Matty

How often can you get a 3 WAR shortstop under contract for 8-9 million dollars?  How many 3 WAR SSs are there right now in all of baseball...and how many of those are cheap?  This is just plain stupid...you do not commit minor league assets to acquire a shortstop at enormous cost when you can sign one relatively cheaply by market standards and trade for pieces to fix OTHER problems.

I am rapidly losing faith in Zduriencik.

3 WAR woulda made Nishioka the #8 shortstop in both leagues last year.

There's Tulowitzki, there's Drew, there's Hanley Ramirez ... and then Nishioka projects [about] as well in 2011 as any other shortstop in baseball after those three.

Don't take the Doc's word for it.  Catch a WBC sometime.  Everybody agrees that NPB is better than AAA.  You want the best shortstop in AAA?  How much more the best one in NPB?

Taro and SABRMatt have adroitly underlined the drought in SS's.  This is no longer the era of Jeter, Nomar, ARod et al.

................

Nishioka was a super opportunity, and he's gone.  A 3-WAR shortstop, when your rivals have 1's ... that's the same as nabbing a 5-WAR outfielder when your rivals have 3's.

But that's okay.  Nishioka's a Twinkie, but we'll segue this NPB discusson to the M's in a bit...

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Mojo

No average shortstop, no average catcher, it makes me miss the days of Dan Wilson and Carlos Guillen and Kenji Johjima.  You don't know what you got 'till its gone. What about an average left fielder?  What happened to Raul Ibanez and Jose Guillen and Randy Winn? 

It takes a team full of at least average players to play .500 ball.

All this stars and scrubs stuff sounds good in theory (which is often more fun than watching games) but this year it seems deficient in practice.

Great comment...

1.  The idea of Stars & Scrubs isn't to have 6 good players and 19 bad ones.  :- )

1a.  (The idea is to carousel inexpensive, but wisely chosen, cheap players until you get okay performances.)

2.  If you're going to play Stars & Scrubs, it would be nice to have some Stars. 

2a.  The M's had two position players above 0.9 WAR (!!).  Ichiro was a Star; Guti had 2.3 WAR.... they had three pitchers above 0.9 WAR.  Felix ... then Fister and Vargas had 2-something WAR.

3.  The 2010 M's weren't an incrimination of Stars & Scrubs; they had neither the 5-7 Stars nor the secondary group of overperforming Scrubs.

3a.  The 2010 M's were an incrimination of the avante-garde "Win With Moneyball UZR" concept.  They didn't think they need a 3 or a 4 hitter.  They were wrong.

4.  There might have been a couple of other things that went wrong in 2010, too, I admit.  LOL.

5.  But 2010 has never been reviewed against the light of a community that claimed #3-#4 hitters didn't matter.  In February 2010, we'd outgrown the old-fogey ideas about 100-RBI men.  Oh well, whatever, nevermind.  Couldn'ta been we were wrong about dat.

Hopefully in 2011, we won't outsmart ourselves quite as badly.

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