Payroll wise, how are you doing this year? Have you been told to expect a jump in the payroll budget as the new TV deal kicks in, or are the owners subsidizing the budget until the deal starts (and therefore the budget remains in the area it currently is)?
Our payroll will be up from where it was last year. We had approval from ownership to take it further than where it currently sits, but we didn’t find the right situations to extend ourselves on. The new TV deal actually doesn’t kick in for a couple of years still - ownership has increased payroll to the higher levels in the meantime because they are committed to fielding a championship club year in and year out. They have been unbelievably supportive of our baseball group.
A lot of questions about why we didn’t sign certain free agents. Let me address that generally. Our commitment to you (the fans), our players, our ownership group, and ourselves, is to keep our window to win open for years to come. We expect to win. We don’t want to go back to the lean years. We’ve shown we’ll trade prospects (Cliff Lee, Adams, Uehara, Dempster, Molina, etc), sign our own (MYoung, Kinsler, Harrison, Holland, etc) and sign free agents (Darvish, Beltre, Nathan etc) when the time and fit is right. It’s a balancing act in some regards. The surest way for us to short circuit what we’ve got going on is to get an old club with a bloated payroll. That sometimes means letting a player go if the contract might hold us back elsewhere, or if we feel the back end of the deal doesn’t fit for where we are. In the end, I’m confident that as long as we continue to win, our fans will embrace the club. We genuinely like the team we’re going to field this year - and we’ve got a lot of flexibility to adjust as we go.
Repoz
Posted: February 22, 2013 at 06:18 AM |
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1. Walt Davis Posted: February 22, 2013 at 06:00 PM (#4374294)It just seems to me the offense is taking a big step back this year.
Yeah, the offense has the potential to be pretty bad. I'm sympathetic to not wanting to dump cash on mediocre bats, but what's all that money good for if you can't turn it into hitting talent?
Beltre, Andrus, and Kinsler are all solidly above average for their position. Pierzynski could be. I think Cruz will be if he stays healthy, same for Berkman. That leaves Murphy, the CF platoon/timeshare, and Moreland as the only likely soft spots, and I don't think any of them mare black-holey enough to be a major cause for concern. With Olt and Profar pushing, I wouldn't worry too much about the depth either.
Give me the under on Cruz. Career OPS+ of 112, only one season over 515 PA, career average WAR/WAA, defense on the decline and he's turning 32 and has 1.2 WAR total over his last two seasons. He's a big risk at the moment. League average seems his upside to me. Murphy looks a better bet but can't hit LHP. Even Scott Hairston might have helped these guys. (Can Olt play OF? I think we discussed this before and the consensus was no.)
It's not a black hole offense by any means but they lost 2 of their top 2-3 hitters, have marginal players at the 3 corners (the place to have marginal players), have Kinsler coming off a sub-par year and are apparently hoping Soto will rediscover himself.
Of course the A's will hit 150 through mid-May and the Ms and Astros are best not mentioned so probably still the 2nd best offense in the division.
Whatever the Rangers are saying publicly, I gotta think that they figure "hey, we lost the World Series twice with those guys." And hence, at least for the moment, they're trying a more San-Francisco-Giants approach: sign some canny veterans and rely on the pitching staff, hope it all falls together for them. You never know, it might, but they're putting a lot of wishful thinking into their roster, I agree: it could completely blow up on them, Moreland and Murphy and the CF could be awful, and Kinsler, Beltre, and others might get hurt. If so, as others have mentioned, I reckon we'll see a lot of shakeup on the roster midseason.
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