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Omer Asik and Jeremy Lin, especially the latter. Lin's was backloaded, but it was backloaded such that it would have cost the Knicks an enormous amount of luxury tax and hamstrung their franchise. Those deals are created by the accounting practices of the NBA, though. The offering team can account ...

I'm having De ja vu, lol. Front-loaded is better (and more realistic) than backloaded. That said, if someone had offered a contract like Baca's (52M year 1 to 21M year 2 is almost a 250% drop, lol) to one of his own home grown players I might've raised an eyebrow, but that's just the nature of the ...

7teen wrote:Gonna go out on a limb and say that I'd be surprised if Savage is wearing a Yellow Springs Nine uniform next season.

Nothing is impossible, said Heisenberg to the Empire State Building.

After hearing the results of the MBWBA's annual Rule 6 draft, Nine fans are suddenly salivating at the idea of an outfield that pairs 22-year-old superstar Luis Bacca with 23-year-old slugger Alfredo "Savage" Salazar . The team made Salazar, who has been a star for the Brussels organization, the fir...

bschr682 wrote: I can afford to give him more than 50...

Here's me not counting unhatched chickens.

7teen wrote:Losing out on the drafting rights to Salazar bothers me more than anything about giving Yellow Springs the #1 pick with Avery's tanking.

I understand that, and I sympathize ... but not enough to keep from making the selection.

What a series!

bschr682 wrote:Yellow springs prepare to be poison pilled! Mwahahaha

I suppose I can always just let the other guy pay $50M for Savage if need be.

bigmike13 wrote:It was a very tough choice, but I went with California. I just believe in the old axiom that good pitching trumps good hitting.

Well, it's always been known to hold true, except when the hitters beat the pitchers.

If having the two teams in the Landis with the two lowest win-loss records in the playoffs wasn’t a big enough story AC's being a WC team caught my fancy, but this statement never dawned on me. If there was ever a bigger indicator of the randomness of the playoffs... lol. It's baseball that's the r...

“Why do I keep getting the same message from Mr, Little every time I open my email client?” new general manager RonCo says one day at a lunch he’s having with Kierra Washington, the team owner’s personal assistant. She halts, looks at RonCo, and dabs a crumb of her cob salad from the corner of her l...

Because we draw more



????

Injuries cast aside the best laid plans.

Nothing like having the best franchise in the league in your division.

The other "playoff economics" thing to think about is that when it takes only 82-84 games to get into the playoffs, a team that is sitting at 75 games looks at the guys they have and thinks "I'm only 6 games out of the playoffs. I can make that up in Free Agency, so rather than I move my solid piece...

Oddly, IMHO, while there's an obvious sweet-spot, fewer playoff slots makes for hotter trade markets...perhaps partially because playoff spots are rarer and therefore more valuable. That depends what you consider a "hotter trade market". 15 teams all competing against each other to sell pieces to 5...

My hypothesis is that it's the mid-level teams who decide they can't win who make the most interesting trades at the deadline. They are the teams who have perhaps the aging stars they held onto, or good players that got caught out on a team that got struck by injury or whatever...they are also (in o...

This does, however, require the lower-level teams to actually be paying attention at the deadline.

Though part of me says that HALF the teams in the league making the playoffs really is too much, even if I'd personally prefer that extra shot at getting in. More teams "in it" means more teams looking to buy at the deadline*, more teams writing TNs about the playoff push, etc. Nothing worse than h...