Seriously, who cares what Rob Neyer thinks. He'll pick the Indians and Mets or Dodgers and he'll be wrong again. My hatred for pre-season expert predictions (including those of the sabrmetric variety) exceeds my hatred for Adam Eaton, Jose Mesa, Jose Reyes, and Oliver Perez combined.

quit sucking up to Trent. His ego is already too big

FTN wrote:quit sucking up to Trent. His ego is already too big

I'm just a sheep in the flock of Mike Crain: Karatist Preacher

Warszawa wrote:

FTN wrote:

But it's not the contract per se that concerns me. What concerns me is that the Phillies, having won a World Series, seem to have very little interest in improving. Granted, they're not likely to win another World Series no matter what they do. But don't you have to at least try?

- Neyer's blog

Yeah, the Phillies are probably one step up from the Nationals jerkoff. No chance at winning the World Series. WTF??? So Mr baseball genius, who do you think is so much better in the NL? Oh wait, THE METS?? I'm sure you'll pick them to win the division again.... but that is not likely either

I don't think that's what he's saying with this statement. I think he's saying that no matter what the Phillies do, or any team does, no team is considered "likely" to win a World Series before a season starts. There are too many teams. The Phillies could have gone out and gotten Manny Ramirez to replace Pat Burrell and CC Sabathia to replace Jamie Moyer and they still wouldn't be likely to win the World Series. Sure, they'd be one of the favorites, but not likely.

I think you're completely wrong and interpreting that blurb entirely too literally

im fairly certain none of us deserve this

I would love to hear that said out loud by an announcer.

"This team is certainly one of the favorites to win the championship, but it's not likely."

The truth is that the Phillies, like most any team, are viable contenders as long as they have a championship core, decent supporting pieces, a pipeline of prospects and some budget--in that order of importance, I'd say. Their core will be unchanged next year, barring something shocking, and while they'll all be a year older, age isn't a concern for any of the five best players on the team: Utley, Rollins, Howard, Hamels, Lidge.

They will be more expensive, which eats into #2, as does the fact that the current supporting cast is about to get probably a lot more expensive: Werth, Victorino, Madson, Myers, and Blanton are all due for big raises. I'll come back to this in a minute.

As others have noted, the Phillies actually got almost nothing from rookies in 2008; I'd be surprised if any other recent champion got so little contribution from first-year players. Happ as the #6 or #7 starter, depending on how you count it, was pretty much it. I think they'll get a lot more in 2009 between Carrasco, Donald, Mayberry, Marson, maybe someone less obvious like Carpenter. So that's a plus.

On the budget, they're clearly going way up, but that's mostly due to raises to incumbent players, so we can't be sure if they'll have the flexibility to add a big piece in-season, if need be. What we do know is that they had this capability at the start of the off-season, and they presumably used pretty much all of it on Ibanez, Moyer and Park. We can, and have, and will, argue over the wisdom of those moves, which is the point of all this: I think that, say, Dunn and Lowe would have been better supplemental pieces than Ibanez and Moyer, at roughly the same 2009 cost if you include Park.

I guess a fifth consideration is minimizing your known dead weight. It bothers me that even at the higher payroll, about 10 percent of it will go to Eaton, whom we know is useless, and Jenkins, who certainly seems cooked. The real pain of the Ibanez and Moyer deals will be if, a year from now, those guys look as unhelpful as Eaton and Jenkins look now... especially since they'll cost more. It's the danger of that outcome, which doesn't seem very improbable, that made so many of us dislike these deals.

Woody wrote:I think you're completely wrong and interpreting that blurb entirely too literally

I'm cool with that.

dajafi wrote:I think that, say, Dunn and Lowe would have been better supplemental pieces than Ibanez and Moyer, at roughly the same 2009 cost if you include Park.

The base salaries for Ibanez, Moyer and Park total $15.5MM. If you add in Ibanez' signing bonuses and all Moyer's performance bonuses and all Park's performance bonuses, the total is $21.25MM (and I doubt Park makes his performance bonuses). Lowe and Dunn made $23MM combined last year before being free agents. Do you really think we could have signed both for roughly $20MM+/-? I figure they make $25MM-$27MM combined easily in 2009.

Shut up, Ruben is a moron.

Forgive me.

JFLNYC wrote:

dajafi wrote:I think that, say, Dunn and Lowe would have been better supplemental pieces than Ibanez and Moyer, at roughly the same 2009 cost if you include Park.

The base salaries for Ibanez, Moyer and Park total $15.5MM. If you add in Ibanez' signing bonuses and all Moyer's performance bonuses and all Park's performance bonuses, the total is $21.25MM (and I doubt Park makes his performance bonuses). Lowe and Dunn made $23MM combined last year before being free agents. Do you really think we could have signed both for roughly $20MM+/-? I figure they make $25MM-$27MM combined easily in 2009.

Replace Lowe with Wolf, who won't cost nearly as much, and the point still basically holds. But that wasn't really the heart of my argument.

cshort wrote:Can somebody explain all the Big Unit love on this board? Over that last couple of years, Moyer has been just as good, if not better than Johnson. Based on Moyer's pitching style, his skills probably aren't going to decline as much as Johnson's either. I know the 2 years bothers people, but if you can get a + .500 pitcher that will give you double digit wins, and 180-200 innings, $7.5M/year doesn't seem so bad. Not to mention, he can probably get the Phillies an AARP discount for his hotel room on the road.

I know Werthless and I posted answers to this already, but FanGraphs came up with another great article where they actually compare the two.

Pitcher A threw strikes 62% of the time and generated a missed bat 6.7% of the time.
Randy Johnson threw strikes 68% of the time and made batters miss on 10.6% of his pitches.

Pitcher A, traditionally a neutral pitcher, generated 1.25 groundballs for every flyball, but also yielded a line drive on 21.1% of batted balls.
Johnson, traditionally a slight GB pitcher, was neutral on groundballs in 2008, but allowed only 18.2% of batted balls to be line drives.

Pitcher A struck out just under two batters for every walk he yielded.
Randy was almost double that, at just under four strikeouts per walk.

Pitcher A's FIP was 4.32 over 196 innings and his Marcel projects his FIP at 4.73 next year.
Johnson's FIP was 3.76 and he pitched 184 innings. His Marcel projects him for a 4.11 FIP in 2009.

Who would you rather have based on those numbers? Seems pretty simple right? Here's where you'd expect me to name some random 30-year-old pitcher so that naysayers could point to Randy's age as a means behind the snubbing. Well, Pitcher A is Jamie Moyer. Like Randy, he's left-handed and Jamie is about 10 months older than Johnson. Moyer just signed a two-year deal guaranteeing him $13 million with easily reached innings-based bonuses likely worth an additional $1-2 million per year.

Not sure if you need to be an ESPN insider for this.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/blog/ind ... ney_buster

He may suck this year, but there's no question the world would be a better place with more Jamie Moyer. Just a snippet:

The Phillies pitcher and his wife took their seven children with them for Christmas break and made the most of it. Their youngest child, 26-month-old Yennifer, was orphaned in Guatemala before coming to the Moyers 16 months ago in need of special care.

Earlier last year, the Moyers had been undecided about where to spend Christmas, and it occurred to Karen that they could travel to Guatemala for a weeklong mission.

"We talked to the kids, and they were very unselfish about it," Karen Moyer recalled.

The Moyers wanted to take Christmas to the orphanage, partly so that Yennifer's American siblings could see where she came from, and partly to help. Before leaving for Guatemala on Dec. 19, Karen had e-mailed friends and family a list of items the Moyers hoped to take with them. They delivered 32 boxes.

there was a good article in the daily news about this with some pictures