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bmg42

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Everything posted by bmg42

  1. Buster had some great points, by which I mean he agreed with me. At this point there's only two reasons to keep Yelich and Realmuto - 1) they're still pretty cheap and very good, and 2) if they trade them they'll win about 55 this year and draw even fewer people than last year, fewer than any team since Loria's Expos in 2001. Buster points out that the team's actions may push attendance that way anyway, and the only way to save the franchise might be to have a "near-perfect, cost-efficient rebuild." But Buster basically said what I did a few days ago: "The new ownership group had one chance to make a first impression, one chance to distinguish itself from the distrusted regimes of the past. That has been squandered, and mortal damage may have been done to the market."
  2. Of course selling one ticket might be difficult this year...
  3. Yes, but lying on that type of document can have some pretty dire consequences. And when you add to that is has been reported that there will be no cash calls, it's clear that financial concerns are the priority.
  4. The problem is merely tanking 2018 won't solve anything. Building the Astros way lost 416 games in 4 years, and required drafting both very high and well for several years and spending money in the international market. So sure, let's build the Astros way and we'll see in 2023 if things start to get better. Or, if you like, we can build the Cubs way, which included 3 bad years - though not nearly as bad as the Astros, eating tens of millions of dollars in dead weight / traded players and, once things got better, raising the salary by 60 million from '15 to '16.
  5. 1) Got my info from baseball reference. I don't want to get rid of Dee, but I figure that the return of Prado would help defray the loss of Gordon. 2) Part of the problem, of course, is the dead money on Chen, Tazawa, Ziegler, and Volquez. Maybe the Marlins don't have the resources of the big clubs, which can eat bad contracts, but in the long run a 30 million dollar short-term loss means nothing when you take club appreciation into account. 3) Stanton, Ozuna, and Realmuto had the best years of their careers because they are now in their peak performance years of 26-30. Bill James found that for a majority of players the peak is 27. 2018 will be the 27-year-old season for Realmuto and Ozuna, while Stanton just had his. 4) Let's do a hypothetical. You're a FA starting pitcher. You look at the Marlins roster from 2017 and see one of the two-best hitting teams in the NL but no pitching. You see a park that's very friendly to pitchers - your 3.8 ERA elsewhere could be a 3.2 ERA here, especially if you're a fly ball pitcher. You see Derek Jeter running the club, after Jeter has announced that he's not concerned about short-term losses and wants to win right away in an attempt to generate fan, corporate and TV interest. You see a state with no state income tax, which is even a bigger deal now that the new GOP tax bill became law. So why not come here? 5) Now contrast that with what Jeter has actually done. Once he decides to increase the payroll, some time in the late 2030s, why would any FA want to come here? Still no fan support. There's no history of keeping players, so there's no reason to think your 5-year contract will be spent in Miami if things don't work out. And Project Wolverine makes it clear that financial considerations are much more important than baseball considerations. 6) For years and years the club argued that the team could be competitive if only South Florida built the Marlins a brand new ballpark. That park has been built, yet there's no reason to believe that this club under Jeter/Sherman will ever raise the payroll to even the league median, which last year was 135 million.
  6. Their projected attendance increase in 2 years is only 15 million more than this year. That buys, what, one decent (not all-star) pitcher? Baseball revenue is not tremendously affected by attendance. It’s the bad tv contract and the lack of a name on the building. To reiterate, the Marlins won 77 games last year with a negative WAR for the pitching staff. With a pitching staff like the Braves had hast year - not exactly world beaters - they would have been in the playoff hunt. There’s nobody in the entire organization now - nobody - who projects to be an MVP-caliber player down the line. They just traded two of them for pitchers who nobody thinks can be aces and players nobody thinks will ever hit enough to be better than Sierra, whose ceiling seems to be Juan Pierre. The guys who will be the stars of the next Marlins playoff team are not in the organization right now, and won’t be ready until about 2022-3.
  7. Rogue: "When they come out... does it hurt?" Wolverine Marlins fans: "Every time"
  8. Gotta agree with cYoung mostly. I watched the Braves every day during years of summer vacations with my grandparents (approx. '78-'85). Braves got to ATL in '69, and they won their division that year. The early 80's teams were pretty good- they made the playoffs in '82 and came close in '83. After a couple of boneheaded moves, they fell apart. They had 6 years in the wilderness (pretty much the 80s version of "full Astros"), but they put together a pitching staff via the farm (Glavine) and trade (Smoltz) and in '91 they were suddenly a perennial playoff team. However, it's also true that Braves attendance has been awful unless they were winning. It only seems good because they won for a very long time. Before last year, they were 11th, 13th and 12th in the league in attendance. Last year, in a brand new park, they were all the way up to 8th. Very similar to us, and they don't have Jeffrey Loria as an owner. We don't anymore either, though Sherman/Jeter haven't been an improvement just yet...
  9. I’m not sure what’s the best part of Project Wolverine. Is it the part where they say they’re going to make 68 million at a 90 million payroll - which means that they could have kept everyone except Dee, added a pitcher or two and still made money? Or is it that they anticipated trading off at least half the team and still increasing attendance? Maybe they called it Project Wolverine because the idea is to kill all SoFla business and move the team to Ann Arbor...
  10. Yes, but getting rid of Loria was supposed to fix this, not make it worse.
  11. You can't know that. A lot of people hated Loria/Samson enough that they swore off the Marilns. Jeter could have come in and taken steps to bring people to the park. He could have said, "Things are going to be different now. We're not in it for the money - we want to win as soon as possible." And they could have tried to piece together a pitching staff to go with the hitters they had. There are enough baseball fans here to fill the stadium. The team has chosen a different path, and the park will be a ghost town most nights for a few years if not longer.
  12. The worst part of the Stanton deal is that at this point they're going to piss people off either way. If Castro leaves, some people will say "See, they're trying to lose 110 next year." If he stays, others will say about what El Penguino said. You can't please everyone, but so far Jeter is pleasing nobody.
  13. Well, no. First of all, the Rays aren't trading a 27-year-old MVP or a 26-year-old All-Star. They're trading a 32-year-old with an OPS of .737. Yeah, he's a gold-glove fielder. But at 13 million, he's really not worth it. Second, they've had 4-straight losing seasons, but two of them were 80-82, and anyway they had a decent run before that. They never really did a rebuild - they went from losing 90+ a year to a contender. They've traded a huge contract here and there (most notably David Price), but they've said that they're not necessarily trading Archer. Ken Rosenthal said they now have 7 of the top 100 prospects, and they're not looking at a 5-year rebuild. But most of all, they had a sustained run of good to very good baseball in recent memory, so their front office has some credibility.
  14. The Rays have also been in the playoffs 4 times in the last 10 years
  15. Actually I think Manfred's point was the salary dump is strategic, and even if he knew about it - which he says he doesn't - he wouldn't have a problem with it because everybody's doing it these days. He wasn't saying that the Sherman/Jeter group doesn't have the money to go forward - just that this is the way they want to do things. Not endorsing this point, just saying that this is his (BS) position.
  16. Reminder that Turner came to us as the main piece of a salary dump - Aníbal Sanchez and Omar Infante to the Tigers. Of course, Aníbal came here in the Beckett/Lowell salary dump. As Elton John would say, it’s the circle of life
  17. Justin Bour and his .920 OPS missed a month and a half.
  18. Sorry guys - Jeter just said he trusts Hill. So much for your optimism...
  19. 1) What kind of TV deal are they going to get if they lose 210 games the next two years and nobody is watching the next two years? 2) If we assume the absolute worst, and assume Loria lost $50 million a year for every year he owned the Marlins, and also assume he took no salary and made no money from side deals, he still made a profit of $361.5 million on an investment of... nothing -- the 38.5 million difference between the sale prices of the Expos and Marlins was fronted as an interest-free loan. Baseball teams appreciate in price significantly over time (158.5 million to 1.2 billion in 16 years isn't a bad appreciation rate), and will continue to do so as long as baseball is a professional sport that people care about. If Mr. R2SPECT and Sherman wanted to, they could have absorbed a one-year loss in order to prevent the foreseeable loss of the benefit of the doubt from most of the fan base and players. It would have been very easy to keep the team together, pick up a couple of pitchers, and try it out for a few months. In the long run, those few months won't mean a whole lot for a baseball franchise. And of course there would have been a much better chance for bidding wars on everybody in July. But noooooo... they had to take what should have been one of the greatest events in the history of the club - Loria's exit - and instead make it one of the worst. And let's look at Loria's fire-sale record. At least when they dumped Cabrera they got back two guys who had enough raw talent that 10 years later they're still playing in the majors in Cameron Maybin and Andrew Miller (two top-10 Baseball America prospects). At least when they dumped Beckett and Lowell they got back Hanley Ramirez and Anibal Sanchez (two top-40 Baseball America prospects) - both of whom are still playing 12 years later. At least when they made the dump trade with the Blue Jays they got back 7 guys who are currently in the majors for 3 guys who aren't in baseball now and 2 utility guys who had negative WAR last year (Reyes and Bonifacio). Sandy Alcantara would kill to have Anibal's career - including an appearance in the World Series. Magneuris Sierra would kill to have Maybin's career - and his World Series ring. You can talk all you want about how prospect ratings are over-rated. For me, between the trades, the firing of Waltz and the way they handled Conine et. al., this team is not getting another penny from me until they start being better owners than Jeffrey Loria. R2SPECT is earned, and they don't have mine right now.
  20. Trouble is the FO hasn't shown anyone respect yet.
  21. I was invited. But there’s no chance I could get down to the park at 6 on a Tuesday. Heck, I’m usually rushing - and failing - to get there by 7:10 most Tuesdays. And I guarantee you i’m NOT a yes man - Jeter’s already lost me as a customer for next year (was a half-season ticket holder). John Henry’s town hall for season ticket holders was held during Fan Fest on a weekend.
  22. As Rule 5 guys Elieser Hernandez and Brett Graves will be on the 25-man roster...
  23. I've been a fan since the beginning. November/December 2001 was the worst, because we weren't sure if we were still going to have a team in 2002. We didn't get contracted or relocated - instead we got Loria. Even after the 2012 purge, 2013 Opening Day wasn't so bad because there was this kid in the minors named Fernandez who was pretty exciting and we had a 23-year-old in RF who just put up a .969 OPS with 37 HR in 123 games. This is a lot worse - it's going to take years before this is better. Yelich is a pretty good, but even if he stays there's no way he's the best player on a contending team. There's nobody in our minor league system, including the guys we just got in the purge, who screams out "Major League All-Star". The Miggy/D-Train didn't work for us, but Maybin and Miller were 2 of MLB's top prospects at the time and are both still playing 10 years later.
  24. If Jose doesn't die there's no way they decide last year that the way to win is to go reliever-intensive. So probably no Tazawa and no Ziegler. I'm going to assume that they still buy Volquez as the #2. (Who knows, maybe they decide that they don't need to trade Castillo for Strailly!) Then maybe they don't start 14-27. If you consider that our replacement pitchers were beyond awful for most of the year, then Jose's baseline 4-5 WAR season and the extra 6-8 wins would have kept us pretty close to the playoffs most of the year. Then we're talking right now (well, a couple of weeks ago) about an 81-83 win team that needs a little bit more to get there, not a 77-win team that needs to be blown up.
  25. Frisaro told me on twitter yesterday that losing 105 games a year for the next few years world t be the worst thing in the world. Anybody here agree with that?
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