"Buying cheap" on 3 years of Han-Ram is still 4-5 of your best prospects.
I don't trade $15 mil + Paxton + Seager + Trayvon + Pryor (for example, and that would be low) to get Ramirez when I can just spend 22 million to add twice the production at the plate in Fielder.
Not when I already HAVE a SS in AAA who can hit .250/.330/.400 with an iffy glove for a lot cheaper...and he's a great clubhouse personality.
That extra 7 million a year might mean something to the bean counters if it was just Ramirez vs. Fielder in a vacuum, but not if Paxton and Seager and Pryor are saving us millions on FAs.  The guys we have to trade to get him matter too.
It's a whole-picture thing.
~G

Or get both Fielder and Hanley. Thats the kind of action its going to take to win in the West.
Hanley looks to have been slowed down by injuries. The shoulder in 10, that ended up needing surgery in late 2011. The constant back and leg pain in 2011.
I liken him to last year's Justin Upton. You'll never have another opportunity to buy as low.
Hanley won't age well because hes lazy and will likely get even more injury-prone in his 30s. But you get 3 prime years at bargain prices and say goodbye.

Shoulder surgury, back sciatica, but that, for me, is a warning off sign, like it was with Jose Reyes, and Jose Reyes hasn't shown the diva signs that Ramirez has.  He has 41 seperate entries for injuries on his Baseball Prospectus Page.  That's worrisome to see in a player you're going to owe 45 million to over the next 3 years.  Toss in the lazy tag, and who knows what his "Prime" seasons look like, they may be well past.  Betancourt never got better than his Age 25 season, Carlos Zambrano topped out at 25,  BJ Upton has shown one glimpse at the talent he and his brother shared, Carlos Silva pretty much had his career end at 31 because he was that lazy about his conditioning.  Sometimes players malaise themselves out of a career, just ask Andruw Jones.

True, although none of those guys were nearly as dominant as Hanley either than Jones (who wasn't as good a pure hitter). Hanley also never really missed PT until this season (injuries more serious).
Jones himself is a good downsider scenario, but he himself was elite until age 30 (after which he fell off a cliff). You'd be buying Hanley's 28-30 seasons.

But I don't think this analysis is very meaningful. The guy was hurt this year so listing all the ways he was terrible doesn't really address the main issue which is how healthy he will be next season. If he is healthy I don't see any reason why he won't be above average at a minimum. If you think he's permanently broken that's fine but you don't give any justification for believing that.

But if a mega talented Mariner had put up super star numbers several years in a row and then had a poor year at 27 due to injuries, I don't think you'd immediately throw him off the bus. You would explain to us what those injuries were, explain how they affected him and give an estimate of how healthy you'd expect him to be going forward. That was your exact approach when Felix got hurt.
You didn't do that here. It was simply "he looks terrible, his numbers are terrible, therefor he is finished". If we were talking about an over-the-hill player like a Johjima or Vidro that might be sufficient but not for a guy just entering his prime.

I'm not saying he didn't look bad. My point is that simply saying that he looked bad doesn't explain WHY he looked bad, and when we're talking about a guy with elite talent and proven performance in his prime that's what really matters when discussing how valuable he will be going forward. Chone Figgins is an aging 2nd baseman so the fact that he seems to have hit a wall isn't surprising seeing as how other guys have done the same (Roberto Alomar, Boone, etc.). But an MVP caliber player doing poorly at age 27 is surprising and deserves an explanation because the assumption going forward should be that such a player can still be a star.
If Felix' fastball suddenly plunged from 95 to 87 next year due to injury, you wouldn't simply say "he looks aweful, all the numbers back me up, he's done" because that wouldn't tell us what his health would be the year after which is what is key. When guys like Edgar Martinez (age 30) and Jim Edmonds (age 29) had a poor year in their prime, would dissecting their performance in those injury plagured seasons, whether from a scouting perspective or saber one, told us how good he would be the years after? No, not at all. I'm sure they looked real bad when they were injured and if advanced stats were available at that time you could come up with a list a things that they were struggling with. But all of those scouting reports and numbers wouldn't have told us anything about how good they'd be in the future because they would ignore the cause of the poor performance, the players health.
Today there are an amazing variety of numbers which allows us to analyze players in ways we had never been able to do before. However, I think this has caused a great deal of over-analysis because people want to believe that every obscure stat tells us something vitally important about a player. Specifically, the attitude is now that if I can show 100 different ways that a player is struggling that means he has 100 different hurdles to overcome in order to be effective. But this is often not the case. If Felix did lose velocity, then he would be much worse off. Not only would his fastball be less effective, all of his pitches would likely be worse leading to much worse performance. That reduced performance would manifest in a bunch of different ways; that is, ALL of his numbers would get worse. His strikeouts would plunge, he would give up more hits, he would have more flyballs, balls would get hit harder, etc. The same would apply to his scouting reports; it would be possible to list a bunch of different issues he was having. But if his velocity came back then all of those issues would instantly disappear and all of his numbers would come right back to where they were before. So instead of having dozens of problems, he really would only have one which meant getting back to normal wouldn't be nearly as hard as it may seem from looking at the data.
The same applies to hitters like Ramirez. If an injury slowed down his bat speed, then he would look terrible. He wouldn't be able to catch up to fastballs, adjust to off speed pitches, hit flyballs, hit for power and so. And digging into the numbers would show all sorts of deficiencies as well. That would not mean that he has an assortment of problems holding him back. It's possible that EVERYTHING stems from that one issue: bat speed. If that's the case, then healing up would cure every single thing overnight. That's why listing out a bunch of seemingly different defects doesn't mean anything to me. If a guy's overall numbers are poor, then his component numbers are going to be poor as well so slicing-and-dicing his stats doesn't really add much additional information in most cases. What matters is root causes and we have to be careful not think that each statistic available to us measures a specific, discrete, isolated skill.

I also see that he had a sore elbow that troubled him. Anyway, even star players see big fluctuations in performance so even without a clear explanation it wouldn't be real worrisome.

Shoulder injuries sap power/bat speed. Justin Upton '10 is a good example. Hanley/Rendon '11.
Hanley was a mess of injuries in '11. Back and leg pain so terrible that he couldn't move at some points during the season. He aggravated the shoulder in '10 and it worsened late '11 (leading to surgery).
PEDs are always a possibility, but why stop this year? Regulations changed from "04-'05. '12 is another year that could lead to more collapse, but I see no reason for a roider to stop if they've been bypassing the (weak) system since '05.

Granted, Hanley looked terrible in 2011. It just seems unlikely to me that it is PED-related. If Hanley were a roider, why stop now?