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The benefit of clarity


Frobby

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Well, I will. Anyone giving Brian Roberts any where near $10 million dollars next year from this organization should be shot.

Not one dollar over $3 million.

Even at a reasonable price, I'm not really sure I want him back. Being 36 and oft-injured and basically a replacement player anyway, other than a penchant for good at-bats, I don't know why you wouldn't just roll the dice on someone else.

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Even at a reasonable price, I'm not really sure I want him back. Being 36 and oft-injured and basically a replacement player anyway, other than a penchant for good at-bats, I don't know why you wouldn't just roll the dice on someone else.

Exactly, time to move on.

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Even at a reasonable price, I'm not really sure I want him back. Being 36 and oft-injured and basically a replacement player anyway, other than a penchant for good at-bats, I don't know why you wouldn't just roll the dice on someone else.

If we don't bring him back and Flaherty starts we'll need a RH 2B. Not sure I like the idea of using Schoop as a non every day player. If he's ready he needs to play every day.

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I see Flaherty/Schoop platoon possible Roberts resigns for 1 year < 10 million. McLouth resigns for 2-3 year deal worth 3-4 per year. Means we need RH OF and a real DH. Along with #5 starter and some arms in the BP.

McLouth has cooled down after a hot first couple of months. His OPS+ is at 101 and I don't see anything particularly exciting about his defense. He is currently about a 2 win player and a lot of that comes from his stolen bases at the start of the season.

No way would I give him three years and if I could find something enticing out there I can see him not coming back at all.

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McLouth has cooled down after a hot first couple of months. His OPS+ is at 101 and I don't see anything particularly exciting about his defense. He is currently about a 2 win player and a lot of that comes from his stolen bases at the start of the season.

No way would I give him three years and if I could find something enticing out there I can see him not coming back at all.

Agree. He'll expect a raise but I'm not sure we should give it to him for the years it will require.

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McLouth has cooled down after a hot first couple of months. His OPS+ is at 101 and I don't see anything particularly exciting about his defense. He is currently about a 2 win player and a lot of that comes from his stolen bases at the start of the season.

No way would I give him three years and if I could find something enticing out there I can see him not coming back at all.

The FA market isn't big on corner OFers. Unless you got money to spend. Pence, Choo, Cruz, Ellsbury, Beltran, Kubel, Morse, Chris Young, Hart or Granderson.

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If we're going to miss the playoffs, I'd almost rather be an 85 win team than an 89 win team. It's pretty obvious that the team needs to make some upgrades to be a true World Series contender, and we can't delude ourselves into thinking that if Jim Johnson had only had a better year, we might have gone a long way this year.

I understand the sentiment. But I always question the notion that we fans can see so obviously that improvements need to be made, yet we are somehow concerned that unless they get hit over the head with it, professionals whose job it is to put a team on the field will somehow not realize it. I realize we have some knowledgable fans on this board, but I still don't think that when push comes to shove, there are many, if ANY, on here who would be better at doing all the actual work required to run an organization and build a team than the majority of people who actually make a career out of it.

I think when we fans see an offseason like last year, where we didn't actually do a lot to improve the team, we just kind of sit there and think "well, the team needed improving, most of us thought so, but Duquette wasn't smart enough to see that like we were so he just stood pat".

More likely the truth is he investigated every avenue to improve the team, weighed it agains this budgetary constraints and the balance between improving the team for one year and the strength of the organization as a whole, and made the best moves he could.

It's really easy now to say "I wanted us to sign Francisco Liriano" and obviously, such a move would probably have had a big effect on this team. But there were a dozen such moves we MIGHT have made, almost all of which were advocated by some people on here. And a bunch of them would have been horrible moves (Josh Hamilton, anyone?). It's very easy after teh fact to cherry pick the ones that worked, and say that a smart GM would have done exactly those moves, and would have avoided all the ones that didn't work out.

I just find the notion that one of us, as much as we follow, study, and love baseball, can feel that something is really obvious to us, but that if it isn't driven home by some extraordinary turn of events, it will completely escape the notice of someone who makes a living as a GM... to be kind of silly.

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