Speculations

Outrageous Steals and Rip-offs

The rookie draft featured a number of amazing purchases. Among them:

Rip-offs

Javier Baez (11,000): Javy is looking a lot like Mike Olt, to me. Hope I’m wrong.

Daniel Norris (10,500): Don’t get me wrong, this is a good pitcher. He was high on my list too. But $10.5M for a guy who lives in a trailer?

Steven Sousa (8,250): This is just an average player. Way too much. I wanted to draft him, but only to trade him for the two guys that Washington got back.

Steals

Arismendy Alcantara (2,000): This guy is going to be a star. Just you wait.

Garin Cecchini (2,000): If he gets traded out of Boston, he will be a bargain for the Pears.

Alex Guerrero (500): Same as Cecchini, only more so. If the Dodgers trade him away, the Wolverines will have the last laugh on the rest of us.

Who did you think was a rip-off or a steal?

5 Comments

  • I think your “steals” are all wrong. In my opinion, aside from Guerrero, those guys aren’t great For the price paid. Alcantara at least should have some Utility function. Norris and Souza are paid correctly. I wouldn’t have gone with Baez in the 1st round, but if he can decrease his strikeouts, that won’t be a bad pick.

    Steal of the draft might be Foltyniwicz, traded for Gattis.

  • What I like most about Foltynewicz was how the Tornadoes found out they could get Gattis that way AFTER outbidding 7/8ths of their competitors.

    I will defend the Alcantara Caper as a brilliant move by the Cheese to defend their position as favorites for the championship. Not only did they get a potentially useful utility player cheap, they prevented anyone else from getting the mighty Rusney Castillo. Also — wasn’t having this story to tell to stony-faced lunchtime companions today worth something in itself? Almost as good as getting Castillo, I’d guess.

    I am worried about Baez, too. He struck out 95 times in 229 PA last season — that would be 248 times if he got 600 PA. No one has ever succeeded striking out that often.

    I am also worried about Shane Greene. I thought Ryan would use my pick for Castillo or Heaney or maybe steal away my precious G. Polanco. I didn’t see Greene as being at that level. But here’s the glory of the internet! Ryan can defend his pick his own self!

    Finally — the other possible steal in my eyes was the Pears’ pick of Michael Taylor. I thought he was nearly as good as Polanco, whom I was happy to nab at $8.5 million. Taylor might even be better by 2019.

    • Oh yeah, Greene. I missed that one. Totally agree with you, Ron. I would have picked Polanco (for whom you paid a fair price) or Castillo instead. Not Heaney. He was a Cheese last year, and we know too much about him.

  • Those Pears may have made a couple more steals than we recognized at the time.

    1. Remember the trade of Anthony Gose for some guy I’d never heard of named Devon Travis? I just saw this on MLBTraderumors:

    Blue Jays infielder Maicer Izturis may miss the start of the season, reports Jim Hawkins for MLB.com. Izturis, who was competing for the open second base job, is sidelined with a pulled groin. The Jays also lost veteran infielder Ramon Santiago to a broken collarbone last weekend. The injuries have improved the outlook for prospect Devon Travis. He was acquired from the Tigers in exchange for outfielder Anthony Gose. Per manager John Gibbons, if Travis earns the job, he won’t be platooned.

    2. Remember the mysterious late pick of some guy named Jesus Aguilar whom I had never noticed or heard of despite having manipulated his name several times while setting up for the draft? His spring training batting line:

    27 AB, 11 H, .407, .414, .630.

    CBS and BP don’t list Aguilar on their Indians depth chart, and Fangraphs had him as a fourth-string first baseman in Cleveland. But Rotoworld lists him as second string, behind only Carlos Santana, and says Aguilar “should be on display in the majors at some point this year.”

    I don’t know if these are steals so much as undeclared contraband smuggled through customs.