WilliamC wrote:

philliesphhan wrote:Even Randy Johnson was only looking for a one year deal though

I am interested in seeing what he gets for that year. If it's over 7 it's just as dumb as the Moyer signing. Moyer showed he still can't pitch well over the course of a full season just last year. I don't expect him to be still pitching that way in year two of this deal which is why I don't like it. But Moyer this year over Johnson this year at close to the same money I am definitely taking Moyer.

I see no reason to think that Johnson is going to be anything close to respectable in this upcoming season. He might be for a few games. Of course I was wrong about him last season.

I remember someone said on here that there something on fangraphs maybe showing that Randy Johnson was as good as Hamels last year.

"I'm sure if you ask Jamie, he'll say that he will play out a few more contracts," Phillies general manager Ruben Amaro Jr. said Monday. "I know on paper it probably says this is his last contract, but it will be fun to see how it plays out."

I don't know what the hell I am doing, but at least this is fun!!!

WilliamC wrote:Moyer showed he still can't pitch well over the course of a full season just last year.

The good news is he was good from second part of May until the NLDS, so if they get there again, and they can use their three best pitchers at that point, I'll worry about it then.

I'm not in love with the two years or anything, but I do think that's what starting pitching costs, good or bad.

i haven't really had much of a chance to analyze any of these three signings, and it's very clear to me that given the phillies beliefs about the market rate for salaries, they should have offered arbitration to burrell and moyer and would have saved a couple million off of the moyer contract (if not an entire year), and would have gotten draft picks for burrell (since if they think ibanez is worth 3/30M, burrell clearly would have either rejected arbitration or been tradeable had he accepted).

however, let's not act like we just traded abreu. we signed an outfielder who is likely to be worth about 2-2.5 wins over replacement including defensive adjustment for $10MM/year, a pitcher who is likely to be worth 1-1.5 wins over replacement for $7.5MM/year, and another pitcher who is likely to be worth 1/2 a win over replacement for $2.5MM/year. given the market rate is probably $5MM/win (and unless these players are made of houses, their price isn't actually going to be cut in half like people insist), we basically just raised a payroll $30MM and paid barely above market value for the players we signed at that rate. yes, there were probably better deals to be had out there, but what's the difference? amaro may be ed wade but if you had told me five years ago that ed wade would be the GM and the payroll would be $135MM, i'd have punched for toying with me.

these weren't smart moves. they weren't savvy moves. they don't bode well for amaro's GM skill or anything. but we're not going with jenkins and kendrick because they were good once. we're spending money. and we're signing chan ho park's 2009 contract, not his 2002 $65MM contract. we're not doing crazy things like sabean's zito contract or whatever the hell the pirates were doing trading for matt morris to join their sub .500 team at the trade deadline a couple years ago. these are reasonable moves, just not the best moves available. we're paying a little above market value. but we still have a 90-win team in a division where our chief opponent GM just spend $13.5MM of this year's payroll on about 120 innings of baseball so that WFAN would stop saying he wasn't addressing the bullpen.

I still don't get how Burrell would be tradeable at $16-$18 million

The Dude wrote:I still don't get how Burrell would be tradeable at $16-$18 million

18 and they might need to pick up some money. he's probably not tradable for solid prospects at 16, but he could probably net us cj henry again or something like that. the point is that it was not a sunk cost if we got stuck with the arbitration payment. i still dont see why he'd say yes if the market was such that he would get 3/40 or so, at least according to the phillies. if he wasn't tradeable 1/16 or wasn't able to get 3/40 on the open market according to the phillies, then ibanez wasn't worth 3/30 according to the phillies. the moves are not compatible, just like moyer being worth 2/15 on the free market with no draft pick risk is not compatible with him accepting arbitration and getting 1/8 or whatever.

No team would have traded for Burrell at that price, plus that makes the Ibanez deal worse b/c then they're picking up some of burrell's contract for no reason (= cj henry level prospect)

The Dude wrote:No team would have traded for Burrell at that price, plus that makes the Ibanez deal worse b/c then they're picking up some of burrell's contract for no reason (= cj henry level prospect)

my point is he probably would have said no to arbitration-- making the offchance that he would accept a low enough risk that it was worth it. and i disagree with the premise that burrell wouldn't have been tradable at 1/16. getting cj henry wasn't the point. my point was that a team would value burrell at that deal enough to throw away a struggling long-shot prospect for it. if it turned out that he got 18MM, that's the worst case scenario.

I guess we don't need to continue the same argument from the past two weeks, we've both made the same points 100 times now

The deadline to accept or reject arbitration is now long passed. Burrell (to my knowledge) hasn't received anything close to an offer and if he gets 2/22 he'll be fortunate. He wanted to stay in Philly. We'll never know for sure, but it seems logical to me he would have accepted arbitration, been paid $16-MM-$18MM, stayed in Philly and tried his luck again next year on the open market.

As it is, they got Ibanez and Moyer for what they'd have paid Burrell (actually, less, because Ibanez is making $8.5MM in 2009, including his bonus). I like Burrell. I'd rather have a RH hitter in LF. There are other reasons not to like the Ibanez deal. But speaking strictly for 2009 only (i.e., not factoring in contract lengths, lost draft pick,) and coming off a WFC, I'd rather have Ibanez and Moyer than only Burrell. So I really don't think offering Burrell arbitration would have been wise.

And, for those who might say we should have signed Burrell for 2/22, doing so would not have been possible before the deadline to offer arbitration. Would it been possible thereafter? We'll never know.

JFLNYC wrote:
And, for those who might say we should have signed Burrell for 2/22, doing so would not have been possible before the deadline to offer arbitration. Would it been possible thereafter? We'll never know.

Especially since they never even asked. That was also a big thing that jerks my chain.

The reason I said it would not have been possible before the arb deadline is that there's no reason to believe Burrell would have accepted such a deal and there were at least rumors during the season that he rejected such an offer.

even still, according to Burrell, there was NO contact, not one feeler.

Here are some details on Moyer's contract: He's guaranteed no less than $13 million. He'll make a base salary of $6.5 million 2009 and 2010. His 2010 salary can escalate to as much as $11 million based on innings pitched in '09 ($250,000 for 150 innings, $500,000 each for 160, 170, 180 and 190 innings) and starts in '09 ($250,000 for 23 starts, $500,000 each for 25, 27, 29 and 31 starts). Also, he can earn $250,000 performance bonuses each year for 150, 160, 170, 180 and 190 innings pitched.

Lauber

JFLNYC wrote:

Here are some details on Moyer's contract: He's guaranteed no less than $13 million. He'll make a base salary of $6.5 million 2009 and 2010. His 2010 salary can escalate to as much as $11 million based on innings pitched in '09 ($250,000 for 150 innings, $500,000 each for 160, 170, 180 and 190 innings) and starts in '09 ($250,000 for 23 starts, $500,000 each for 25, 27, 29 and 31 starts). Also, he can earn $250,000 performance bonuses each year for 150, 160, 170, 180 and 190 innings pitched.

Lauber

Jesus.

If he duplicates his poor 2007 (33 starts, 199 IP, 5.01 ERA), he'll earn

2009: $6.5M base plus $1.25M in performance bonuses
2010: $11.0M base plus $1.25M in perfomance bonuses

That's 2/20.

Please, defend.

11M for a 47 year old guy
brilliant, Moyer is a master negotiator

2/20 is much better than offering arbitration.

i'm reacting to all of this news very differently than everyone else. the payroll keeps turning out to be higher than i thought it would be. i don't really see the phillies lowering payroll in 2010 and 2011, so the higher that it is in 2009, the more optimistic i am about the budgets in 2010 and 2011. moyer making a couple million more this year and a couple million more next year, when i thought that payroll would never get a couple million higher, is just good news for 2011. when the phillies give chan ho park 2.5 million more this year, that just means that money is going to be spent in 2010 and 2011 when i didn't expect it too. i'm not really thinking about the fact that they could have gotten more with that money. i'm just happy it's not going to claire betz and is potentially going to represent a higher payroll and more margin for error later on. i've been saying for the a year or two that i didn't see how the phillies could maintain their competitiveness into the next decade, and they're going to do it by spending more money. who would really care if the phillies spent like the yankees but made a pavano type deal now and then?

MattS wrote:i'm reacting to all of this news very differently than everyone else. the payroll keeps turning out to be higher than i thought it would be. i don't really see the phillies lowering payroll in 2010 and 2011, so the higher that it is in 2009, the more optimistic i am about the budgets in 2010 and 2011. moyer making a couple million more this year and a couple million more next year, when i thought that payroll would never get a couple million higher, is just good news for 2011. when the phillies give chan ho park 2.5 million more this year, that just means that money is going to be spent in 2010 and 2011 when i didn't expect it too. i'm not really thinking about the fact that they could have gotten more with that money. i'm just happy it's not going to claire betz and is potentially going to represent a higher payroll and more margin for error later on. i've been saying for the a year or two that i didn't see how the phillies could maintain their competitiveness into the next decade, and they're going to do it by spending more money. who would really care if the phillies spent like the yankees but made a pavano type deal now and then?

I see what you're saying here, but I think you might be making an assumption I don't necessarily agree with: that the team's budgeters are rational. It seems possible to me that the spending is a result of sentimentality (Moyer) and exuberance (Park--though why they blow the WFC dividend on him is a mystery perhaps only Amaro's therapist, were such a person to exist, could explain to us).

Another option: the payroll goes up now because revenue is up. If the team starts to lose, attendance and other income drops, and we can be damn sure payroll will decline. Just because they're spending, doesn't mean that they're spending well; if the expenditures aren't sound, they won't be sustainable.

For me it still boils down to the fact that I don't trust this group of decision-makers. Maybe that's irrational; they did just win the title. But if it were Gillick and/or Arbuckle who were still around, and Amaro gone, I'm pretty sure I'd feel much more optimistic.

dajafi wrote:

MattS wrote:i'm reacting to all of this news very differently than everyone else. the payroll keeps turning out to be higher than i thought it would be. i don't really see the phillies lowering payroll in 2010 and 2011, so the higher that it is in 2009, the more optimistic i am about the budgets in 2010 and 2011. moyer making a couple million more this year and a couple million more next year, when i thought that payroll would never get a couple million higher, is just good news for 2011. when the phillies give chan ho park 2.5 million more this year, that just means that money is going to be spent in 2010 and 2011 when i didn't expect it too. i'm not really thinking about the fact that they could have gotten more with that money. i'm just happy it's not going to claire betz and is potentially going to represent a higher payroll and more margin for error later on. i've been saying for the a year or two that i didn't see how the phillies could maintain their competitiveness into the next decade, and they're going to do it by spending more money. who would really care if the phillies spent like the yankees but made a pavano type deal now and then?

I see what you're saying here, but I think you might be making an assumption I don't necessarily agree with: that the team's budgeters are rational. It seems possible to me that the spending is a result of sentimentality (Moyer) and exuberance (Park--though why they blow the WFC dividend on him is a mystery perhaps only Amaro's therapist, were such a person to exist, could explain to us).

Another option: the payroll goes up now because revenue is up. If the team starts to lose, attendance and other income drops, and we can be damn sure payroll will decline. Just because they're spending, doesn't mean that they're spending well; if the expenditures aren't sound, they won't be sustainable.

For me it still boils down to the fact that I don't trust this group of decision-makers. Maybe that's irrational; they did just win the title. But if it were Gillick and/or Arbuckle who were still around, and Amaro gone, I'm pretty sure I'd feel much more optimistic.

they generally don't lower payroll. it's not rational-- they should lower payroll when it stops being profitable to have such a high payroll, but i feel like they'll resist lowering payroll the same way that they resisted raising payroll before. if i'm wrong, so be it, but i think they will stay competitive at $135MM through at least 2011 and therefore really won't drop payroll before then. ibanez's deal is through 2011 so i'm less thrilled about that but he still is a 2-win player, and while they could have gotten a slightly better player for that price, the willingness for a team primed to win 88 or 89 games to spend on an extra $5-10MM on about 2 wins worth of players is actually why we made the playoffs this year. It's rational and I approve.