn’t do a good job exploiting Wilson’s lousy year with the bat. He hit .257/.299/.363 in his age 27 season last year, right at career levels. You’d think they could’ve gotten him for 3/15 because of this. It’s not as if he was coming off his 2004 Silver Slugger season. But his agent snagged three years and $20.2MM with an $8.4MM option for 2010 and most folks chalked this one up as a typical Pirate mistake.
Let’s turn to my favorite new toy, Baseball Prospectus’s Marginal Value Over Replacement Player. That metric says he’ll be worth $15,650,000 over the next three seasons. BP has him as on average a 3.6 win player over the next three seasons. Wilson was worth 6.9 wins in 2004 and 4.6 last year, so he can easily beat that projection. He only needs to beat their projection by four and a half million bucks worth of value spread out over the next three seasons.
Topping 2005 offensively shouldn’t be too tough for Wilson. He added 20 pounds this offseason, typically a good thing for hitters. I will admit, this could have an effect on his range in the field. Keep in mind that Wilson’s ’05 season was definitely affected by a December 2004 emergency appendectomy. He lost fifteen pounds during that surgery.
There are a million defensive stats out there; just take my word for it that Wilson is a defensive whiz. His glove probably comprises 90% of his value, so any offensive value is gravy. It’s not like there’s anything in the Pirates’ farm system that could possibly replace Wilson, even in year three of the deal. And it’s not like the market is bursting with 4.6 win shortstops; only eleven shortstops were better in 2005.
You want to pan a long-term contract? Start with Paul Konerko, Kevin Millwood, A.J. Burnett, and Johnny Damon. There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell their teams break even on those deals. Of course, breaking even overall matters a lot more to the Pirates than it does to the Yankees.
Gammons: Astros Expect Clemens Back
Peter Gammons’s inside info on Roger Clemens in this morning’s blog has received surprisingly little press. His stance:
"…Unless owner Drayton McLane kills this (yeah, right), the Astros expect Clemens to sign on May 1, work out with Koby’s minor-league team, and make his first start June 2 against the Reds."
Our source pretty much had this pegged back in December. That means my 144 inning projection in my Fantasy Guide should hold up well; he’s still probably a top 25 starter in just two-thirds of a season.
What I don’t get is why Clemens needs to milk $15MM (or whatever) out of the Astros for the ’06 season. We all thought it was somewhat noble of him to "settle" for $5MM for his 2004 comeback. If he’d asked for twice that maybe Houston doesn’t go get Beltran and doesn’t end up in the NLCS.
But Roger pretty much ruined his goodwill when he decided to compensate for his 2004 gift by demanding an $18MM salary in 2005. If the Astros had acquired a decent hitter at the trading deadline, they would’ve at least put up more of a fight in the World Series. If Clemens keeps his demands unnecessarily high and Bagwell forces his way into the lineup, the Astros have absolutely no hope of acquiring reinforcements through trade.
And now to go off on a tangent. I’m all for guys like Gammons and Stark producing more content that’s presumably published more quickly. But is anyone reading these things? They should be called BINOs – Blogs In Name Only. Their subscriber wall is killing the spread of traffic that is supposed to be the hallmark of blogs. It doesn’t really matter given this problem, outlined by Aaron Gleeman:
"…As far as I can tell none of the dozen or so blogs ESPN.com hosts actually link to other blogs. For instance, Olney’s blog is made up primarily of links to outside stories and his brief comments on them, but in nearly a year I can’t remember a single link that wasn’t to a mainstream newspaper."
That comment helped garner Gleeman a one-time link from Jayson Stark’s blog, but it’s not becoming a regular occurence. I do like the conversational style seen in ESPN’s recent blogs, though Gammons and Stark kind of write informally in their columns anyway. But all griping aside, I still think ESPN’s subscription price is well worth forty bucks a year. No, they didn’t pay me to say that.