"No problem with paying for an elite reliever" is not exactly the same as "wise investment."

 

For what it's worth, you also called Bell a "luxury." I'm not going to mince words, but I'm just pointing out that you seem to be rather inconsistent in your philosophy regarding these types of signings.

 

There is nothing "luxurious" about the situation the Bell signing puts the Marlins in. It's a lot of cash to be spent on an aging closer. In fact, it actually complicates things; look at the situation the Marlins are in now. He's getting paid sooooo much and is so high profile that the Marlins have their hands tied when he starts struggling. You can't DFA someone making $9 million a year. Hell, it's even hard to remove him from the closer's role for an extended period of time. If he continues to struggle, their only real option would be to create some kind of fake injury.

 

Also, Bell was our first signing. I'm not saying this for sure because I do not know, but if Bell doesn't sign...perhaps Reyes doesn't sign here. The Bell signing could have been symbolic to some other free agents in getting them here.

 

Reyes probably could've waited things out a bit and gotten more money. Going by the market and advanced metric projections, we basically got Reyes at a bargain.

 

The team had money to spend and they spent it.

 

This is silly.

 

There is no way that you can find supporting evidence to back this up. All of the public info we've received about Reyes indicates that it was "about the money." Samson made some remarks about this and the Mets didn't even offer him a contract. There really wasn't much serious competition for Reyes at all. To say that there would have been a bidding war without the Bell signing is absurd.

 

And the Marlins hardly got a "bargain" on Reyes. You can't expect someone with his injury history to bring in that much more cash. The Marlins basically offered him a bunch of cash, there were no other serious bidders, and he ate it up. That's my take on how the signing went down. Bell had absolutely nothing to do with it.

 

Another reason why people hated the Bell signing was because it was going to prevent us from spending on other players according to some. I thought that was false considering we still went after Pujols, and, more realistically, Cespedes.

 

This doesn't justify overvaluing a player. The Marlins might have made offers to Pujols or Cespedes, but the Bell signing ties up money that could have been spent on additional depth for either 2012 or the following years.

 

You are trying to make it sound like the Bell signing has no financial consequences. That's not the way finances work.

Spending an extra $3.5m a year on Papelbon as of right now would have been a better move.

 

Then again, I'd rather not spend $12.5m a year on a closer if Shek can do a good job for the minimum.

 

If the Marlins were to hand Cishek the closer's role, I'm sure he would do well there. It doesn't matter that other teams do it, paying 9-13 million for something that a Cishek could do probably just as well is pretty ridiculous.

I don't see how calling the Bell signing a "luxury" at the time is wrong. I'm not going to go back to that thread, but I probably said something along the lines of it not being a necessity but rather a luxury.

 

It's not necessary to give a reliever such a contract, but I don't see how it's wrong to call it a luxury when the guy (piece of sh*t month aside) has been a very good reliever, thus improving the team overall. In terms of player performance alone, it projected to be a luxury that would add a couple of wins per season to the team.

 

The Reyes contract absolutely was a bargain. You must have missed what other top free agents got this past offseason.

 

There wasn't much of a market for Prince Fielder either but he waited and got quite the contract. Reyes signed extremely early, which usually isn't the case with top free agents.

 

Reyes doesn't even have to stay fully healthy throughout the contract to make it justifiable according to WAR.

 

The guy was coming off a ~6 WAR season last year, something he's done 3 other times in his career. He's a SS, which is a scarce position in the big leagues. We got him at 17.6 mill per year, which is way better than any contract handed out to a top free agent this offseason. In comparison to the market for top free agents, it absolutely was/is a bargain and saying otherwise is just judging the situation in hindsight right now.

 

 

All you're doing in this thread is taking a lot of my comments out of context.

you think he's going to stop don't you...