a700hitter

Merrily I Troll Along.

They look nothing alike. One is left handed and the other is a righty.

This is a great troll effort by Slasher. He even sucked in the mod. I am out on this one. I am going to look for metrics that prove that Todd Benzinger > Yaz.

That Clay is as valuable as Price -- if that is your inference.

We need more afternoon games.

Just say "no mas" and give up the silly argument.

Psst, calm down. We can expose the foolishness of his argument with dispassionate logic. p.s. I feel your frustration.

I blame Theo for that. It was clear going into September that the pitching rotation was in a shambles and reinforcements were needed. We just needed to get someone to give us one good start to prevent that collapse. He sat on his hands and the collapse happened.

Less than a handful of starts proves nothing. Nothing.

Where did you read that? I have said that the best way to maximize his value would have been to pick up his option and then trade him? Don't make up stuff.

If it is known to be very imprecise and therefore unreliable, I am not so sure that it is better. Did you need to look at any metrics to conclude that Price is more valuable than Buch? Have you found any metrics that have contradicted that evaluation? I think the answer to both is probably "no".

And David Ortiz has struck out several times this season just as Christian Vasquez has. Nothing can be concluded from that either.

There are so many contingencies and dynamics involved with baseball performance, roster building and roster budgeting, that any attempts to value any of it are woefully imprecise.

That is right, and that is how you compare players. They are not even close to the type of assets that can be evaluated with ROI.

Some are close to that. This Buch vs. Price discussion isn't far off.

If Price pitches to Buch's numbers, he will be 50% better, because Buch only pitches half of a season.

This makes what point?

Okay, so it was a meaningless remark that you passed as part of the discussion without meaning to compare the two. Okay, thank you for clarifying.

Francona is my all time favorite manager.

You just equated them again. Do Yankee fans go to school? They cannot be equated in any meaningful way. Maybe you just meant to equate them in a meaningless way?

Back in Spring Training after seeing Sam Travis who was clearly going to be the Pawtucket first baseman, I said that the Red Sox should just release Craig and eat the money as there was no spot for him. Now, there might be a spot for him. A lot of things had to go wrong since Spring Training to open up a major league outfield spot. The Red Sox have opted to put a catcher in LF. I don't see any other better opportunity that could develop to give Craig a shot, so they might as well send him on his way.

No it doesn't. Most fans are not sabremetric nerds who bury themselves in advanced stats that convince them that Todd Benzinger was better than Carl Yastrzemski.

There is one way to compare Price to Buchholz. If you are the manager and you have to hand the ball to one of the two, which one do you pick? Every other measure of "value" and "ROI" is nothing more than blather and mumbo jumbo. Building a team is not exactly like building a portfolio of assets. There are so many other factors and dynamics at play. When building a portfolio of financial investment assets, there is no possibility of one asset making the other asset perform better or worse as is often the case with players. There is no ballpark factor. Camaraderie is not a factor. In purchasing a financial asset, no one would overpay for one asset because he got other assets below market value. Baseball teams with lots of cost controlled players like the Red Sox will have more budgetary flexibility to pay more for a big ticket player. That doesn't happen in financial business. Also, a big market rich guy would never pay more for a stock or security than would a small investor like me. This happens all the time in baseball. Applying these financial measures like ROI to try to determine definitively which players are more valuable is silly as they don't fit when measuring human capital. There is one measure that is definitive. Ask who you would want to hand the ball. The answer will tell you which guy is more valuable.

Craig isn't going to walk away from any of it. Zero.

Only a fool would equate Price with Buchholz, but then again there are Yankee fans.