Peabody: Life, Friends Baseball

Greg Johns the mlb.com beat reporter for the Mariners got access to Jack Zduriencik today and who said no to the Mariners signing Josh Hamilton. link at bottom

Jeff Sullivan weighed in shortly after that on LookoutLanding and said only an idiot would get mad at Lincoln and Armstrong for not letting Zduriencik pursue Hamilton. He parses Armstrong’s comments from early in the week and concludes that Chuck just pushed some words around that did not really mean anything and like Jack says we have to protect the owner’s money by not giving a player too long of a contract.

I think that is a curious stance for somebody to take going into the 2013 season, twelve years after the Mariners were last in the playoffs. The franchise value of the Mariners has grown and grown and the team has grown worse and worse and worse.

Were they to sign him for seven years and $175 million his asking price, which the signing price will be lower by two years with an option perhaps. He gives you three or four very good years and then two less years. He has got to be worth 500,000 tickets per year above their current level for at at least four years and if they make the playoffs bang, zoom back to 3,000,000 butts in the seat again. One and a half million seats to three million net seats at $100 a seat total revenue, seats, beer, parking etc. $50 per seat etc. Just on stadium revenue and no impact on the monstro TV deal they’re all counting on, the deal works. If more people are watching the games on tv the deal gets bigger.

But Chuck and Howard point to Chone Figgins why they will never ever sign a big free agent deal.

Lastly is a link to CBS Sports.com showing the remaining free agent outfielders. Nick Swisher is still there, but he’s not coming here, largely because he does not have to come here.

You’re sure to see lots of stuff over the few weeks leading up to the Winter meetings about the Ms trading most of their minor league prospects to the Royals for Billy Butler. I would put a less than likely outcome on that, mostly because somebody in one or both organizations talked about the deal, so it now acts as a stalking horse and other teams can beat the deal.

If the market functions, that is it trades on all information, free agent players that are cheap are not very good or very special.

I guarantee that signing lousy players or giving away the entire rebuilding effort for a designated hitter is not very smart, and is not a secret way to get good. You either pay up or develop your talent, or both. Not doing either is where we’ve been.

http://www.cbssports.com/mlb/blog/eye-on-baseball/20794397/free-agent-rankings-outfielders

atmlb.com/T7ccN8

http://www.lookoutlanding.com/2012/11/16/3656844/seattle-mariners-rumors-josh-hamilton

This entry was posted on Friday, November 16th, 2012 at 9:59 pm by terrybenish and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.