11/21/24
December 11, 2014
SportsFilter: The Thursday Huddle:
A place to discuss the sports stories that aren't making news, share links that aren't quite front-page material, and diagram plays on your hand. Remember to count to five Mississippi before commenting in anger.
That new GM for the Dodgers is definitely changing things up. It looks like he had a list of "must fix" ideas, and he's going through them step by step.
posted by grum@work at 11:20 AM on December 11, 2014
Red Sox say, "Cespedes we hardly knew ye", sending him to Detroit Rock City for Rick Porcello. My new favorite game this off-season is to go to FanGraphs and click in the search box. It brings down a list of the most recently searched/ most active players. You can pretty much watch the trades (and rumors?) from that.
posted by yerfatma at 11:41 AM on December 11, 2014
I don't know that I really want Matt Kemp on the Padres, but Grandal hasn't seemed to be incredibly awesome since getting busted for PEDs, so...
posted by LionIndex at 01:33 PM on December 11, 2014
"I'm on somebody's fantasy team, and I think it's the man upstairs." -- Cam Newton on surviving the car accident
posted by rcade at 05:05 PM on December 11, 2014
In the grand scheme of things, a few months of Jon Lester for one year of Rick Porcello is a heck of a deal.
Masterson for $9.5m seems pretty pricey, but at least his alternating horrible season/great season career cycle means he's due for a great year this year.
Allen Webster and Rubby De La Rosa seem joined at the hip - they were traded to Boston together, and are now heading to Arizona together.
posted by dfleming at 05:39 PM on December 11, 2014
I don't know that I really want Matt Kemp on the Padres, but Grandal hasn't seemed to be incredibly awesome since getting busted for PEDs, so...
Why not? Kemp has had some health issues but he has great when healthy. He played 150 games last year. His contract is a bargain for his talent, especially with the Dodgers contributing to pay some of it. He will certainly make it on the field more than Carlos Quentin.
posted by Ying Yang Mafia at 07:40 PM on December 11, 2014
Yeah, but we already have Carlos Quentin.
I'd rather us just actually draft good players and develop them instead of gambling on vets where you keep your fingers crossed that they're going to be able to play. This just seems like a continuation of the policies Jonah Keri wrote about earlier this year.
posted by LionIndex at 08:23 PM on December 11, 2014
"I'm on somebody's fantasy team, and I think it's the man upstairs."
Jerry Richardson's?
posted by tommybiden at 10:01 PM on December 11, 2014
I'd rather us just actually draft good players and develop them instead of gambling on vets
Guessing you have no aspirations of becoming a Yankee executive.
posted by cixelsyd at 12:31 AM on December 12, 2014
Masterson for $9.5m seems pretty pricey
I'm guessing it's a combination of them thinking John Farrell can get the best out of him combined with using their financial might to ensure they got him. One sidenote to this off-season/ season is the Sox have left themselves in a clever place financially: because they did not exceed the luxury tax in the last three years, the penalty for doing so is trivial (to them) and next year a number of big contracts come off the books so I think they built an intentional window here to be able to sign whomever they want and then just clean up the salary levels next year. Even with last year's terrible season, Masterson has been worth about 2.5 wins/ year over the last 5. If he achieves that, he'd be a bargain, relatively speaking.
The three pitchers the Sox have picked up are all groundball specialists who played for crappy defensive teams*. I don't know about Boegarts at SS and Ramirez at LF, but other than that the Sox are pretty solid defensively (assuming Pedroia can manage to get & stay healthy) so they may see these pitchers as undervalued though I'd like to see some more swing & miss power pitching.
* He said without checking.
posted by yerfatma at 09:07 AM on December 12, 2014
Guessing you have no aspirations of becoming a Yankee executive.
That was actually kind of my reaction to the trade - that it seemed like a really Yankee move. But, at least they're getting help with the salary for Kemp and they didn't have to give up anything too valuable.
posted by LionIndex at 02:26 PM on December 12, 2014
Matt Kemp to Padres with Tim Federowicz and $31 million for Yasmani Grandal, Joe Wieland and Zach Eflin.