MLB Offseason - Lets see your moves!

[FiddySicks]

The '09 Jays, in my dream world.

>> Trade BJ Ryan for Andy Sonnanstine

Just saw an article today that the Rays have Sonnanstine and Edwin Jackson on the block to make room for David Price. Gives the the Rays a legitimate closer, and the Jays a reliable 3-4 starter and dumps the last 2 years of Ryan's contract.

>> Trade Adam Lind and David Purcey for Chone Figgins

Lind has been passed by Snider as the LF/1B/DH of the future, but still has trade value. Angels have Brandon Wood waiting in the wings at 3B, and could get Lind to take over at first if they don't resign Tex. Figgins gives the Jays a legit leadoff hitter and stolen base threat.

>>Sign a 2-3 starter, like Brad Penny, Derek Lowe, or Ben Sheets

and the big splash...

>>Sign Manny Ramirez or Adam Dunn

They've been rumoured to be interested. Throw 3 years, $70-80M at Manny, obviously less at Dunn.

1. 3B Figgins

2. RF Alex Rios

3. CF Vernon Wells

4. DH Ramirez/Dunn

5. LF Travis Snider

6. 1B Lyle Overbay

7. 2B Aaron Hill

8. C Rod Barajas

9. SS Jon McDonald

Bench

C Curtis Thigpen

3B Scott Rolen

OF/IF Marco Scutaro

OF/IF Joe Ingett

1. Halladay

2. Penny/Lowe/Sheets

3. McGowan

4. Sonnanstine

5. Janssen

RP Litsch

RP Cecil

RP Downs

RP Accardo

CL Brandon League - Annointed the new closer. Was dynamite late last year.

You really think the Rays are gonna trade within the division right after they actually won it? No way they make a deal that adds another AL East threat into the mix.

And on top of that getting the Angels to trade Figgins is gonna be quite the task.

[Shumway]

The '09 Jays, in my dream world.

>> Trade BJ Ryan for Andy Sonnanstine

Just saw an article today that the Rays have Sonnanstine and Edwin Jackson on the block to make room for David Price. Gives the the Rays a legitimate closer, and the Jays a reliable 3-4 starter and dumps the last 2 years of Ryan's contract.

>> Trade Adam Lind and David Purcey for Chone Figgins

Lind has been passed by Snider as the LF/1B/DH of the future, but still has trade value. Angels have Brandon Wood waiting in the wings at 3B, and could get Lind to take over at first if they don't resign Tex. Figgins gives the Jays a legit leadoff hitter and stolen base threat.

>>Sign a 2-3 starter, like Brad Penny, Derek Lowe, or Ben Sheets

and the big splash...

>>Sign Manny Ramirez or Adam Dunn

They've been rumoured to be interested. Throw 3 years, $70-80M at Manny, obviously less at Dunn.

1. 3B Figgins

2. RF Alex Rios

3. CF Vernon Wells

4. DH Ramirez/Dunn

5. LF Travis Snider

6. 1B Lyle Overbay

7. 2B Aaron Hill

8. C Rod Barajas

9. SS Jon McDonald

Bench

C Curtis Thigpen

3B Scott Rolen

OF/IF Marco Scutaro

OF/IF Joe Ingett

1. Halladay

2. Penny/Lowe/Sheets

3. McGowan

4. Sonnanstine

5. Janssen

RP Litsch

RP Cecil

RP Downs

RP Accardo

CL Brandon League - Annointed the new closer. Was dynamite late last year.

You really think the Rays are gonna trade within the division right after they actually won it? No way they make a deal that adds another AL East threat into the mix.

And on top of that getting the Angels to trade Figgins is gonna be quite the task.

Figgy's been among plenty of rumors(it seems like every year a Figgins-for-Crede trade comes up at the deadline). I personally wouldn't trade the guy, but he's been rumored before...then again, I'm still not sold on Brandon Wood. I hope he does well for the Angels.

[napalmandsillyputty]

The 2009 New York Yankees

Free Agent Signings

P- C.C. Sabathia

1B- Mark Texiera

P- A.J. Burnett

2B- Orlando Hudson

Trade

2B Robinson Cano to Kansas City for P Zach Greinke, and CF David Dejesus

Lineup

LF- Brett Gardener

SS- Derek Jeter

RF- Xavier Nady

3B- Alex Rodriguez

1B- Mark Texiera

C- Jorge Posada

DH- Hideki Matsui

CF- David Dejesus

2B- Orlando Hudson

Rotation

C.C. Sabathia

Chien-Ming Wang

A.J. Burnett

Joba Chamberlain

Zach Grienke

[epper]

The 2009 New York Yankees

Free Agent Signings

P- C.C. Sabathia

1B- Mark Texiera

P- A.J. Burnett

2B- Orlando Hudson

geez why dont you throw manny, lowe and dunn in while you're at it?

[floydnimrod]

Cincinnati Reds

Trade Chris Dickerson, Ryan Freel, and Paul Janish to San Diego for Khalil Greene.

Trade Alex Gonzalez for a mid or low level prospect to dump salary.

Trade Homer Bailey and Bobby Livingston to Texas for Max Ramirez.

Signings:

Mark Mulder

Willie Bloomquist

Rocco Baldelli

Matt Wise

Jerry Hairston Jr. (re-sign)

David Weathers (re-sign)

Jeremy Affeldt (re-sign)

CF Jerry Hairston Jr.

2B Brandon Phillips

1B Joey Votto

LF Rocco Baldelli

RF Jay Bruce

3B Edwin Encarnacion

C Max Ramirez

SS Khalil Greene

Potential bench players:

C Ryan Hanigan

UT Willie Bloomquist

OF Norris Hopper

IF Jeff Keppinger

IF Wilkin Castillo

IF Adam Rosales

Starters

Edinson Volquez

Bronson Arroyo

Aaron Harang

Johnnt Cueto

Mark Mulder

Bullpen

Matt Wise

David Weathers

Jeremy Affeldt (LH)

Bill Bray (LH)

Micah Owings (spot starter)

Jared Burton

Josh Roenicke

Francisco Cordero (closer)

Minor Leaguers making appearances throuhgout the year

OF Drew Stubbs

P Ramon Ramirez

P Danny Ray Herrera

P Matt Maloney

P Carlos Fisher

OF Shaun Cumberland

[McCall]

Cincinnati Reds

Trade Chris Dickerson, Ryan Freel, and Paul Janish to San Diego for Khalil Greene.

Trade Alex Gonzalez for a mid or low level prospect to dump salary.

Trade Homer Bailey and Bobby Livingston to Texas for Max Ramirez.

Signings:

Mark Mulder

Willie Bloomquist

Rocco Baldelli

Matt Wise

Jerry Hairston Jr. (re-sign)

David Weathers (re-sign)

Jeremy Affeldt (re-sign)

CF Jerry Hairston Jr.

2B Brandon Phillips

1B Joey Votto

LF Rocco Baldelli

RF Jay Bruce

3B Edwin Encarnacion

C Max Ramirez

SS Khalil Greene

Potential bench players:

C Ryan Hanigan

UT Willie Bloomquist

OF Norris Hopper

IF Jeff Keppinger

IF Wilkin Castillo

IF Adam Rosales

Starters

Edinson Volquez

Bronson Arroyo

Aaron Harang

Johnnt Cueto

Mark Mulder

Bullpen

Matt Wise

David Weathers

Jeremy Affeldt (LH)

Bill Bray (LH)

Micah Owings (spot starter)

Jared Burton

Josh Roenicke

Francisco Cordero (closer)

Minor Leaguers making appearances throuhgout the year

OF Drew Stubbs

P Ramon Ramirez

P Danny Ray Herrera

P Matt Maloney

P Carlos Fisher

OF Shaun Cumberland

I think Mulder's either done, or won't pitch for a long time. His shoulder's messed up pretty badly.

[KevinMcD]

2009 Orioles in my Dreams

Sign AJ Burnett for 4/60

Sign Mark Teixeira for 7/145

Get Khalil Greene from SD for Hayden Penn (SP)

Trade Ramon Hernandez for Prospect(s)

Re-sign Roberts and Markakis to extensions

Starting Roster:

1.Roberts (2B)

2.Jones (CF)

3.Weiters (C )

4.Teixeira (1B)

5.Markakis (RF)

6.Huff (DH)

7.Green (SS)

8.Scott (LF)

9.Mora (3B)

Bench:

Montanez

Reimold

Salazar

Quiroz

Rotation:

1.Guthrie

2.Burnett

3.Cabrera

4.Olson

5.Patton

Pen:

Ray

Sherrill

Johnson

Safrate

Albers

Walker

Waters

[gingerbreadmann]

Trade

2B Robinson Cano to Kansas City for P Zach Greinke, and CF David Dejesus

Forget your free agent signings, which even the Yankees and their huge payroll space this year can't afford, really? It might surprise you to know that both of these players were each far and away more valuable than Cano this year, and Greinke is essentially a young ace. If you made a player who was 20x as valuable overall as Cano was this year, it still wouldn't be remotely fair. This is ridiculous.

And why does everyone want Khalil Greene? He sucks! If I'm the Padres I'm taking every one of these deals as fast as I can.

You never like a guy who gets old at age 25.

[Jigga]

Anyone can have a bad season. Khalil Greene's not great, but it's not like the guy is washed up. He's never going to be a high BA/OBP guy, but homeboy did go for 44 2B, 27 HR, and 97 RBI in 2007. Plus, he's not exactly kicking the ball around at short, he's an above average fielder at a critical defensive position.

[BaltimoreFan]

And why does everyone want Khalil Greene? He sucks! If I'm the Padres I'm taking every one of these deals as fast as I can.

He had a down year last year, but also Petco Park seems to kill him. His away numbers are actually very good for a shortstop (Career OPS Home: .658, Away: .802). He seems like a great guy to buy low. At first I really didn't want the O's to try and trade for him. However after taking a second look I think he's worth a try, especially if it only take Hayden Penn or Daniel Cabrera (similar high risk, high reward players).

[floydnimrod]

Trade

2B Robinson Cano to Kansas City for P Zach Greinke, and CF David Dejesus

Forget your free agent signings, which even the Yankees and their huge payroll space this year can't afford, really? It might surprise you to know that both of these players were each far and away more valuable than Cano this year, and Greinke is essentially a young ace. If you made a player who was 20x as valuable overall as Cano was this year, it still wouldn't be remotely fair. This is ridiculous.

And why does everyone want Khalil Greene? He sucks! If I'm the Padres I'm taking every one of these deals as fast as I can.

You never like a guy who gets old at age 25.

I put him in mine because the Reds are acutally interested in him, he would do well in Great American Ballpark, and he's above average defensively, and he'd be at the bottom of the lineup.

I also put Mulder in mine too, because rumor has it that Reds' GM Walt Joketty really likes Mulder. But it's mosty wishful thinking.

[gingerbreadmann]

Thing is, this year he was even worse on the road than at home(hence maybe he wouldn't do so well in your teams' parks). And judging by every other season since his almost-RoY campaign in '04, 2007 seems more like the outlier. And even then, he only had a .291 OBP and was only a league average hitter in 2007. He is certainly not a high-reward player either. I don't think he will hit over 20 home runs again, and you are guaranteed about a .300 OBP with maybe a .260 average, at best. Though he does play shortstop, where worse hitting is condoned far more than other positions due to its defensive difficulty and importance, and adjusting for Petco park, he is still a well-below average hitter even for a shortstop and I would absolutely argue no more than a slightly above-average defender, maybe even below average on defense.

I tell you what, he baffles me. As his prime goes on he gets worse. He will be 29 next year and roughly entering the 2nd half of his prime. And while there is chance of a rebound, I don't think he will be as bad next year as he was this year, the ceiling given his past stats is nothing special at all, and the chances of hitting his ceiling are quite small. In 5 seasons, he has had 2 very bad years, 1 awful year, 1 good year (his rookie year), and 1 average year. Given that his good year was the first year and farthest back, I am not optimistic. However, even if he returns to 2/3 of his ceiling it will be close enough average for a shortstop that maybe he can platoon or even start for a bad team. I think Cabrara is a lost cause personally, so that may be a trade I would do, but only because of Cabrera's failures.

This is an outstanding article on the relative collapse of Greene. He makes way better insights, comparisons, and predictions than I do.

Edit: I decided to look more into it myself. Let's take a peek.

Looks like Khalil lost two aspects of his game: Plate Discipline and Slugging. Mr. Greene saw his K% rise by 5% this year. Here is a visual, which I broke into home and away splits because that has been brought up:

Why this disparity happened between Home and Away, I have no idea, especially given his past trends. However, let's delve deeper into the K% increase. Khalil swung at 5% more pitches out of the strike zone, up to 35%, and even though his contact rate on balls and overall pitches went up, when you swing that many times you are going to miss a lot more. Plus, in 2007 he swung close to 5% more on both balls and strikes, so perhaps we should have seen this coming even though it didn't hurt his K rate or overall production in 2007. 2008 was just building on that, making it even worse. For some reason he has become a wild swinger and unless this trend reverses I don't see how his K rate improves at all. And with a 5% K rate increase your hitting stats are bound to go down.

Slugging coming in a bit, I'm being dragged in by this.

Alright, this where the completely insane part comes in. Partly it seems like luck is to blame, however it also partly seems like he lost it, as shown above, and I believe he fell just too much. Let's play with the luck aspect though, essentially his hitting the ball. When he wasn't striking out, Greene saw his BABIP drop 19 points to .262.

BABIP is largely considered to be a "luck" stat with little control from the hitter, and should even out at about .290-.300. Khalil has had a career average of about .280 or so, below average but not terrible. Now 19 points is a decent amount that it should definitely hurt you. .262 is definitely a bad showing and for simplicity let's say this was pure luck (which it wasn't). That sucks but BABIP fluctuation should not have a 2:1 impact on batting average itself -- that is, a 20 point drop in BABIP should not drop your AVG 40 points, in fact quite the inverse, maybe even 1:5 or so(total guess). Now here's why it's not luck. It would make sense that swinging at balls as much as he did would have another negative impact, no? So you miss more and the balls you hit are bound to be weaker. Double whammy. But there still are some missing pieces here. This is where it gets interesting, and mysterious. It still seems like his BABIP should have increased, not decreased. Even with his swinging wildly.

This is Khalil Greene's slugging percentage career graph. As you can see, it dropped a ridiculous amount in 2008. Obviously, if your Balls in Play don't fall and you don't make contact with balls and you swing at pitches out of he strike zone your Slugging will hurt, as well as your BA and OBP, etc. But it seems as if Khalil did improve one aspect of his game this year, and that is his batted ball types. Naturally, Line drives are more likely to fall in for hits and also, extra-base hits. They are hit harder than other balls and in the air, often in a gap. They also occur least often. Grounders, since they are hit hard as well, are also generally beneficial to a hitter. They occur more than liners, but not nearly as often as flies, which are almost always outs.

Here you can see that Khalil increased his Line Drive rate by an abnormal amount, 3% from about 17.5% to 20.5%. Not his GB% decreased at basically the same rate but any time you increase LD% by that much with flies essentially remaining the same, it's a very good thing. Especially given that he hit 27 home runs and slugged .468 a year before, he should improve on that even.

Here's the first problem. Why? Before we had a sensible conclusion that swinging at more bad pitches led his K% to increase dramatically, and hurt his BABIP because you generally hit bad pitches worse off the bat anyway. So why would he hit more line drives? I have no idea. Maybe there is an error in the data because his SLG% decreased so much, which would be consistent with our previous hypothesis, but I doubt it. It's obviously never perfect, but this is consistent and carefully entered play-by-play data we're talking about. But then why did his SLG% decrease when he hit so many more Liners? Again, I don't know. Maybe he hit them in all the wrong places, or something, but again I doubt it because of such a big increase. Maybe he just didn't hit things as far, because his Home Runs per Fly Ball decreased almost 5%, from 11.5% to 7%. Again, how does that happen? Why did his home and road tendencies flip? I never get to see the Pads so I'm not the most qualified to try to guess this answer. This is truly baffling. When his peripherals like swinging at balls increase like it does you expect it to have multiple repercussions, such as K rate and BABIP, which trickle down to the main numbers. But not that much. Like I said, it doesn't explain why his home-road tendencies flip. It doesn't explain why his LD% increased, or why his Slugging and such decreased so much in spite of that.

Don't get me wrong. Much of this is due to normal year-to-year fluctuations and normal regression, if he really is declining. But when you go behind the numbers and discover this insane stuff behind this huge collapse, it is a huge red flag for me. There is still a possibility that his 2008 was the statistical outlier to end all statistical outliers. None of this adds up, and as pointed out in the article I linked to this is a collapse of historic proportions. But given his past, he's not even a good hitter anyway. Maybe this is all luck and he will return to his normal simply below-average form, but even then he is 29 and maybe has 2 years of "prime" left. Remember, this guy's best year came when he was 25. So until he starts acting like a normal hitter and shows he can reverse his habits, you guys can have him. I'm not touching him.

Whew, sorry for the humongous post. It probably was just babbling nonsense to you guys. This is just fascinating stuff to me, I can't help it.

[See Red]

I'm not the biggest Khalil Greene fan, though at one point I wouldn't have minded seeing him in Boston. But the guy looks like he needs a permission slip to play night games.

[BaltimoreFan]

Thing is, this year he was even worse on the road than at home(hence maybe he wouldn't do so well in your teams' parks). And judging by every other season since his almost-RoY campaign in '04, 2007 seems more like the outlier. And even then, he only had a .291 OBP and was only a league average hitter in 2007. He is certainly not a high-reward player either.

He was better than the crap the O's put out at SS last season. I'm not his biggest fan. If the O's get him, I still hope they also find a young SS prospect to eventually take over. All I'm really saying is that if all it take to get him is either Daniel Cabrera or Hayden Penn (two pitchers who don't seem to have a future in Baltimore anyway), then its worth the risk. Worst case scenario, he sucks and you let him walk in free agency.