Hmm. Tonight’s Indians/Yankees game was postponed. I have a random day off tomorrow, and they’ve now turned tomorrow into a true double header, something I’ve never seen. It’s a three-hour train ride and then a subway ride from here to the Bronx.
Yeah, I think I just figured out what I’m doing with my day.
Wow, never went to a true double header before. I use to go to them about once a year when I was young. Of course back then the games averaged closer to 2.5 hrs each with about 20 minutes in between or in other words the same length as a modern Yankees vs Orioles game. 
Giancarlo Stanton is up to 51 homers with September plus to go. I’d bet no on 73, but yes on 62; how about you?
Stanton has hit what, 30 homers in his last 59 games? Hell, why not?
Of course, the Marlins are talking about trading him. They actually put him on waivers. If you’re going to trade away your 27-year-old franchise player, someone for whom you will never get an equal return, I think it fair to say you are publically stating “we have no plans to ever be a good team and are just going to sponge off revenue sharing.”
The Marlins are changing owners, though. Maybe Derek Jeter will want to win more than Jeffrey Loria.
According to a USA Today article, that makes it MORE likely they will trade Jeter. The reasoning is this; Marlins fans would be furiouos now if Stanton was traded. But if Jeter is the owner who trades him, well, Derek Jeter is a great guy, so that’s okay. Really, I’m not making that up:
And it’s not just USA Today:
I find this reasoning preposterous. Fans don’t care who the team’s owners are unless the owners piss them off, and if they trade Stanton, the fans will be pissed off. I don’t care if the Marlins are owned by Jesus Christ; trading Stanton after a 60-homer MVP season will look unbelievably bad. You might get away with this in a market that has shown it knows what it’s doing; the Cardinals let Albert Pujols walk, and Cardinals fans accepted that because they were fans of a team that had shown it made hard decisions for good reasons. But Marlins fans are used to ownership screwing them, over and over and over, and if the Jeter group deals Stanton do you think they’ll be like “Oh, this is okay, it’s Derek Jeter!” No, what they will think is “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
I realize the team is in debt, but at the same time I am struggling to understand how trading Stanton is a solution to that debt. If you buy a hotel in debt, the solution to your new enterprise’s fiscal problems is not to sell all the beds; you have to find a solution that keeps paying customers walking in the door. At the risk of pointing out the obvious here, the primary problem the Miami Marlins face, fiscally speaking, is that not enough people are buying Marlins tickets. There is nothing else wrong:
(NOTE: I asusme the maret is lage. Florida is weird. Florida has two major league teams, and right now there are NINE teams - the Red Sox, Angels, Rockies, Cubs, Blue Jays, Yankees, Giants, Dodgers and Cardinals - that draw more fans than the two Florida teams combined.)
This “Stanton takes up X percent of the payroll” thing is a red herring. They do not have a high payroll; if Stanton is a large portion of that, I don’t see why that is either a problem or, for that matter, even unusual. It is logical, and consistent with many other teams, that one player be a large part of the payroll. Stanton is the best player on the team, and is an irreplaceably valuable asset. Of course he costs a lot of money. If you’re going to have a good team, likely SOMEONE on your team will be pretty expensive. Teams have won on the cheap before, but the Marlins are already on the cheap.
The thing you have to fix in Miami is to make people want to pay to see the Marlins. Trading STanton won’t do that. Now, I suppose you can argue that Miami could get a huge return on him and be a great team in 2020. Okay, but
This isn’t a player on the verge of decline, like Albert Pujols was. He’s only 27.
You will not get an equal return for him. It’s certainly very unlikely. His contract will allow a suitor to lower their offer. You can’t get an All-Star in return for him - no one’s trading you Mike Trout or Jose Altuve for Stanton.
Prospects are just dreams. That could blow up in your face, and
The Marlins are not a team that needs blowing up; the characteristics of such a team are high payroll, old players, and poor results (the Blue Jays are a classic example.) They are, in fact, a young team, and they’re a decent team that might be a lot better in 2017. Look up and down that lineup; there’s a lot of guys who can play baseball and are in their 20s. No one listed as a regular position player is older than 29, and a lot of these dudes are really good.
If the Marlins trade Stanton what are the odds they can be a better team in 2018 without doing something weird and trading/signing an equally expensive right fielder? As near as I can tell, zero. 2019? Zero. And with their lineup, 2018 and 2019 are the years they should be targeting.
You’re asking the guy who also killed the Expos to be reasonable and responsible. Yeah, um, no.
Well, to be fair, Jeter has a terrible WAR this year, and he still has awful footwork at shortstop.
Orioles won their sixth in a row last night, beating the Mariners 4-0 on the strength of four solo homers and a 1-hit, complete-game shutout by Dylan Bundy. I watched the game, and Bundy looked pretty much unhittable all night. The one hit he conceded was a bunt base hit down the third base line. It was impressive stuff.
Heck, half those teams (Sox, Yankees, Blue Jays, Cubs) may draw better in Florida than the home teams. Lots of transplants down there.
I’ve been to two traditional doubleheaders, both in awful weather with awful teams. There was a late season doubleheader with the Texas Rangers around 2006 or so. The other was the 1998 Florida Marlins team after the fire sale, they had some end of season games rescheduled due to a storm threat, they had super cheap tickets for decent seats for a doubleheader and they also gave you a voucher for a free ticket to the following season.
Neither Miami nor Dallas are ideal places to watch afternoon doubleheaders in September. I remember at the Marlins games they at least were selling bottled waters for about $1, certainly not at the usual exorbitant stadium prices
Hall of Fame Question: Griffey missed unanimous by 3 votes. Did we ever hear the reason that 3 left Griffey off the ballot?
If Griffey had 3 detractors, then does Jeter have any chance of getting a unanimous? I love Jeter but he is not really close to the player that Griffey was but he was despite this the face of Baseball for much of his career.
Since there are some writers who want to make it all about themselves, rather that the ballplayers, there will always be a blank ballot jerk or someone who deliberately leaves someone off.
Nationals are 13-6 since Harper went down with Strasburg, Scherzer, Werth, and Turner out for part or most of the stretch. They have at least a .500 record against every team with a winning record, including a series win against the Dodgers in LA. Yeah, they may fold again in October. They’ve been fun to watch, though.
Derek Jeter killed the Expos? That’s the owner everyone is saying will sign off on a Stanton trade.
I’ve decided that double headers are really fun when your team wins both games. GO TRIBE!
I’m going to regret this trip in the morning, though.
Backstory on why you root for the tribe?
I thought when the year started that the Yankees were a year away. They fooled me for a bit, but now I think I was right. The young stars will make a formidable lineup- Sanchez, Bird, Castro, Gregorius, Judge, and Clint Frazier. Of the above, I see the biggest potential in Frazier. Watch him bat, his bat speed is just off the charts. Judge needs to learn how to deal with the adjustments that pitchers have made against him, he will be a very good player though perhaps not the megastar he seemed in the first half. What they need to do is solidify the rotation and perhaps trade one of their excess closers for a reliable starter.
Maybe even two years away. I’ll be happy building a rotation around Tanaka (probably won’t opt out), Severino and Gray. Perhaps add Darvish, or in my dreams, Otani. I’d be willing to part with Chapman or Robertson (last year of contract in 2018) but the former will be impossible to move.
As for the offense, hopefully Bird will remain healthy, get Clint Frazier and Gleyber Torres into the mix, get another year of seasoning for the young players, and 2019 looks pretty good.
A lot of fans want to go for Machado or Harper, but if Judge is somewhere in between the first and second half versions we’ve seen this year, and Torres is the real deal, it seems unnecessary and payroll limiting.
I never really felt the Yanks were a Champion team this year but from the beginning I thought they had a good chance at a wildcard. Just a month ago they did look like they could take the division though from the underperforming Red Sox. Now I’m not feeling too good about those chances.