2006-07 MLB Offseason Thread

[EVIL~! alkeiper 0]

Except of course for the 1900s and 1910s. THOSE were the true Dark Ages. Babe Ruth was the Renaissance.

[CanadianChris 0]

The 80's were the only decade the Yankees didn't win a championship.

Not for lack of trying. They only went below 85 wins once from 1980-88. As NYankees already mentioned, in 1987 they finished fourth in the AL East with a record that would have won the AL West. And they won 97 games in 1985 and finished second.

 

The real down period was 1989-92, when they had four straight losing seasons for the first time since 1912-15.

[Guest NYankees]

Was fox right in firing Steve Lyons? I didn't hear his comments during the course of the game and I only read a transcript.

[Brett Favre 0]

I read the comments too, and you'd have to make a pretty big leap from that to that. He's not that good to begin with, but they shouldn't have fired him for that.

[Guest Felonies!]

It's official, Cubs signed Piniella. Worse yet, Rothschild was rehired as pitching coach. I can't fucking believe it. Our local-born, Northwestern-educated, former Cub, NL Manager of the Year inexplicably falls in our lap, OUR FUCKING LAP, and fat fuck Hendry turns around and signs Mr. Temper Tantrum. Does he think he's gonna be our Jim Leyland? Jesus Christ himself couldn't be this team's Jim Leyland. What a farce of an organization.

[Brett Favre 0]

If Girardi doesn't get the job in Washington, he'll probably become the Yankee bench coach.

 

I can't believe Ken Macha is getting fired. Out of nowhere.

[snuffbox 0]

That's too bad about the Cubs.

[Cheech Tremendous 0]

Buster Olney said in his chat today that neither the Red Sox nor the Yankees would get into the bidding for Zito, Matsuzaka or Schmidt? Now I know to take everything Buster says with a grain of salt, but come on. The two biggest spending teams, both with a tremendous need for starting pitching, aren't going after the only reliable arms on the market?

[Brett Favre 0]

I heard the Yankees don't like Schmidt, and aren't really going hard after Zito, but they are going after Matsuzaka.

[Cheech Tremendous 0]

I can't believe Ken Macha is getting fired. Out of nowhere.

 

I'm not surprised that Ken Macha is getting fired. On one hand, the team outperformned its pythagorean record considerably this year, which I usually see as a sign of a good manager. However, he's made a lot of poor decisions for the team and has struggled as an in-game manager. He also has a poor repoire with the players.

 

Just because a team has gotten deep into the playoffs does not mean the manager has done a good job. Look at Grady Little with the Sox in '03. He would have been fired the second that season ended whether they won the World Series or not. Sometimes you just have to make a change if you think the team needs it.

[CanadianChris 0]

It's official, Cubs signed Piniella. Worse yet, Rothschild was rehired as pitching coach. I can't fucking believe it. Our local-born, Northwestern-educated, former Cub, NL Manager of the Year inexplicably falls in our lap, OUR FUCKING LAP, and fat fuck Hendry turns around and signs Mr. Temper Tantrum. Does he think he's gonna be our Jim Leyland? Jesus Christ himself couldn't be this team's Jim Leyland. What a farce of an organization.

How does Hendry still have a job when pretty much everyone else got cleared out?

[Bored 0]

Macha hasn't been fired, yet. Remember last offseason he was effectively gone when him and the A's couldn't agree on a new contract but when he couldn't land a job elsewhere he came back. I've never been a fan of his but I'm not a fan of most managers. Part of me wants him back just so I don't have to hear from other A's fans on how they'll commit mass suicide if Ron Washington, their 3rd base coach, isn't hired as his replacement.

[Guest Paul]

Ummm, yeah. Macha is fired.

[Guest Felonies!]

It's official, Cubs signed Piniella. Worse yet, Rothschild was rehired as pitching coach. I can't fucking believe it. Our local-born, Northwestern-educated, former Cub, NL Manager of the Year inexplicably falls in our lap, OUR FUCKING LAP, and fat fuck Hendry turns around and signs Mr. Temper Tantrum. Does he think he's gonna be our Jim Leyland? Jesus Christ himself couldn't be this team's Jim Leyland. What a farce of an organization.

How does Hendry still have a job when pretty much everyone else got cleared out?

MacPhail gave him an extension before the season started and then quit on the team (or was tacitly fired by Fitzsimons, idunnoyoutellme), so now we're saddled with the idiot who broke the bank for Glendon Rusch whilst Andy will probably be the commissioner of baseball by 2008. HE IS BASEBALL ROYALTY IN CASE YOU DID NOT KNOW.

 

As distressing as the idea of Lou Piniella running this team is, the silver lining is that at least he won't be running the North Side Country Club like his predecessor. And the downfall to THAT is that Aramis Ramirez, who tends to stretch doubles into singles, is probably shitting himself as we speak at the prospect of some crazy old man yelling at him for not hustling on the bases, and is now really likely to bail on us. Jacque Jones and Scott Eyre are as good as gone, since Jacque takes enough shit from the fans for throwing like a girl without his manager giving him a rough time, and Eyre is a Dusty boy who came here because he wouldn't have to work hard.

 

It's gonna be hard to turn around the character of this clubhouse from Baker's to Piniella's, though. Mark Prior, perfect example. After Kerry Wood got hurt, he made sure to do the rounds with the media to reiterate how terrible he felt about letting the team and city down by not keeping himself healthy, and offered to take a pay cut to work as a reliever for the Cubs and see if he can help make up for it that way. I haven't heard a thing from Prior. Had he even been traveling with the team at the end? I never saw him in the dugout. I'm afraid he's gonna get raked over the coals for not pitching through pain, and as soon as Sweet Lou tries to get his ass in gear, Mark will be on the next flight to LAX to sit out the rest of his contract. (It wouldn't be anything new; he's basically done this the last two years.)

 

And sticking with the pitching thing, Larry Rothschild, a Hendry guy, still hasn't been purged either. We thought he was gone, but here he is, rehired to fuck up our staff yet again. My theory is that Jumbo Jim kept him from bolting to the Tigers by promising to never let him go.

[Bruiser Chong 0]

Hearing Lou in the booth shook my confidence in him.

 

That said, this another case of Hendry and the organization going for the quick fix. A team that lost 96 games this year realistically thinks they'll compete next year. What an inept organization.

[Guest Felonies!]

What this is, is another case of Hendry not having a real plan. He just tries to mimic whoever won, but mimics the wrong things. The White Sox won with pitching, obviously, but Joe Buck said they won with Scott Podsednik's basestealing, so Jim decides the Cubs are going to win with speed by trading the farm for one year of Juan Pierre. (Meanwhile, someone reminds Kenny Williams that it's only like 320 down the lines in Comiskey, so they get Jim Thome and become a home run juggernaut; Podsednik becomes such a nonfactor that they're running him out of town, and though they finished third, which Ozzie blames on not playing Ozzieball, they still finish better than the Cubs.) Jim was watching Sportscenter one night back in like April and saw Jim Leyland bitch out the Tigers for slacking, and thinks that they won because of their firebrand skipper, and not their pitching. DO YOU SEE A TREND DEVELOPING?

[devo 0]

 

I can't stop laughing at It's American! Man I miss Bobby Valentine.

[Guest NYankees]

What happened to all of his grey hair? Must be the Japanese diet.

[Cheech Tremendous 0]

Was just reading somewhere that Bud Selig wants to change the formatting of the playoffs. The Wild Card teams would only get one home game in the division series instead of the two that they have now. Second, they want to add as many as three off days into the postseason schedule so that the World Series starts on a Tuesday instead of Saturday (per the new contract with Fox). Both are huge mistakes, at least in my opinion.

 

In other news, the head of Player Evaluation/Development for the Cleveland Indians was hired away as the new pitching coach for the Boston Red Sox. Seems to have a great track record with player evaluation and was highly regarded in Cleveland. Maybe he's the savior that every Sawx fan has been clamoring for.

[randomguy 0]

Is it just me or does that burger have a slice or pineapple on it?

 

Anyway about the As...another team put together to do well in the regular season. I love hearing Billy Beane complain every year about how post-season baseball is all luck. The fact is the calibre of teams you face in the post-season is different, and sometimes a team geared towards winning in the regular season just can't get it done in the post season.

 

For the As a lot of that is fundamental errors that are magnified. Not sliding, not running, being slow, mental errors, fielding mistakes, etc. Things that don't matter a lot when you are facing a poor team. The Yankees are the same way - poor fielding, average baserunning, average pitching and a lineup that can victimize poor pitching but is much worse against good pitching.

 

The As have a lineup that is ok against average pitching and very poor against good pitching. And while they have good depth at starting pitching they don't have the one or two aces you need.

 

It's like in football in a close game special teams might make the difference, but in a rout it really doesn't matter. In the post-season those small things can come up big. And the As are consistently terrible at the little things.

[Guest NYankees]

Was just reading somewhere that Bud Selig wants to change the formatting of the playoffs. The Wild Card teams would only get one home game in the division series instead of the two that they have now. Second, they want to add as many as three off days into the postseason schedule so that the World Series starts on a Tuesday instead of Saturday (per the new contract with Fox). Both are huge mistakes, at least in my opinion.

 

In other news, the head of Player Evaluation/Development for the Cleveland Indians was hired away as the new pitching coach for the Boston Red Sox. Seems to have a great track record with player evaluation and was highly regarded in Cleveland. Maybe he's the savior that every Sawx fan has been clamoring for.

 

I think baseball should make winning the division more important than winning a wild card. There have so far been 4 wild cards to win the world series and Detroit is making a strong case for number 5.

[Cheech Tremendous 0]

Anyway about the As...another team put together to do well in the regular season. I love hearing Billy Beane complain every year about how post-season baseball is all luck. The fact is the calibre of teams you face in the post-season is different, and sometimes a team geared towards winning in the regular season just can't get it done in the post season.

 

Well, a lot of the postseason IS about luck, but getting beat 4-0 has nothing to do with luck. There is a great chapter in Baseball Between the Numbers that explains the reasons why the A's teams of the early 00's routinely came up short in the playoffs. Not only are these failures well-documented, but Beane understood them and has restructured the teams since then so that they can compete in the regular and postseasons.

 

The A's have a poor lineup, and they got about as far as they could with it. Beane is never going to be able to add a huge bat to the lineup on the FA market, so in reality they will always have to punch and judy their way to scoring runs.

 

For the As a lot of that is fundamental errors that are magnified. Not sliding, not running, being slow, mental errors, fielding mistakes, etc. Things that don't matter a lot when you are facing a poor team. The Yankees are the same way - poor fielding, average baserunning, average pitching and a lineup that can victimize poor pitching but is much worse against good pitching.

 

The As have a lineup that is ok against average pitching and very poor against good pitching. And while they have good depth at starting pitching they don't have the one or two aces you need.

 

It's like in football in a close game special teams might make the difference, but in a rout it really doesn't matter. In the post-season those small things can come up big. And the As are consistently terrible at the little things.

 

This is not true. The A's probably have the best all-around defense in all of the major leagues. They have above average defenders everywhere on the field. This team is consistently good at the little things, but as I stated before (and you mentioned as well), they just don't have the hitting to compete against some of the AL powers. The pitching is also very good (mostly because of the defense, and partly because of the ballpark), but the management of the staff is not. That's one of the reasons why Macha is no longer with the team.

[Annabelle 0]

macha was fired out of nowhere? dude was fired last off-season. why are we surprised? sounds like kenny wasn't a player's manager & roasted their beans on a lot of issues, like the legitimacy of their injuries & such. good riddance. ron washington will get the job. surprised they didn't announce it already, honestly. joe girardi would kinda be nice to see. but really, either him or washington would be swell.

 

the only way billy beane is responsible for macha's firing is that he called for it. the play on the field & the team fielded was perfectly acceptable.

[tominator89 0]

Phils add three new coaches

Howe, Lopes and Williams to assist Manuel in 2007

By Ken Mandel / MLB.com

 

PHILADELPHIA -- If manager Charlie Manuel wanted to add experience to his coaching staff, he did that in a big way on Monday.

 

Manuel announced the hiring of a trio of coaches who have big-league managing experience in Art Howe, Davey Lopes and Jimy Williams. Like Manuel, all three are on contracts that will expire at the end of the 2007 season.

 

"We've added three guys with a tremendous amount of experience," said Manuel. "I expect them to have a very positive effect on our team."

 

Howe, 59, will coach third base and serve as infield instructor, two roles handled by Bill Dancy for the past two seasons. It will be Howe's first time back in uniform since 2004, his final season as manager of the Mets. He spent the 2006 season as a part-time postgame analyst for Astros games on FOX Sports Southwest and as a correspondent for MLB.com.

 

Howe has also served as first-base, third-base and dugout coach for the Rangers, 1985-88, and was the Rockies' hitting instructor in 1995. His managerial record is 1,129-1,137 (.498) combined with the Astros (1989-93), A's (1996-2002) and Mets (2003-04).

 

Lopes, 61, will coach first base and serve as an outfield/baserunning instructor, an area that Manuel had wanted to improve. The hope is that he'll help turn the speedy Shane Victorino into a more polished base stealer. Victorino had worked with Maury Wills while with the Dodgers and said at the end of the season that he would welcome further assistance.

 

Lopes, who swiped 557 bases and scored 1,023 runs in a 16-year Major League career, had that dual role with the Nationals last season. The Nationals stole 123 bases, tied for fourth-most in the NL. Lopes spent parts of three seasons managing the Brewers (2000-02) and coached with the Padres, Orioles and Rangers.

 

The 63-year-old Williams takes over for Gary Varsho as bench coach, returning to Major League coaching for the first time since 1996. He spent last season as a roving instructor for the Devil Rays. Williams served as Atlanta's third-base coach, and managed the Red Sox (1997-2001) and Astros (2002-2004).

 

Williams also has a history with Pat Gillick, having served as Toronto's manager from 1986-89. He was replaced during the 1989 season with Cito Gaston, the only time Gillick has made an in-season managerial change.

 

This completes Manuel's 2007 staff. Pitching coach Rich Dubee, hitting coach Milt Thompson, bullpen coach Ramon Henderson and catching instructor Mick Billmeyer had already been retained.

[Guest Felonies!]

Does it really matter THAT much if a wild card wins the World Series? Does it really delegitimize the championship? The Steelers went 11-5, got the lowest seed, won the Super Bowl, but nobody* claimed that the Vince Lombardi trophy has been irreparably tarnished by the victory of the Pittsburgh Steelers. The 2002 Lakers won a world championship as a 3 seed, the '95* Rockets as a 6, and the NBA survived. Look at the countless teams that go on Stanley Cup runs after average seasons; it's practically annual. Wild card teams in baseball are just as, if not more, qualified to make and subsequently win the playoffs as their division-winning brethren. Eight teams out of thirty over 162 games successfully culls the undeserving from October play. You're not going to get a '91 North Stars in baseball. The system is fine as it is. Don't change it.

 

1*Maybe Bill Plaschke did.

2*Or was it '94? Nobody remembers the Inter-Bulls years.

[randomguy 0]

If they don't want the wild card to win they shouldn't have a wild card.

 

Anyway, about the As and their defense, they do have a very solid defense. But the As always seem to make these mental errors, including defensive errors, at key moments. I don't know what to attribute that to other than the makeup of the players and the overall tone of the clubhouse or something like that...

 

Obviously the best example of these blunders is Giambi not sliding then the next day Tejada not running, forcing the umpires to call him out. (According to the rules if he had a reasonable chance of making it and was interfered with he should be awarded the base, but because he stopped running he didn't have a chance of making it) and of course there is also the dude who got angry and pushed the catcher instead of touching the plate in what was the stupidest play I've ever seen in MLB. (against the Red Sox IIRC, had 15 seconds to touch home and instead got all angry and shoved people then was tagged out)

 

In the game I watched against the Tigers Payton had a ball bounce in front of him then off of about 3 different body parts (rather comically) and Chavez threw the ball into the stands.

 

They are their own worst enemies. Again it is hard to say why.

[Annabelle 0]

i bet if there was no wild card, they tigers still would have made the playoffs. they took the last week off because they knew they has clinched.

[Guest NYankees]

If they don't want the wild card to win they shouldn't have a wild card.

 

Anyway, about the As and their defense, they do have a very solid defense. But the As always seem to make these mental errors, including defensive errors, at key moments. I don't know what to attribute that to other than the makeup of the players and the overall tone of the clubhouse or something like that...

 

Obviously the best example of these blunders is Giambi not sliding then the next day Tejada not running, forcing the umpires to call him out. (According to the rules if he had a reasonable chance of making it and was interfered with he should be awarded the base, but because he stopped running he didn't have a chance of making it) and of course there is also the dude who got angry and pushed the catcher instead of touching the plate in what was the stupidest play I've ever seen in MLB. (against the Red Sox IIRC, had 15 seconds to touch home and instead got all angry and shoved people then was tagged out)

 

In the game I watched against the Tigers Payton had a ball bounce in front of him then off of about 3 different body parts (rather comically) and Chavez threw the ball into the stands.

 

They are their own worst enemies. Again it is hard to say why.

 

You are thinking of Eric Byrnes in the home plate play.

[The Man in Blak 0]

I think the only thing I'd like to change about the system would be the unbalanced schedule, which induces many of the aspects of the playoffs that folks complain about, in my opinion. Interdivisional games already have enough meaning on their own - why weigh the schedule so heavily with them and turn lousy teams in mediocre divisions into possible playoff contenders (i.e. NL Central and West)?

 

Obviously, you can't really balance interleague play, due to the small number of games, but leveling the playing field for the rest of the games may give us a more accurate indication of who the real elite teams are when September rolls around.

[Guest Felonies!]

Well, there are financial implications to that, too. You probably want to have more games against rivals. Have you seen Miller Park when the Cubs or Cardinals aren't in town? That's mostly why Selig stuck his Brewers in the National League.