I don't think this year was the best time for MLB to try to go all NFL on us with the draft. I mean, you've got the new best pitching prospect ever (don't dare tell Keith Law that he might not be the next Clemens, by the by) , but nobody seems all that excited about anyone else in the draft. I'll watch pretty much anything having anything to do with professional baseball, and maybe if the amateur draft was held in January, they'd rope me in. But I'm not watching the MLB draft in prime time when there's real baseball to be watched. And if I'm not in their audience for this thing, odds are pretty good that their actual audience will be wildly terribly small compared to the amount of time and money they've spent promoting it.------------------------------------------------------
Nobody has told baseball that it's a dated and boring game. It keeps coming up with things I've never seen before. Like this:
I wish I could figure out where that came from or who those teams were. But anyway, I thought it was cool.
----------------------------------------------------------
Speaking of Strasburg, add Buster Olney to the growing list of crotchety writers who are jealous of his opportunity and "advising" him to take less money than he's worth in what may be the one shot to make real money he gets in his life. Olney quotes "one baseball official" as saying he would just offer Strasburg $11 million (half a million more than Prior's record-breaking deal eight years ago) "and make that my best and first and only offer."
I'll just say this: I hope that "baseball official" is the Padres' director of marketing or the Mets' senior counsel or something. If that official is making baseball decisions, you should hope that he's not doing so for your team. A Boras client very well may (I'd go so far as to say probably will) ignore an offer so obviously below his value as that (and negotiation techniques as bullying and amateurish as that), and go play for the Saints or something.
And if that happens, with fan morale where it is now (that one fan is getting awfully down on himself), the Nationals might as well move back to Canada. Or Senegal.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Mr. Pinto points out that the Padres get a strange off-day in the City of Angels, maybe indulging in a Rodeo Drive (or maybe just Rodeo Road--man, I wish that video was online) shopping spree between their series with the Dodgers ending on Wednesday and the one with the Angels starting on Friday. There have been a lot of head-scratchers with the schedule this year, mostly (a) all the two-game series and (b) pairs of teams in different divisions seeming to meet each other very frequently over the first two months, and then not again for the rest of the year. But problem #1, now and always, is that ridiculous unbalanced schedule. Yankees and Red Sox fans (and Rays fans) should put away their differences and organize a collective uprising against that ludicrosity.
Then again, you can get from LA to San Diego in two hours or less. I guess I'd probably just buzz back home for the day. Now, if they did that to the Marlins or Orioles, there might be issues.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Finally, a video that has nothing to do with anything. Here's a sentence I never thought I'd say: I'm currently obsessed with two folk-comedy duos. You've probably heard of the first:
The other is Garfunkel and Oates, who don't have the benefit of an HBO sitcom (yet) but are just as funny. But I've realized that they don't have a video I could embed here that wouldn't be likely to be at least a little offensive to someone.
The other is Garfunkel and Oates, who don't have the benefit of an HBO sitcom (yet) but are just as funny. But I've realized that they don't have a video I could embed here that wouldn't be likely to be at least a little offensive to someone.
Well, I think Olney's looking from the team's point of view. It seems that no one wants Strasburg to make a lot of money. But what Olney was getting at was how can Strasburg turn that down? My guess is that the Nationals start at $15 million and end around $20 million. How can Strasburg turn that down? That's a lot of money, and there's no guarantee that anyone else will pay that much money next season (the Yankees won't be that high in the draft). Strasburg's leverage will be worse (though, being able to go straight to the majors means that being drafted as a 22 or 23 year old wouldn't hurt him too badly), and he'll only lose years of free-agency. And as much as Nationals fans may not be happy about him not being happy, they may not commiserate with a guy who just turned down more money than they'll ever see.
ReplyDeleteI agree that they'd want their full value, but that's generally not how fans see things.
Count me among the group that thinks that Strasburg will sign and will not be anywhere near the $50 million Boras has floated. For most of the reasons Mark outlined, I agree $20 million is a likely end point where Strasburg decides it's good enough and goes to pitch. What I do think might happen is that Boras gets wise to the super-two shenanigans that have gone on with Jay Bruce, Evan Longoria, Matt Wieters, and Ryan Braun and negotiates some way around that, so that Strasburg is a) motivated to sign quickly and b) gets to enter the free-agent market early if he wants to.
ReplyDeleteAlso, count me in the group that finds Hall and Oates adorable and awesome.
I don't disagree with either of you. Yeah, Olney's article was written as though he were "advising" the Nationals, not Strasburg directly. And I'm no Boras fan or apologist.
ReplyDeleteBut underlying this article and the dozens like it are the sense that no damn kid deserves that kind of money, and where does he get off etc. And that is, among myriad other things, a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of value. I think $20 million (with various bells & whistles as TCM suggests) is a reasonable guess. A one-time, walk-away $11 million offer, however, isn't reasonable at all.
HALL & Oates are adorable, TCM? That's a side of you I've never seen...and speaking of never seeing, send me an email one of these days (preferably before three weekends from now). :)
I love that you are enjoying flight of the conchoards. Hahaha. I just got a copy of the first season so I'm starting from the beginning. They're great.
ReplyDeleteBest triple play I ever saw was a Legion game.
ReplyDeleteRunners on 1st/3rd with no outs.
Battters flies out to CF.
Runner from 3rd scores on the SF by beating the throw.
Runner from 1st is gunned down by the C trying to advance on the throw.
P appeals at 3B that the runner left early, it's upheald and the runner is out, no run scored.
1 pitch, 3 outs. I was the only one who realized it and had to tell the umpires and both teams the inning was over.