2019 MLB Regular Season running thread

This proves what I've said for a long time: The value of dealing stars for alleged prospects is highly overrated. In your standard 4-for-1 trade, one of the four alleged prospects is a future every day starter, one is a marginal guy, one may get a cup of coffee and one is a throw in to fit organizational needs.

 

Ohtani, coming off TJ surgery, hit his 14th HR of the season in his 53rd game. That's a 42 HR/year pace.
Don't let him pitch again.

 

The vest jerseys with cutoff/ torn off sleeves below just scream "trailer trash."

Also, they're great for the guys with major league guns. For the guys with chicken biceps or jiggly flab, not so much.

 

Except hardly anybody makes 4-1 or 5-1 trades (unless the 4-5 are complete trash).
The Angels probably wouldn't get 4 major leaguers for Trout straight up -- unless they offered to unconditionally pay off the final 5 years of his contract.

 

The ultimate example of this was the White Sox wearing shorts when they had Wilbur Wood as their ace.

 

Now, with half the players wearing compression leggings, it wouldn't be so bad.

 

I don't think they had compression clothing that would've helped Wilbur look more trim.

 

This is where I wonder if I'd rather be a fan of the Tigers or the A's.

The Tigers are in complete freefall/teardown mode in an attempt to catch lightning in a bottle like the Astros/Cubs did -- and Cincinnati hasn't, even though a guy like Boyd or even Castellanos may still be a compelling piece to meld with younger players. But you have to have perfect timing or have extreme luck to pull it off, something I haven't seen from Avila, who telegraphs every damn move he's thinking of making. So the team is going to lose close to 500 games before Avila has even a skeleton of an outline of a competing team again. Maybe. This is a franchise that's historically been behind the curve in everything from getting stadium lights to signing black players to developing a sabermetrics/analytics team.

And yet, Beane just builds good to nearly-great teams like Frankenstein's monster with a fraction of the budget. He's a fricking real-life Transformer with baseball cleats.

So tell me who should get the contract extension?

 

Crazy piece of trivia: David Price became the fifth starting pitcher from the 2014 Tigers to beat Detroit this season. Verlander, Scherzer, Porcello and Anibal Sanchez were the others. Drew Smyly and Robbie Ray are cursing the schedule.

 

Greg Luzinski and Richie Zisk in those late 70s unis

 

I'm told Mad Max and JV couldn't stand each other
I always felt Scherzer would leave anyway, but when JV got the Opening Day start the year after Scherzer won the Cy Young, that clinched it
The Tigers got pissy when Scherzer turned them down, but he would have been making less than JV
I'm sure he told them what he thought of that

 

Gio Urshela: Did the Yankees know something or did they get lucky?