Spring Training Gamethread/Discussion

I agree that it was unrealistic to build better depth then what was built on the "restrictions" imposed by Liberty. We aren't the Dodgers who can overspend on one portion of the team and not worry about having limited resources to fill out a balanced roster.
 
thethe said:
I agree that it was unrealistic to build better depth then what was built on the "restrictions" imposed by Liberty. We aren't the Dodgers who can overspend on one portion of the team and not worry about having limited resources to fill out a balanced roster.
Click to expand...

We can't stash quality players at AAA. They won't sign here and we can't hemorrhage money to go to the minors. I don't see any way around these supposed depth issues without expanding rosters.
 
zitothebrave said:
You really can't prepare for multiple catastrophes when you're a mid market team.
Click to expand...

I think this is the key point. It seems every year there are one or two positions where you have multiple injuries/regression. But it is not possible to know ahead of time where the multiple catastrophes will occur. That's why you keep some budget in reserve.

Last year we had both Venters and EOF go down. Eventually, we picked up Downs.

Second base was the other position with multiple castastrophes. Injuries/regression to Uggla, Pastornicky, Pena, DeWitt. That's how we ended up playing Goselin and Elliot Johnson there.

This year the issues with starting pitching occurred early enough that we were able to pick up Santana. In some ways the timing of Medlen and Beachy going down was lucky. If it had happened ten days later, Santana would no longer be on the market.
 
Tapate50 said:
We can't stash quality players at AAA. They won't sign here and we can't hemorrhage money to go to the minors. I don't see any way around these supposed depth issues without expanding rosters.
Click to expand...

You can have a decent group in AAA by having a productive farm system and being careful about how you use up options. We actually had a solid group of starting pitchers ticketed for AAA before all the injuries hit: Hale, Maya, Thomas, Martin, Schlosser, Northcraft. Our AAA pitching depth was good. And that is going to serve us well. But realistically you are not going to be able to stash a healthy mid-rotation type starter with major league experience in AAA. What you can do is have a good group of guys who are coming up through the system and AAAA types like Maya. And we have that to a better extent than we did last season.
 
I really don't understand who would have been better to acquire as our potential #7 guy than Floyd. Unless Wren just totally ruled out Beachy all year (which is tough to do), there weren't many options. Whatever.
 
Nice!

BillShanks ‏@BillShanks 9m

B.J. Upton just walked off the field and said he just had the best batting practice he's had since 2007.
 
yeezus said:
I really don't understand who would have been better to acquire as our potential #7 guy than Floyd. Unless Wren just totally ruled out Beachy all year (which is tough to do), there weren't many options. Whatever.
Click to expand...

Capuano, Maholm and Chen were some of the other options. I would take Floyd over any of those three.

I think the question is whether we should have signed Floyd and one of the others. There was the possibility of not trading for Doumit and using the salary on another pitcher.

Also once the price for Maholm and Capuano dropped, we could have signed one of them rather than Garcia.

It is worth noting you can always pick up some pitchers close to the value of a Garcia or Maholm as teams trim their rosters at the end of spring training. For example, Vance Worley just got waived. It is hard for me to criticize Wren for not picking up a pitcher like Maholm when chances are he can sign someone off waivers of comparable quality.
 
nsacpi said:
Capuano, Maholm and Chen were some of the other options. I would take Floyd over any of those three.

I think the question is whether we should have signed Floyd and one of the others. There was the possibility of not trading for Doumit and using the salary on another pitcher.

Also once the price for Maholm and Capuano dropped, we could have signed one of them rather than Garcia.

It is worth noting you can always pick up some pitchers close to the value of a Garcia or Maholm as teams trim their rosters at the end of spring training. For example, Vance Worley just got waived. It is hard for me to criticize Wren for not picking up a pitcher like Maholm when chances are he can sign someone off waivers of comparable quality.
Click to expand...

Good point on the Doumit trade. I don't think Gilmartin was/is any kind of option for us. He can't dent Kleenex from ten feet away with his fastball. But I don't know if Doumit is redundant with Terdoslavich and if we were going to acquire something for Gilmartin, maybe we should have looked at other options.

Worley appears to be done. He has been terrible in Minnesota. Paul Diamond might become available out of Minnesota. He has also stunk up the joint over in Fort Myers this spring. And he's like Gilmartin in that he pitches "backwards." Maybe he could go through the league a couple of times before turning into a pumpkin (like Maholm did last year). It's an old saw, but off-speed guys usually do well early in the season when hitters are trying to find their timing, but have diminishing returns when the hitters get back in their groove.

For the record, I always believed Medlen was going to have durability concerns. He's just not that big a guy and while he's a great athlete, when you look at his motion, he's puts a lot of leverage in a pretty small body. He's a tiger, but the body can only do so much.

I'm not going to rag on Wren. I just think he sort of put up the white flag after Hudson left. Garcia is not a viable long-term option and he seemed to be the back-up plan. I'm no big fan of Phil Hughes, but he signed a reasonable contract with the Twins and might have been an option. I'm just throwing things at the wall. From my perch, it just seems that Wren was satisfied with where we sat with the pitching depth, but you just never have enough pitching, Graham's injury is a kick in the knee for us, but I wonder about his long-term durability as well. Martin got cuffed around pretty good this spring and we'll see how he does in Gwinnett. Both those guys could be options down the road this season, but out of the gate, there is no question we are a little light.
 
Hughes was one of the guys I thought we should take a look at this off-season. But my understanding is that Wren didn't want to give any multi-year deals because of the budget crunch we're likely to face in 2015. That's why he didn't bring back Hudson. And I suspect that's why we weren't in the running for guys like Hughes.

Btw we're going to face a challenging situation with respect to the starting rotation in 2015 given the budget constraints. I assume we won't be counting on Medlen or Beachy for anything more than depth next year. We'll have a couple openings in the rotation given Floyd and Santana are on one-year deals. We'll save a little money from not having to give Medlen and Beachy a raise, but there isn't going to be more than 5M or so to fill out the rotation.
 
Small kzone today. A few pitches from either side could/should have been strikes.

Julio lookin good
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top