chasfh

I think Drury could have fit pretty well on the Tigers, defense notwithstanding, and I think the Tigers might have liked him for a year. But maybe not for two.

"Nanny socialism for me; dog-eat-dog capitalism for thee ..."

A successful team builds from a solid foundation of homegrown players and trades, and complements them with the right free agent signings that plug the holes that need to be plugged. I would expect the Harris Tigers to do the same. It's what Avila tried to do when he and ownership were bamboozled by the fool's gold that was the post-May 8 2021 Tigers. They thought the homegrowns were done cooking and the long-term free agents would then come in and lead us to the promised land. Wrong on both counts. One of the interesting things I'm going to watch for is whether the overperformances of 2021 or the underperformances of 2022 are closer to reality for certain Tigers who were on those teams. Erik Haase was practically the only guy who took a step up last year versus prior; just about everyone else went splat.

That’s true as things stand now, although he’s also been a hot topic since the end of the season.

Sure, and if they prove to be solid starters this year, we might get something decent for them at the deadline. I don’t think either of them fits into the current vision of the rotation of the future, and I don’t know how well they would have to do to force themselves into that conversation.

Brandon Belt and A.J. Pollock are Excel clients. Both of them would technically fill a need expressed by Harris. 1/12 would be an overpay for either of those guys. I would not recommend either.

We really don’t have a line on decent free agents. Boyd and Lorenzen are the kind of one-year guys we can hope to flip in July, which is fine because, fast ending to 2021 notwithstanding, that’s the stage we’re in at the moment. It’s going to take a bit of time and some proof of concept to get a decent guy who wants to come here to help us win for a few years.

I don’t know, a lot of people were breathing fire here about how terrible he is and how we had to dump him.

People feel very strongly about him. He was by far the most interesting non-tender.

Not many I can think of. I would never suggest they do.

Makes it way easier to get away with graft.

Teams that totally avoid free agency don’t win as much as teams that know how to effectively sign key free agents.

OK, that’s fine, we can leave it there, although don’t be surprised if I continue to acknowledge it at times, and I won’t be surprised when you continue to push back on it.

It’s based on all the years under the prior administration, which was well-reported in the national media while being pretty much ignored by the access-dependent local guys. You might have heard about it. Sure, the Avila people are mostly gone now, but the smell is still lingering around the organization, and the Harris front office has to work through that and establish that they are not more of the same. The changed talk and the hires are a good start, but they still have to prove themselves to complete the turnaround, which they were never going to accomplish within the first six weeks of the offseason. Once they do accomplish that, though, they should have a fair shot at getting the top guys at market value, instead of having to overpay to lure in the remaining free agents that are left, such as the Baezes and the Eduardos.

There may well be more than one, and they may also rotate to other positions. Malloy may be one, Kreidler may be another, Ibañez yet another, Schoop may get some reps there, the way people are talking. The way Harris is assembling the team for 2023, versatility may be the watchword.

I’m willing to give Harris some rope on the upcoming year since bad teams with bad reputations usually have a tough time getting good free agents to sign, for obvious reasons. They need to prove themselves to be serious about recasting the organization from top to bottom, even beyond announcing the right hires. That’s gonna take time, maybe even more than a year.

Sure, he’s old news now, I agree. But attended to the right set of circumstances, this kind of thing can wax as well as wane.

He may have had lots of money before, but if he wanted to take his personal wealth into the stratosphere, he could always use the help of a nation-state hostile to America, and with trillions of dollars at its disposal.

Would the government just look the other way with the hope that Trump exiles himself? That strikes me as off-brand, but also, the danger is that if Trump’s Q score somehow increases as people come to believe he was politically martyred, he could become even more dangerous as a leader-in-exile, outside the reach of US control. If he were to go to a country hostile to the US, which I believe to be the leading probability if he does leave, he could do way more damage to America than he ever could under house arrest at one of his properties here.

Always struck me as a guy who takes himself heart attack seriously.

I know they are still at least a couple of steps away from this, but that whatever point these charges go to court, are they actually going to apprehend Trump? And if so, how will they apprehend him? Or do they expect he’s going to just walk into court and face the music like a good little boy?

“Fund” right there in the name of the thing. Wonder whether red hats will notice.

If they believe him to be a 1 WAR player next year, then I’m glad they let him go.

Even if he does technically step away, I can't help but believe he will still be dictating policy, strategy and tactics from wherever afar is.

The first contracts that came in like that, the Diaz and Suarez contracts, struck me that way. But the more contracts like that which get signed, the less like overpays they look and the more like it's the market shifting, taking the line of what constitutes "overpay" upward with it. I think only if the market shift back down to 2019-21 levels can all these contracts signed this offseason be considered overpays.