Entries Tagged 'minnesota twins' ↓

Manny Parra made his first start today after a four-start stint in AAA where he did pretty darn well compared to his big league disaster. His peripherals aren’t quite there yet (19K, 13BB, 24 2/3 innings pitched), but he did a good job of keeping the ball in the park and on the ground. He’s appeared to regain at least some confidence and with the rotation in flux as it is it’s time to bring him back.

He decided to perform admirably, to the tune of 7 shutout innings. He hardly had any jams and used the sun to his advantage (Todd Coffey, however, did not). He threw a ton of strikes after complaining about not having the confidence to throw any of his pitches for strikes and got ahead of hitters better than I’ve seen him do all season long.

With him coming back and hopefully being a solid rotation piece, should the Brewers still trade for another starting pitcher to last them through the rest of the season?

I wrote on Monday about the current state of the pitching market and why it makes sense for the Brewers to just stand pat where they are, with regards to Doug Davis. Now, all of a sudden, J.P. Ricciardi says Roy Halladay is available for trade and all of a sudden everbody’s nuts for Halladay! FOX Sports’ own Boras-mouthpiece Ken Rosenthal said in his article that Halladay is ‘all but gone’ in Toronto. Whoo, how exciting! Maybe the Brewers will finally add that pitching piece they so desperately need.

But wait! There’s more. Here’s what Toronto’s GM Ricciardi had to say about Halladay just yesterday:

It would take a lot for us to part with him. We’ve gotten a lot of calls from teams but none of them are telling us at this point what they’re willing to give up. If you’re coming at us with a ‘B” list of young players, don’t bother. This is one of the five best players in baseball. It’s going to take a significant package of players for us to even listen. So as the teams call we’ll go through the ones we feel are the serious ones and then we’ll start scouting their farm systems to see if there’s anything we can do.”

“My gut feeling is no we won’t [make a deal] because there aren’t too many teams out there who are willing to give us the significant package of prospects we would need to make this go. Teams protect their prospects.

In other words Ricciardi said that a player even as good as Halladay is available but it’s going to take a mountain of candy to sweeten the deal enough for them. This suspiciously sounds like the media is trying to create a story out of nothing.

Of course now that Halladay’s been brought up, the media has successfully made something out of nothing. The internet is abuzz with Halladay rumors. The problem with all this new trade talking is that the media has successfully created a story when there might not be one. No more complaining about how much attention Brett Favre’s gotten!

Here is a pretty interesting article about Halladay’s current trade value with what he should get on the market. Here’s some of the more important points:

First off, let’s look at Halladay’s win values over the years. Since 2002, he’s been worth about 46 wins in 1,585 innings, or right around an average of six wins per year. He’s on pace for about a seven win season this year, and he shows no signs of slowing down. Going forward, ZIPS projects a 3.21 FIP and 106 innings in his remaining 15 starts this year, which would be worth another 3.5 wins. Halladay is a +6 to +7 win pitcher, easily the best in baseball.

The market value for wins took a tumble on the low end last year, but at the high end, teams were still willing to pay around $5 million per win for premium free agents. Based on that, we’d say that Halladay’s fair market value is something like $30 to $35 million per season. However, those $5 million per win contracts were all long term deals, which carry extra risk to the organization and therefore pull down the annual average value that teams are willing to pay. With only a 15 month commitment, the long term risk with Halladay is substantially lower, and teams should (and will) pay a premium for that risk avoidance.

…

But, you can’t forget about the fact that he’s very likely to be a Type A free agent at the end of 2010, and the acquiring team would be able to recoup two quality draft choices if they didn’t re-sign him as a free agent. Thanks to some good work by Victor Wang, we can see that the value of Halladay’s Type A status is around $8 million or so.

$52 million for Halladay’s performance + $8 million for the draft picks = $60 million in total value. He will be paid $22 million over that time frame, so 60-22 = $38 million.

To acquire the Jays ace, teams should be expected to surrender something like $40 million in value.

What does $40 million in value look like? Something like three terrific prospects who are not that far from the majors. No one’s giving up players from the Matt Wieters/David Price mold, but it’s going to take several players from that second prospect tier, the top 25-50 type guys.

So in order to obtain Halladay the Brewers would be looking at shipping away J.J. Hardy or Alcides Escobar, Lorenzo Cain, and Bret Lawrie, at the very least. Does that sound worth it to you?

I’m not the biggest fan of disarming the entire farm system to set the franchise back multiple years just to gain an extra win or two for 2009. The really nice thing about last year’s C.C. Sabathia trade was that it didn’t handicap the franchise for the upcoming years; Matt LaPorta was blocked and the other prospects involved weren’t exactly the major-league-ready types. If the Brewers were to give up $40 million for Roy Halladay…that would destroy the franchise. $40 million is almost half of the Brewers’ current salary.

It would be different if Halladay was sour grapes about his time in Toronto and the Blue Jays were looking to get what they could for him. However it sounds like Halladay is happy in Toronto and Ricciardi is just as happy keeping him there. In other words, he’s not going to take pennis on the dollar for Halladay. $40 million in talent seems about right.

It just doesn’t make sense to trade away the farm system — or anyone, for that matter — with the rotation the Brewers have at the beginning of the year. Parra’s only slightly broken (and hopefully is back for good) and when Bush comes back the rotation will be back to where it was at the beginning of the year and in May when the Brewers were the best team in the major leagues. Overpaying for Halladay or Javier Vazquez isn’t going to be the answer. It’s just not going to be worth it.

Mark DiFelice is a 32-year-old career minor league pitcher who seemingly can’t find a home, having minor league stints with the Rockies, Orioles, Nationals, Cubs, and now Brewers. So far, he’s been a journeyman minor leaguer who just found his first big-league experience last year in a short 19-inning stint, only getting his opportunity when David Riske got injured.

In his 19 innings with Milwaukee last season, he only put up a 2.84 ERA and a 151 ERA+, which should give him another shot at a cup of coffee, but even the amateur baseball fan knows that 19 innings is a small sample size for any period of pitching time, so the rationale is that DiFelice is an AAA pitcher.

Problem is, he’s not your everyday AAA scrub. He’s a really good pitcher. Last year in AAA, he put up gaudy numbers, which he’s done throughout his minor league career. Last year, in Nashville, he went 5-1 with a 3.22 ERA and 0.90 WHIP, while striking out more than a batter an inning and walking only 1.2. He had a K:BB ratio of 8.13 in AAA last year!

DiFelice is a junkball pitcher, throwing an 87mph fastball as well as a slider (cutter), circle change, and curve. He threw his fastball less than 15 percent of the time in the majors last year. Some have thought hitters will eventually catch up to his lack of an “out” pitch and he wouldn’t be a good option at the major league level, but he’s proven himself at least capable of being a good big-league reliever and if he can at least keep up a really good K:BB ratio he should still be an expendable reliever at least for a year or two.

Let’s say his CHONE or Marcel projections hold to be true. CHONE projects DiFelice to have a 3.41 FIP, while Marcel projections think his walk rates are going to go way up and decrease his FIP to essentially league-average (4.5). I tend to think, at least at the beginning of his big-league career, he’ll be closer to the CHONE projections and be a good pitcher who nobody really knew about. Instead, the Brewers most likely are going to keep Eduardo Morlan who had an FIP of 3.4 in AA last year for Tampa Bay simply because he will have to be offered back to Tampa if he’s not kept on the roster. Morlan is good, and projects to be a future stud in the big leagues, but if the Brewers want to win now they’ll place DiFelice higher up on the food chain than Morlan.

That leaves the bullpen situation looking like this:

Trevor Hoffman
Seth McClung
Carlos Villanueva
R.J. Swindle/Mitch Stetter
Jorge Julio
David Riske
Mark DiFelice

I actually really like that pen. Especially if they keep Tim Dillard and Todd Coffey in AAA. Dillard just isn’t that good, and Coffey could stand to work on his pitches for a little while while being the backup for the pitcher who’s ultimately going to get hurt sometime during the season.

But DiFelice is ready for the bigs. I think he’ll be a great pitching candidate, even if he doesn’t rely on the fastball.

Uh oh.

tl; dr version: Prime Brewers shortstop prospect Alcides Escobar’s wife wrote a post on Bleacher Report detailing how Escobar, since getting called up from the minors in the September callup binge, has been abrasive, silent, and big-headed, getting to the point where he skips out on his wife and baby child and supposedly got kicked off the team in Venezuela. He hasn’t made a minor league appearance in winter ball since the end of December, although he’s still on the lineup card.
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Here’s a piece/interview I wrote up on Aaron Gleeman, writer for Rotoworld, excellent blogger, busy dude, and all-around nice guy. Comment up!

On April 29 of this year, two people fought over an elephant in the room of the sports media. On that day, the hard-nosed, old-school, New York Times columnist and Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Buzz Bissinger went on a profanity-laced tirade during a broadcast on “Costas Now,” a show on HBO where guests debate pressing issues in the sports world, attacking a 32-year-old baby-faced man named Will Leitch. Leitch, in April, was the founder of Deadspin.com, a sports blog.
A “blog” is an online journal or diary – short for “web log.” Many people use these blogs for writing about their own personal life, their children, or pets. Many people blog about sports – some talk every day about baseball, some on football – but Deadspin covers everything that has to do with sports. Blogs work differently than newspapers; while newspapers call sources and squeeze the information out of them, blogs call up newspapers and report the information that they’ve already sent to people, except they range over everything―more than strict sports news.
Leitch was trying to address a legitimate concern against blogs when host Bob Costas asked him what he thought of the mean-spirited potshots that people without journalistic credentials write on different blogs. Not 30 seconds after Leitch began defending his medium did Bissinger interrupt.
“I have to interject – I really think you’re full of shit,” he said. For nearly 15 minutes, Bissinger attacked Leitch without regard to common decency and gave him no breathing room to try to defend blogs. The show sparked a giant discussion across the blogosphere and in the national media about the validity of bloggers and the status of newspaper columnists. The entire world seemed to think of them as two separate entities, and argued like the Capulets and Montagues.
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