Shelton

It was ferndale

Yes I understand how that works. Why did you delete the rest of the passage that effectively said to ignore the passage you cited in the case of special accomplishments. That sentence can be interpreted to say service time doesn’t matter. I’m inclined to believe the arbitrators in Skubal’s case read it that way. Otherwise it’s hard to see how Skubal’s arbitration-restricted value could have exceeded 25.5. I think it’s great for Skubal and very interesting going forward. In the case of skenes, a hypothetical rookie of the year followed by back to back Cy Young awards sure like a special circumstance that removes the restriction of comparisons being limited to common service time.

This is what I read: The arbitration panel shall, except for a Player with five or more years of Major League service, give particular attention, for comparative salary pur-poses, to the contracts of Players with Major League service not exceeding one annual service group above the Player's annual service group. This shall not limit the ability of a Player or his representative, because of special accomplishment, to argue the 20 equal relevance of salaries of Players without regard to service, and the arbitration panel shall give whatever weight to such argument as is deemed appropriate.

If Skenes win a Cy this year, and heads into his first arbitration year, the language of the current CBA appears to indicate that he could demand and win 32 million.

What a fascinating case. I think each side had good arguments to support their view, and on a three judge panel with fairly flexible guidance, anything can happen. I’m specifically interested in the precedent set here. The fact that nothing like this had happened before was relevant, but it’s also true that a player having the specific attributes that Skubal had was never presented to a panel. Most of the preceding cases for big money were settlements. Credit to Skubal and Boras for risking millions argue their position.

If you have Apple News+, which often is included when you buy a new device or have a family bundle or the like with music/tv/etc, baseball prospectus is one of the publications included. It also has the freep and detnews. Only realized this recently.

Everything?

::raises hand::

This right here is the perfect illustration for why the tigers were never going to trade Skubal for the oft-mentioned “three top prospects” this offseason. Everyone that likes to dabble in speculation and hypothetical deals that the tigers could have made, have at it. You can safely say that the tigers could have traded Skubal for this return right here. If you want to replace Sproat with Tong and make it straight up for Skubal with no RP attachment, I’ll allow it (although that could still be pushing it). We now know what a win-now team like the Mets is willing to give up in return for one year of a Cy Young caliber SP and a decent RP (and 2027 comp pick). I wonder how many folks would prefer the two prospects. The Brewers won 97 games last year and have World Series aspirations no different than the tigers, and they preferred the prospects. There are two big differences that I see. First, the brewers were starting from a stronger position and could more afford to lose the Cy young caliber SP. Second, their cache of top prospects wasn’t as good as the tigers.

I’m a big fan of this Stormin guy.

Doesn’t really matter, but I think they switched to file and trial late in Avila’s tenure. Of course, because no one wants to go to “trial,” we never actually got to the point of “filing” with anyone until Mize last year. I think it’s a good system, personally.

As you said, you’d have to know what the internal/external alternatives were, as well as the cost of the external alternatives. No one knows this except Scott Harris and his team. But the comment about hurting the team implies that he took the current team and then made a move that reduced its effectiveness relative to what it was before the move. So, comments regarding whether he hurt the team or not, to me, can only be relative to existing team, not to hypothetical other moves that maybe could have been made instead that would have been better at similar or nominally higher cost. So, as for the internal options, that’s also hard to identify. And the knock-on effects of using those internal options in place of those two guys (ignoring finnegan) is also hard to identify. The easiest argument for the “hurt the team by the moves” position is that Montero and melton would have been better used in those slots. However, I don’t think melton was an option. Maybe that’s deserving of criticism but I think he had an innings cap and they needed to stretch that. But ignoring that, and just saying use melton, then you’ve got to replace melton innings with whatever worst bullpen/aaa arm wasn’t used. Same with Montero. And it’s not like melton and Montero would have been locks to perform better. To me, it’s a toss up. I can’t prove it either way, but neither can anyone else. In my opinion it is not as simple as pointing to poor performance by two specific guys and declaring that it hurt the team. To be clear, I am not disputing that these two guys performed poorly over the course of their short tigers tenure. There are a lot of other players you can point to that also failed during that period. But the tigers needed innings to get to the end of the season. I don’t think they had them in reserve. They didn’t need much more than that. Indeed, it turns out that all they needed was a tranch of fairly bad innings! Finally, both Paddack and Morton ultimately pitched worse for the tigers than they had for their prior team. I don’t think anyone really expects to get a substantially different performance over the final two months relative to the prior four months. Even then, Morton started off pretty strong for the tigers, following a couple strong months for the orioles. From June through August he threw 80 innings with a low 4 era. There was little evidence as we entered September that Scott Harris’s decision to add Morton a month earlier had made the team worse, especially given that we needed dem innings. Similarly, Chris paddack was a 1 war pitcher for the twins at the time of the trade. Nothing amazing, but an easy 4/5 starter. He gave us 30 innings in his first 6 starts, gave up too many homers in a couple starts, but we did go 4-2 in those games. So, that’s why I take issue with the idea that Scott Harris made moves that hurt the team. I think it misses the point of those moves, and relies too heavily on hindsight and vibes due to the September collapse by almost everyone wearing the uniform. This was a long explanation to your question. I regret the length. Short answer is that I don’t think it’s a given that the internal options would have been better and that we would have finished with more wins had we not made the trades.

Good point, please go back and edit your posts to say that Harris made the team better in August and worse in September and did just enough to reach the playoffs for the second year running. We wouldn’t want to leave anything out.

See, that’s the rub, and I don’t disagree. However, it’s easy to say he should have just “made a better move.” Could have acquired a better pitcher than Paddack or Morton? Surely. But at what cost? And even if we had (at some unknown cost), to what benefit? Would it have been enough to have clinched a bye? I’m not so sure. Would we have made it to the ALCS or WS? Also hard to say, but probably not. Maybe Skubal should have performed “better” in his game 2 and game 5 ALDS starts. I think one problem we likely ran into is that to get a “better” pitcher in that trade market, Harris probably would have had to move Kevin, Max C, Bryce, Josue, or Melton. I know folks want to keep creating deals involving max anderson and hao-yu Lee, but you can’t make other teams like your mid-tier prospects more than another team’s mid-tier prospects. There is a long list of hypothetical moves ai think Harris should have made, but I’m not so sure that’s a list with any basis in reality. I’m glad he didn’t trade any of the big 5 to add a 1-2% increase in reaching a particular round of the postseason.

What about Finnegan? Logic also dictates that you have to consider who else would have had to have been in their position in those starts, and who would have had to backfill if they weren’t there. The point is that just because the team performed worse doesn’t mean he made the team worse, which is a point being made repeatedly in here. With the buffer they had, merely limiting the damage is still a positive relative to the baseline. Let’s not forget that they also struggled on each side of the all-star break, so it’s not like they had some well-oiled machine that he threw a wrench into by adding Charlie Morton.