Hot Stove 2023-2024

to take the dbacks example, they were 16 games out of first in their own division when the season ended (behind guess who) and the only way on god’s green earth that this 86-win team makes the postseason is the expanded playoff format, the secondary function of which is, as far as i can tell, to give the appearance of competitive balance that is lacking during the regular season

“we just landed ohtani… but actually… winning is not about the money”

Sports teams do not need a salary cap, no.

Critiques the *checks notes* Red Sox fan (is this a good argument?)

Sorry bout your sour grapes

spare me

Sports teams do not need a salary cap, no.

….. lol

Not going to make any more posts about reading comprehension after this one, promise

i think we should get back to everyone’s favourite subject, the dodgers choking in the postseason, despite their monstrous payroll, the hows and whys

I would also like to solve this problem

dodgers also always manage to have a thriving farm system producing great players like will smith and an endless supply of pitchers, prospects they can trade for rentals, and a sense of organizational professionalism that money cannot buy

money also can't buy not choking in the postseason

Money could help, Dodgers are still 2 starting pitchers short for this season. Their no-starting-pitchers-besides-lance-Lynn strategy wasn’t exactly a winner this year

I was interested though that apparently the Rangers are having trouble with money due to some TV rights issue, which seems to be damaging a ton of teams. Ken R reported that he thought they wouldn’t bring back Monty, which surprised me because previously he’d been a good fit.

I sometimes get alerts that Blake Snell is streaming on twitch, he is desperate to be a Mariner but I could only see them doing this if they sign him and then flip Kirby for a load of bats, at least one of which would have to be a major league player. I’m honestly not sure where he’ll end up, you don’t hear much about his market compared to the other SPs.

speaking of teams that have never won a pennant

First I’m hearing of the Snell mariners thing tbh. Had no idea.

… and now that I’m checking, he was born there, so makes sense.

xp don’t go there, h8 Stanton h8 Dipoto end of

Yeah Snell is, like his fellow two time Cy Young Award winner from Washington, a guy who loves being from Seattle and would be very happy to play out his career there. I think he may have said this outright too. Idk if you get better weed in California but maybe the taxes are lower too.

Money could help, Dodgers are still 2 starting pitchers short for this season. Their no-starting-pitchers-besides-lance-Lynn strategy wasn’t exactly a winner this year

― H.P, Monday, December 11, 2023 10:18 AM (fourteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

their strategy was to get may and gonsolin and buehler injured and then encourage urias to continue to be a violent jerk?

Tbf I don’t think they encouraged him to do that, they just kept him under contract like they were trying to rival the Yankees for the roster record for having the most DV offenders at any one time.

well yeah

mariners would be nuts to trade kirby. incredibly cool player.

Yes I wouldn’t either, but he would command a huge price in the trades and those cunts aren’t going to spend money. That kind of pinpoint control, I can’t see them paying for him in free agency.

He might eventually end up with your guys tbh, he’s from NY State and grew up a Yankees fan (though there’s a picture of him wearing a Red Sox shirt on his Instagram)

If I were trading for a Mariners SP and knowing Kirby and Castillo* aren’t going anywhere my priorities in order would be dependent on how much time I had to work with the guys. Here is a guide in case any of these guys get traded.

- Logan Gilbert
Pros: about ten feet tall, huge extension, 4 years of control, good breaking and offspeed mix, has that forever feeling of not being anywhere near his ceiling, healthy

Cons: his boyfriend** Cal Raleigh will come after you if you look at him, his 4-seamer has a BA of .280, from Florida.

-Bryan Woo
Pros: A BABY (he was called up from Double A last year due to Marco Gonzales being injured), great fastball, great ceiling if he can get a curveball or slider working for him. SEVEN years of team control.

Cons: he was on an innings limit last season due to being brought up early, needs some careful handling to stay in the big leagues, only really has two good pitches atm.

- Bryce Miller
Pros: also a BABY (he was called up from double A to fill a hole in the rotation when Robbie Ray got injured), has a great fastball, looks like Randy Johnson if he was hit with a shrinking device.

Cons: he has one pitch not even kidding, also fell apart as the season went on despite strong start due to needing more time to cook in the minors.

*Castillo is on a team friendly contract, if they trade him they might as well just fire everyone in charge of acquiring free agents
** they are the best of friends and lived together all through the minors and Cal made breakfast for him every day for YEARS until Logan got married and moved out

I hate seeing people talk shit about Toronto like they know it. If you live in Toronto you know how special of a place it is and how passionate the people are #GeauxCanada #GeauxBlueJays 🇨🇦🇨🇦

— Kevin Gausman (@KevinGausman) December 11, 2023

yeah all the people talking about toronto like it's some backwater instead of the fourth largest city in north america are making my blood boil. because they're not really talking about "markets" or whatever, they are talking about revenue for the u.s.-based tv networks. fans do not and should not care about that!

George Kirby is a guy who could be the new Maddux, if he's able to keep it together and get more consistency -- his bWAR was a little lower than i thought it might be, 3.9 over 190.2 IP. maybe some park factors there, he was more than a full run better at home vs the road. but he's a good one, they've gotta try to hang onto him.

fangraphs is much kinder to him, as they seem to favor underlying metrics more than on-field results. and he is a fip king, with less than one walk and approximately one homer per nine innings

I would kind of like to see the chaos rotation that features both George “never walks a guy” Kirby and Blake “walks ALL the guys” Snell.

Btw I also like Tarik Skubal, who has been improving for years and who really only needs a decent breaking pitch.

https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/savant-player/tarik-skubal-669373?stats=statcast-r-pitching-mlb

Doesn’t walk a ton of guys, doesn’t give up a ton of home runs. I doubt the Tigers part with him though.

Skubal was a top 3 pitcher in MLB the last month or so of the season.

Yeah! I wasn’t aware of him cos I don’t know many players on the Tigers besides Torkelson, Greene & Carpenter but I was first drawn to Skubal when I read this back about him in August:

Until that pitch on Friday, none of the 130 batters he’d faced this season — lefty or righty — had homered against Skubal, and in his three-plus seasons in the big leagues, only two lefties had ever taken him deep. He’d thrown more than 400 sliders to left-handed hitters in his career and only seven times had those hitters connected for an extra-base hit

i was aware of him on a vv deep level because he helped my fantasy team stay in the running for awhile there. i survived on my weekly skuby snacks.

Nice

i was gonna say he's the kinda pitcher who when you're deep in your fantasy league sorting all SPs by last 2 or 4 weeks of stats you're like "ok skubal is throwing like cy young again, i wish i had drafted him" and then another 4 weeks later he's gone a month w/ a 7.79 ERA and is back on the waiver wire

if you sort the 2023 LHP WAR leaderboard on fangraphs and set the IP total to 70, which allows skubal to qualify you get the following numbers

name/WAR/IP

1. justin steele / 4.9 / 173.1
2. framber valdez / 4.3 / 198.0
3. jordan montgomery / 4.3 / 188.2
4. blake snell / 4.1 / 180.0
5. jesus luzardo / 3.7 / 178.2
6. tarik skubal / 3.3 / 80.1
7. eduardo rodriguez / 3.0 / 152.2

he is the kinda pitcher fangraphs' version of WAR is generally biased towards but still pretty compelling. the list of very good LHP SPs is extremely short

his first few starts were pretty mediocre too, he was getting better as the season went on. it's a pretty small sample size obv but vv promising. he *might* be better than everyone else on that list.

Looking at the list of tigers above… they’ve got so much young talent, I’m kind of frustrated on behalf of their fans that they don’t want to start filling out the gaps with quality free agents. I know they got burned with Baez, but they seemed to give up after that.

They just got Miggy off the books as well

Meanwhile, in Seattle (Mariners twitter undefeated)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GBGOZuVaUAAHPnk?format=jpg&name=small

i think free agency is hard if you’re not a team big enough to just swallow the Ls like nothing happened

the e rod timeline — signed a good pitcher to an under market deal but was only able to do so by giving him an opt out that ended with him leaving for more money to a team in a warmer climate — is prob instructive in terms of the constraints some of these teams face in FA

e-rod didn't want to go to a warmer client when they tried to trade him to the dodgers at the deadline and he invoked his no-trade clause!

*climate, not client duh

ok fine, so just for more money

Great deal by the dbacks, vry strong top 3 in that rotation now

Exclusive @TheAthletic: Shohei Ohtani will defer $68 million per year of his $70 million annual salary over the course of his 10-year, $700 million deal with the Dodgers, allowing the team to keep spending, according to a person briefed on the terms.https://t.co/IsnWlsbTq9

— Fabian Ardaya (@FabianArdaya) December 11, 2023

they're insane if they think they'll be able to get away with this for the life of the contract (and the 10 years after)

Insanely bad for the game.

Loooooool that is ridiculous

Vry interested in what happens post 2033