2012-13 MLB Off-Season Thread

[The_Admiral]

The Tigers sign a lot of black guys. I'm calling a civic leader about this.

[BrySmalls]

Tampa Bay's (AL) David Price and New York Mets' (NL) R.A. Dickey have won the Cy Young Award in their respective Leagues.

[jkrdevil]

If Jeffrey Loria owned an NHL team, Hurricanes/Lightning/Coyotes/Panthers fans on the internet would just say he needs cost certainty to be a job creator, lol

The NHL has (and looks like will keep) a salary floor to prevent a Loria from happening

[pmoehrin]

If Jeffrey Loria owned an NHL team, Hurricanes/Lightning/Coyotes/Panthers fans on the internet would just say he needs cost certainty to be a job creator, lol

The NHL has (and looks like will keep) a salary floor to prevent a Loria from happening

Well that's the thing with Major League Baseball. If your owner who's looking at his team first and foremost as a source of income, baseball is the best sport to do it because you have the most freedom over how much you can spend or not spend on your players.

The one silver lining with this if there is any is I'm sure there's multiple player agents, union reps, owners, club executives asking Bud Selig what the hell is going on down in South Florida. Right now the Marlins are getting outspent by the A's by a several million dollars. The '92 A's. When your getting outspent by what's regarded as small market club from 20 years ago? That's pathetic. But that's Jeffrey Loria for you. Maybe the Marlins will become the first team since the Expos to draw under 1 million fans.

[The_Admiral]

If Jeffrey Loria owned an NHL team, Hurricanes/Lightning/Coyotes/Panthers fans on the internet would just say he needs cost certainty to be a job creator, lol

The NHL has (and looks like will keep) a salary floor to prevent a Loria from happening

And impending blank-check, no-strings-attached revenue sharing to overcome that.

[dfwabel]

Marlins President David Samson recorded an interview with Dan Lebatard today about the trade.

The transcript is here. You can hear it at theticketmiami.com

Samson will be on-air live with Lebatard tomorrow afternoon for his regular segment.

[tBBP]

The Tigers sign a lot of black guys. I'm calling a civic leader about this.

They only get one phone call a day in jail.

[NEW.ERA]

Why do I think Selig will disallow this trade, for some reason. Insiders say he's not happy with it.

[rams80]

Why do I think Selig will disallow this trade, for some reason. Insiders say he's not happy with it.

Is anyone who isn't affiliated with the Blue Jays happy with this trade?

[NJTank]

Because Bud Selig likes screwing the Blue Jays

[Kramerica Industries]

There's no basis to disallow this trade, because there is nothing legally wrong with it.

Sure, you could say it is disallowed to give the giant F U to Loria and Co., but it's also giving the same inadvertent F U to AA and the Blue Jays, and they haven't done anything that isn't permissible within MLB.

To phrase it another way - if the Alex Rodriguez trade wasn't vetoed, then Selig cannot veto anything, ever again.

[Lights Out]

Why do I think Selig will disallow this trade, for some reason. Insiders say he's not happy with it.

Because it makes the rest of the division too much of a threat to Bud's beloved Yankees and Saux.

To phrase it another way - if the Alex Rodriguez trade wasn't vetoed, then Selig cannot veto anything, ever again.

Or, alternatively, since Bud allowed Loria to completely destroy the Expos franchise and ruin Montreal as a baseball market, he can't stop Loria from doing anything ever again.

[pmoehrin]

I'm hoping the trade gets knocked down.

If Reyes, Buehrle and Johnson were all making $2 million a season, they would still be in Miami right now. I don't think anyone has any doubt about that. So what that tells me is this deal was/is not about getting younger or building for the future, its about dumping salary. Now if there some type of insurance out that the Marlins were planning to invest in different players it would be a different story. But there is nothing about Jeffrey Loria's history that would even remotely suggest that is his plan.

Loria's problem is that he can no longer say he is in a market that can't support a major league team. If he does then he is also admitting that it was a bad idea to build the stadium in the first place. And they know that as well, so its going to be pretty fun watching the Marlins PR department go through gymnastics in order to try and justify the trade. Nobody is going to believe this trade happened for any other reason then Jeffrey Loria doesn't want spend money on what has a good chance to be a losing team, but they are going to try to convince people otherwise anyway.

[rmackman]

This is rather amusing. The Marlins trade got some Taiwanese animation treatment. Read the subtitles:

Also, an article by Miami Herald writer Dan LeBatard:

Miami Marlins and fans: a history of mistrust

And so the howling begins anew, angry and redundant, ripping raw those old wounds. At some point, you just imagine the enraged consumers collapsing to the ground en masse, exhausted from the sustained screaming. Hostility and distrust are so very wearying, and South Florida’s baseball fans have been carrying them like a crucifix for about a decade.

It is like the Miami Marlins don’t know they are in the emotion business, which makes them either incredibly cold or totally incompetent. Either way, it feels today like our poor city helped build a bejeweled cathedral for false prophets in search of false profits.

The Marlins, playing in a publicly funded playground for less than one year, just shipped away almost all of their stars in what feels like an act of betrayal, figuring there are cheaper ways to finish in last place. They run their business with little regard for customers or public relations or decency. The players/employees are cattle. The customers are suckers. And the checks keep cashing, now more than ever.

That might be the most galling thing about this transaction. Buffoon owner Jeffrey Loria profits from being meddlesome, greedy, incompetent and despicable. He is being rewarded once you get past all the angry noise, with an ATM we helped him build in Little Havana. Loria, who is George Steinbrenner without the money, has never been worth more than he is worth today ... because tax dollars and that new ballpark increased the value of his team so much, a team that now doesn’t have that many expenses.

Loria was out in front of all the cameras when the ballpark was about to open, taking a lot of pictures with his monument, dragging a shaking and sad Muhammad Ali into his look-at-me on Opening Day. But he goes into deep hiding now, away from all the questions. You can find him in that empty place where other humans might keep a conscience.

The most stable thing about this franchise over the last decade of mismanagement? Management, oddly enough. The team that sits atop this organization, making the failed decisions, would have been unemployed several years ago in just about any other market, under any other owner. But why would Loria fire these people? They make him profit. They got him a ballpark. And, in times like this, when he’s in hiding, they go out in front of the cameras to become the piñatas for him.

What this franchise just did feels like the sports equivalent of a Ponzi scheme, a crime against the spirit of sports. No wonder South Florida is only passionate about baseball when we are winning the World Series or experiencing an abomination like this, with no in-between. We’d fill that new ballpark today in a way we didn’t during the season, standing-room only, if there was a way for our outrage to be seated.

We have an abusive, dysfunctional relationship with baseball here. The team needs our financial support. But it doesn’t have our financial support because it does things like this. So it does things like this because we withhold our financial support. It is, in baseball, the wrong kind of cycle. No new ballpark has ever drawn as poorly as ours did. So payroll gets slashed. So, too, do allegiances.

Very few franchises, any sport, any time, leave so many befuddled parents trying to explain to generations of crying kids why their favorite player has again been traded. Sports tends to be hand-me-downed through a family, across generations, fandom passed like an heirloom. What is getting hand-me-downed here is contaminated, a genetic illness, a viral strain.

The Boston Red Sox hit the reset button last season, trading away so many of their expensive stars, but there is trust in that market — trust that the baseball team will try, trust that it will reinvest. Here? The distrust is caked on the franchise in so many layers that it doesn’t even matter today that an argument can be made that getting Toronto’s cheap farm-system jewels in exchange for Miami’s expensive last-place stars isn’t a terrible business or baseball strategy when taking a wrecking ball to an obviously failed and expensive blueprint.

But here’s the problem: You don’t trust the people who run the Marlins to tell you the truth, to get the right players, to do their job competently. Seeing as how they traded 29-year-old Triple Crown winner Miguel Cabrera for a whole lot of nothing — it is, no hyperbole, the single worst trade in the history of our most historic sport — you don’t trust anything from their acumen to their character. How can you? And, if by some small miracle they do get it right, as they did with Giancarlo Stanton, you don’t trust them to keep said player once he gets expensive.

A year ago, the vision was that Josh Johnson, Mark Buerhle, Jose Reyes, Emilio Bonafacio, John Buck, Omar Infante, Heath Bell, Anibel Sanchez, Hanley Ramirez and Ozzie Guillen were going to the playoffs. Now, every single one of them is as gone as what little remained of South Florida’s trust.

Read more here: http://www.miamihera...l#storylink=cpy

[rmackman]

Here is part 1 and 2 of Dan LeBatard interviewing Marlins president David Sampson on the radio:

[ninersdd]

Posey wins NL MVP!

[The Six]

Two championships, ROTY, the batting title, and a MVP in the span of three years. And one of those years he had his leg snapped in two. What a man.

[McCall]

Posey wins NL MVP!

Shocking.

[rmackman]

Posey wins NL MVP!

Shocking.

What's shocking is Ryan Braun finished second. I fully expected the writers' bias about the whole PED thing to vote him last place. I'm sure there was still some bias in there, but not as much as I thought there would be.

[Still MIGHTY]

You're still my MVP Mike Trout...