I’m not one for hubris and guys have started out great and then gotten hurt or whatever.
Here are what BBRef says are the most similar batters through age 25:
Duke Snider (Hall of Fame)
Grady Sizemore
Del Ennis
David Wright
Manny Ramirez (should be in the HOF)
Carl Yastrzemski (Hall of Fame)
Nick Markakis
Greg Luzinski
Jack Clark
Jim Rice (HOF)
Some of these comparisons are stupid. Greg Luzinski was a huge, strikeout-prone bear of a man with no speed who played defense like he had a grudge against it. (Del Ennis, also a Phillie, was a similar player, though not as extreme.) He wasn’t anything like Mookie Betts. The only mildly concerning examples are Sizemore, a similar player who got hurt in his age 26 year, and Markakis, who just didn’t stay really good. But neither was remotely as good as Betts, not even close. I can’t think of a really good comparison.
But I love Mookie Betts. I despise Boston in every other way but Betts is my favourite ballplayer right now. He’s four foot three and weighs sixty pounds and yet he can hit 30 dingers a year. In an age when guys strike out 200 times a year he doesn’t strike out a hundred. Five tool player. And they drafted him in the fifth round… every team in baseball, even the one he’s on, passed on him over and over and given that he was an excellent MLB player at the age of 21 I just don’t understand why.
I’m also a fan of the game show What’s my Line? A very interesting baseball connection on an episode I just watched today, originally aired on September 28, 1952. The mystery guest was Chuck Dressen, manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Dodgers had already clinched the pennant, they were playing the 7th place Boston Braves. This is one of those games that ended in a tie after 12 innings. The home plate umpire actually left after the 10th inning to catch a train! The Braves also has a train to catch, and since it was a meaningless game, it was a tie. It also turned out to be the very last Boston Braves game.
He was drafted when he was 18. Most players aren’t yet physically mature then, they haven’t faced great competition, and only rarely can you be confident a high school kid will be a great pro when he’s older. Teams would mostly rather use high draft picks on college players with much less uncertainty to them.
Mookie was still skinny when he came up as a 2B, and got moved around everywhere until the team told him he was an RF for better or worse. His power came when he muscled up to play the position, at the cost of some of his speed and reflexes.
Is it really such a big problem? There are a couple of big names like Machado, Harper, Kimbrel and Keuchel, but beyond that it seems like less of a logjam than last year. There are a lot of free agents who are probably finished, like Hanley Ramirez, Chase Headley, Jose Bautista et al… The rest are mostly 30+ years old, hoping for multi-year deals but probably not getting them, with good reason. How big is the market for Adam Jones? Or Evan Gattis? Just a bunch of 1 WAR guys, at best.
I’ve seen some of the complaints from Verlander and others, but what would they strike over? I think Harper, Machado and the hundred or however many other free agents are unsigned would still be in this position even if the luxury tax didn’t exist. I really don’t think it’s “collusion” because I guarantee if a team thought Harper was worth his asking price, they’d pay it.
In this market, even if there’s no collusion, I’m not at all sure I’d jump at the chance to give Harper (say) $300 million even if I thought he was worth it. Why? Because with teams dragging their feet and coming up with excuses not to pay big bucks for free agents, I’d think there’s a chance I can get him for $250 million, maybe even $225 mil. Save the rest for other free agents, scuse me, building the farm system, scuse me, for a rainy day.
And even if there’s two teams out there who think he’s worth $300 million, they might both be thinking the same thing, without having officially colluded. I wait, you wait, we each see if he drops his price, if he drops his price maybe we wait and see if he drops it a little more… Sort of a reverse auction. How low will it go before someone finally pulls the trigger?
Five or ten years ago, I would have agreed that some team would’ve signed him for what they thought he was worth. Today, I’m not so sure.
I’m happy with the Yanks buying out all of Severino’s arb years + and option year @15m. Looks like a win for both sides. I see Philly did basically the same thing for Aaron Nola.
Look guys…this is how we fix the 'is there collusion" conundrum.
Would you hire Machado or Harper for your personal team at 10/300? For the Red Sox?? NO. I even balked at the idea of signing Harper at 1/40 (The Section 10 guys talked themselves into that crazy nugget). Either of those guys prevents signing a host of my own players down the line and because of the soft cap would cost a lot more than 10/300.
Now there are a ton of teams who cant afford them*, there are others who can but makes no sense because they are rebuilding and there are maybe one or two who dont particularly have a spot open or just arnt getting enough of an upgrade for the price (Like say The Yanks who could still get one of them regardless) So who does that leave? And as said above, why hire now when the price will go down? Or wait until one gets grabbed and grab the next?
*Ok…ALL teams can afford them, but there are teams who have created a narrative that they are poor.
If Betts and Trout were the two 26 year-olds on the market, they would both have signed 10+ year deals by Christmas. Machado has maturity issues and Harper is inconsistent. Teams are right to be wary.
I haven’t heard boo about Craig Kimbrel this offseason. Does he have a market at all? Keuchel too.
They both went into free agency with unrealistic ideas about their true market value, and no offers have come close. Certainly the usual teams, including their current ones, have offers on the table, although they’ve played coy about it (the Red Sox have been publicly saying how they don’t need Kimbrel and will are content to find a new, cheap closer in-house :rolleyes::rolleyes: ). Probably now that camp has started, those players are on the verge of capitulating and signing, just like J.D. Martinez did last year.
There’s a lot of scuttlebutt that Harper and the Phillies are about to ink a deal, so I guess we’ll soon find out just how much a guy can get paid to not hit the ball the other way.
The strike impitus is pretty straightforward. Players have agreed to all sorts of things that limit their wages (draft, luxury tax, player control, arbitration, revenue sharing etc.) They do this, under the theory that these policies are good for the game, which will increase earnings for the owners and players over time. This worked for a while, but lately owners have pocketed all of this increase in revenue and players salaries are flat or down. So players, understandably, aren’t willing to continue to make all of those concessions without changes.
Do you think those teams would be dragging their feet, looking for a bargain if we were talking about Mike Trout? Or Mookie Betts? I think either of those guys would have been signed for $300M by now.
The Harper signing, or the Machado signing, makes all the other big dominoes fall, too. For all of Philly’s big talk, they aren’t going to be able to afford more than one of Harper/Machado/Keuchel/Kimbrel, not long-term. There are contracts, already wealthy beyond imagining, waiting for all of them somewhere.
Just based on rumors and reading the coyness of public statements, the best bets might appear to be Harper-Nats, Machado-White Sox, Keuchel-Phils, Kimbrel-Red Sox. But we’ll know in just a few weeks at most.
Right, but what would their demands be? Eliminate the luxury tax and revenue sharing? So many teams are far below the luxury tax threshold that I don’t think it’s a factor for unsigned free agents.
