Though two NL Central veterans dominated headlines this offseason, Albert Pujols and Prince Fielder signed with American League teams and Aramis Ramirez's three-year, $36MM deal with the Brewers was the largest free agent contract by any of the division's six teams. Here are the latest links from the NL Central…
- The Pirates announced that they expect A.J. Burnett’s eye injury to sideline him until two or three months from now. The right-hander underwent surgery today after injuring himself in a bunting drill.
- Cardinals chairman and CEO Bill DeWitt Jr. told Jon Heyman of CBSSports.com that the Cardinals couldn't take the chance of letting Yadier Molina hit free agency. "We didn't extend Molina because he had a good year offensively last year,” he said. “We extended him because of the bulk of the work since he became a regular in 2005." Molina and the Cardinals finalized a five-year, $75MM extension yesterday.
- Four of the ten people Astros GM Jeff Luhnow has hired might be described as geeks or nerds, MLBTR’s Tim Dierkes reports from the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston (Twitter links). Luhnow said he’s had a clean slate, since the Astros weren't doing much in terms of analytics before hiring him.
Burnett just can’t win…
Feel bad for the Pirates too….
BTW, Luhnow must have watched Money Ball….
Yet another reason to never call for a bunt.
Nice move by Cash, before Burnett’s Karma messed with the Yankees in some sort of extraordinary way.
Is kind of odd when you think of it. Before they signed him his biggest concerning problem was his bad injury history. During his time in NY he was healthy, but he had problems pitching. Now he gets traded and a week later gets injured.-
#Piratefanproblems
Pirates fans are probably crying as much as Burnett did when that ball hit him.
I feel bad for the Pirates. they need to borrow some goalie masks from the Penguins for bunting drills from now on…
That’s a damn shame for Burnett and sounds like one hell of a painful injury.
I’ll be surprised if Burnett actually misses that much time. They are figuring on two weeks to recover from the surgery, then two weeks to begin working out again and building up strength. At that point, he will have missed all 4 weeks of spring training, so they are assuming he will need an extra 4 weeks to get ready in extended spring training. I doubt he will need all 4 weeks to get ready.
The way the Pirates schedule lines up in April, they really only need 4 starters anyway for the first 3 weeks, so this isn’t a huge deal. Plus, they still have a 5th starter if needed in Correia.
But there could still be lingering side effects. His depth vision could be messed up.
(so everyone knows, this comment isn’t supposed to sound sarcastic) now he might be wild high & low as well as inside & out
Considering that Correia’s best months are at the beginning of the year, he might be the opening day starter.
I wonder how many clubs still don’t use statistics and such now that the Astros and Cubs are converting to sabermetrics.
Mariners.
Orioles. Not unless Angelos steps down as majority owner.
Horrible news for Burnett. I was very excited for him, he seemed very happy to be with Pittsburgh and was determined to turn his career around. Sounds like a painful injury, but at least he should be good to go when it heals, better than something happening to your arm I suppose.
i was excited to get him out of ny. But hate to see someone injured like this.
I was kinda interested to see how pit did with the high upside potential outputs from the rotation by adding burnett and bedard. could have been kinda interesting.