News

Links for November 9, 2012

A grinning bird mascot has been enlisted to teach Japanese children in Fukushima how to stay safe from the radiation that escaped from the region's crippled nuclear power plant. au.news.yahoo.com

Links for November 04, 2012

Southern California Edison crews will haul a gigantic piece of slightly-radioactive spent nuclear equipment down Southern California freeways south of Orange County starting Sunday night. msnbc.msn.com

This week, the Angels have been shopping Dan Haren and Ervin Santana. They have (had) one-year club options on both, and didn't want to use either one this year at that money. So they grabbed a megaphone and said "HEY EVERYBODY! WHO WANTS TO GIVE US SOMETHING FOR ONE YEAR OF DAN HAREN OR ERVIN SANTANA? ANY REASONABLE OFFER ACCEPTED!"

The Royals finally held up a hand, about halfway into the air, and gave Brandon Sisk. He's a career minor league lefty with a mediocre fastball, 88-92 MPH, that he says is his key pitch ... yet he fans 9 men per game in AAA. You could (very) loosely compare him to Lucas Luetge 2011, as far as value is concerned. Luetge would be higher.

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=== Talking points ===

1. I was kinda thinkin' about this all week, because I didn't remember this situation ever coming up before, the sign and trade. Could be I just hadn't noticed. Is this a common thing, this sign-and-trade coming out of a team option year? Why wouldn't you do it with every option that was theoretically in favor of the club, but which didn't fit its needs going into that season?

You'd think this would be one of the most common transactions in baseball, because there are always situations where you can't use the player but somebody else can. Don't recall any at all, though. All you would need, to make this work, would be:

The club-option year is one in which the player is theoretically underpaid
You have internal options that you prefer

Club-option years, for players under 33 or so, should be club-favorable once you get there. You'd think that many club-option situations would lead to sign-and-trades.

Is this something new in baseball, where clubs have decided they don't care whether they tick players off? The Mariners have one player coming into that situation after this year: Franklin Gutierrez has a $500,000 buyout next year or a $7.5M salary at the Mariners' option. If he produces 2-3 WAR this season he's a perfect sign-and-trade. How good do you have to be, to be a CF worth $7M? Not very. And the M's will probably have better options than him next winter.

Sign and Trade alert?

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