Going back a bit to the K-Rod trade, and contract incentives in general: Obviously franchises will often have good reason to want to tinker with an athlete’s playing time to see that an incentive-based bonus is not reached, but you rarely hear about it being an issue. The possibility of a grievance being filed with the union was mentioned upthread, but is there anything *concrete *that would stop (for instance) the Mets from keeping Rodriguez and just saying, “Gee, we think that we need to see if Bobby Parnell can handle the closer’s role, so Rodriguez is going to be his setup man for the rest of the year”? Or is it just a matter of reputation, i.e. of a team being forced in the future to guarantee portions of contracts that could have been incentive-based?
The grievance and bad publicity, I guess. In any case Rodriguez and the Brewers renegotiated his contract so the 55-game clause no longer exists. The contract now has a mutual option year, and everybody knows there is absolutely no way the Brewers will pay him $17.5 million next year. The buyout went up slightly- to $4 million from $3.5 million, I think. So he got traded and got a little bit of extra money, and if the Brewers need him as a closer, it won’t cost them anything else. He set up a win last night with Axford closing.
I think you’d see a lot fewer players, especially those represented by the agent of (in this example) Francisco Rodriguez, signing with that team, or, at the very least, to incentive-laden contracts if the team never pays out any of them.
That’s not different; that’s just wrong.
People keep talking about how Matt Kemp is a poor fielder, and maybe he isn’t fantastic I don’t know*. But sometimes he makes catches like this which are almost totally meaningless but still fun to watch.
*I am of the opinion that the current defensive stat metrics are not being drawn from good enough quality data for them to be anything more than vaguely useful.
He made a hell of a catch in last night’s game, too. This is the first I’m hearing of him being considered a poor fielder.
Maybe it’s just coming from Keith Law. I listen to the ESPN baseball today podcast and he is on it and every time Kemp gets brought up he mentions how he isn’t a good enough fielder to play center.
Here’s last night’s catch, by the way.
Stupid poopy-pants Reds. Football can’t get here fast enough. I can’t root for a loser franchise like the Reds anymore. I need me some Bengals championship football to root for.
I didn’t check my link before I posted but that was what I was trying to link to. Clearly I didn’t (the one I liked to was a great catch too). I wonder what happened.
Not much awesome about the Mariners right now, except for Eric Wedge’s 'stache.
Rockies just beat the Braves 3-2 with a walkoff single by Carlos Gonzalez, but the real story tomorrow is going to be the full-frontal nudity by Raphael Betencourt in the locker room show after the game.
They were interviewing Mark Ellis who is two lockers down from Betencourt, and you could see Betencourt looking over to the camera as he took off his shirt. He apparently thought he was out of camera range and pulled down his pants, revealing everything. The cameraman immediately tightened the shot on Ellis’s face.
Kemp is rated by some analytical methods as a mediocre center fielder. I haven’t seen him play, I am skeptical of WAR’s reliability with individual fielders, and they don’t say he’s THAT bad, but it’s also true that
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Kemp was not brought up as a center fielder and is playing it out of necessity, and
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Highlight reel catches don’t tell you, really, how good an outfielder is, and
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Frankly, if he’s not quite Devon White, who cares? He’s not terrible and he can rip it.
In my perfect world Kemp would be playing in Right, Ethier Left, and Tony Gwyn Jr in Center. Well, not a perfect world, but a perfect world that leaves me dealing with the mess of players that are currently on the team. Right now I am hoping that they trade Ethier, Loney, Furcal and Uribe (probably Carrol and Miles too while they still have some value) and bring up some of the kids to see what the team really has to work with in the youth department.
Tigers traded for Wilson Betemit . They sent Inge down. Inge is a strikeout machine hitting under .170. He plays good defense but he has hurt them badly on offense.
The Blue Jays had a first today, playing a game in summer with the roof closed in order to keep out the heat. Downtown it was approaching 50c/120F withthe humidex, so it was probably a smart move. Having been outside today I can attest to you that it would have been exceptionally unpleasant for the fans, if not dangerous.
It was also Seattle’s 12th straight loss.
In the 9 games preceding their series the Mariners had scored a grand total of 11 runs in all those games. Then in Toronto they scored 16 runs in 3 games, and still lost every game.
This is their second worse losing streak. 14 is their franchise record from 1992. Their hitting hasn’t gotten worse, but their pitching got tired from having to be perfect to win. They’ve fallen off a cliff.
Their hitting really couldn’t possibly get worse from what it was in 2010. The 2010 Mariners was a mind-bogglingly bad-hitting team. To field a worse hitting team you’d almost have to do it on purpose. They were about as bad as a team has ever been in the modern era when it comes to scoring runs.
The 2011 squad is pretty awful, though. They have scored just 75.3% of the runs of the average AL Team (that average includes the Mariners themselves.) Maybe that doesn’t sound bad - I’m struck by how it doesn’t look that bad - but it’s really, really bad. That is a worse percentage than the 1962 Mets. In the last few decades I believe only the 2010 Mariners and the 2003 Tigers were worse, at least in the AL.
Granted, Safeco is a pitcher’s park, but they are one bad offense. And what’s scary is Ichiro isn’t having a good season… what if he’s over the hill?
Besides Dustin Ackley, I don’t see any hope for the M’s offense in the future. I’m afraid they are going to have to trade Felix or Pineda. People forget because he’s been around awhile already and won the Cy last year, but King Felix is only 25. They keep drafting pitchers with their high draft picks (except for Ackley.) It’s only going to get worse before it gets better.
Well, it looks like the Dodgers will have to get their loan from MLB afterall. Here’s hoping this gets us one step closer to a change in ownership.