Chavez Ravine

I suspect if you are a promising 14 year old, and you live in a U.S. territory, there is incentive to make your residence in a place like the DR. You need the means, of course,....or at least a cousin who lives in Santo Domingo. It is like getting sent off to a British boarding school.

If the Astros don’t make the playoffs, do they sell high on Altuve?

20M, smillion. Folks are fretting over the money we shedded instead of prospects in the Gausman deal. We may have stumbled into a "moneyed interest" power play that even we cant screw up. Enjoy it ?

He might be worth far more than that draft pick come next July.

I thought we only signed broken, washed up free agent pitchers?

I am calling it now. Chris Davis carries us to the World Series in 2022.

I obviously haven't re-read most of this thread, but I (of course ?) take its existence as another piece of evidence for my entrenched, intractable belief that we need real life umps calling balls and strikes. When the robo umps come, I am sure a thread similar to this will still get started. The main themes of the thread will be: 1) MLB has tweaked the AI in the system to favor the Yankees. 2) The Robo Ump industrial complex has a vested interest in calling the high strike. 3) Pitchers with a certain spin rate get systematically discriminated against by the software. I would just rather have similarly unproductive debates about real people, not a construct of our hopes and dreams for a perfect world.

Gausman was good before he left.

I think the last great under-exploited inefficiency in baseball is figuring out exactly when Steve Pearce is going to get hot.

I think the hard signing cap has only exacerbated the Gladwellian Experiment nature of MLB’s international free agent system. Invest money in teaching very young kids to play baseball. Along the way also invest money in their coaches, counselors, advisors, and mentors. All so that you get the inside track on spending a few hundred thousand to a couple of million on a 16 year old kid. I vaguely wonder what would happen if you just lurked in the weeds, scrounged the internet, spent Chris Davis’ salary every year on 10K fliers, and jumped on the odd Victor Victor Mesa opportunity once and a while.

I have been thinking over the last couple of weeks, with not much deep reasoning of course, that both Dan and Buck stay on...in slightly modified roles. Brady too. None of them are as senile as Thrift was yet. Plus they are "mature" so they don't need a sabbatical to come back from to reaffirm how awesome they are, or another team they can do a rescue 911 on. They have become a vaguely functional/dysfunctional family. Onward!

I can see it now. One gloomy January night, Peter, on his sick bed, reveals to his sons the existence of pirate treasure that he knows the whereabouts to. The map, written in an obscure Karpathos Greek dialect, ambiguously shows the buried booty to be someplace in the suburbs of San Pedro de Macorís, the Dominican Republic. The brothers give Brady Anderson the mission of retrieving the booty and also establishing a bobble head and snow globe manufacturing job training center as a good will gesture.

What is the value of this return in units of Houston Astros tanking years?

Plus he was nearly done in 2010 and then in 2013. He don't mind.

I wonder what the return would have been if we had traded Manny with more months of control left? The current vibe seems very youth/cost controlled oriented. There has to be diminishing returns in how much potential cost controlled talent you can extract in exchange for existing cost controlled mega talent. I suspect we could have gotten a "little" more, but could we have gotten earth shatteringly more?

I thought those things shrank your nads not made them more prolific?

I think the Davis contract resulted from Peter realizing that he couldn't afford Manny.

That Kevin Abel kid looks pretty good too.

He had another grinder at bat in the first inning and came around to score, now a walk in the third so far.

I am far from a doctor, but "shoulder instability" sounds like a euphemism for something not at all conducive to being a MLB pitcher.

I wish!

I always imagined interviews in the Warehouse went something like Sylvia Plath's experience First, are you our sort of a person? Do you wear A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch, A brace or a hook, Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch, Stitches to show something's missing? No, no? Then How can we give you a thing? Stop crying. Open your hand. Empty? Empty. Here is a hand ....