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Saturday, December 03, 2011
UPDATE: Mike DiGiovanna of the Los Angeles Times confirms that the deal is done.
12:10 PM: Ken Rosenthal of FOXSports.com reports that the Angels are on the verge of trading catcher Jeff Mathis to the Blue Jays for left-hander Brad Mills.
The Angels acquired Chris Iannetta from the Rockies earlier this week, which made Mathis a virtual lock to be non-tendered. The 28-year-old backstop stands to make close to $2 million in his second year of arbitration, so it’s a wonder why the Blue Jays didn’t just wait to see if he hit the free agent market. I could be wrong here, but I can’t imagine teams were falling over themselves for a .194 career hitter whose defensive contributions can be overstated at times.
The Angels just traded their Tim Tebow and replaced him with Kyle Orton!
Tripon
Posted: December 03, 2011 at 05:26 PM | 54 comment(s)
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1. Shredder Posted: December 03, 2011 at 05:44 PM (#4005736)Thank God, though... I have Iannetta in Strat-O-Matic.
I guess it's not that crazy. Mills isn't much of a pitcher and the Jays do currently need a backup catcher as D'Arnaud won't be in the majors this year. But what's Mathis going to make in arbitration, 2 mil? You'd figure you could just sign someone for that.
Mathis is a bad backup catcher. He is a waste of a roster spot at zero cost, paying him money just makes it worse.
EDIT: His career year: .211/.276/.351. And he can only dream of returning to those glory days. This is one bad baseball player.
I assume they'll try to agree to a contract with Mathis for ~$750K.
If he won't agree, Toronto will non-tender him. No way they pay him $1.8M.
Although I did enjoy the whole Mathis/Napoli saga, and would have been happy to see it go on for another year.
FWIW, Mike DiGiovanna claims that Weaver and Haren preferred pitching to Mathis.
I think Mathis is all but certain to be non-tendered.
-- MWE
Haren and Mathis have the same career OPS+ (though Haren has hit better in recent years).
If you have those 4 guys on the same team, I think you accept Mathis' offense to keep them happy.
So you're saying there's a chance the Angels can get him back.
Or the new Orioles trading for failed Cubs OF prospects.
That is damn funny.
That's funny, I came here to post that I might've preferred Heath Bell after all. I wish that they would've just thrown 2 million dollars at Jose Molina, or exhumed the corpse of Pat Borders or something. Anything but Mathis.
A deal involving a case of Iron City and the DVD of Epic Movie would have gotten a better return.
Well he's near by. He was just announced as TO's advance scout guy.
Hmm, because I would enjoy the baseball interwebs melting down, I've been hoping that Anthopoulos would give a closer a huge FA contract. I'm taking a small trade for Jeff Mathis is a nice bit of foreshadowing.
Funny. Burnt out from good press Anthopoulos gets eh. Bruce Wayne = Batman. Philly = Kevin Goldstein?
This. I tried to tell this to VA in the Dipoto signing thread
I think I might have traded Lind for Mathis straight up, if only because you can non-tender Mathis and walk away from Lind's contract. But upon reflection Lind's only owed $10 mil over the next 2 years. That's little enough that I guess you may as well run him out there and see what happens. I've more or less given up on him.
What is the Jeff Mathis equivalent of pulling a Jose Bautista? A 95 OPS+?
So why did the Jays do that?
And if not, so what. Brad Mills is the Jeff Mathis of pitching. A finesse guy who can't throw strikes.
I'm not sure they will non-tender him, but if that's their intention, they could be using this time to exclusively negotiate a cheaper contract with him before he hits the open market. That was presumably the reason why Oakland claimed Edwin Encarnacion off waivers last offseason.
He has the 14th lowest career OPS+ (50) on that list, beating out only Bill Bergen, Luis Gomez, Mario Mendoza, Ray Berres, Fritz Beulow, Rafael Belliard, Skeeter Webb, Ray Oyler, Jim Levey, Doc Powers, Jackie Hernandez and Hal Lanier.
Mathis is a very special sort of 1%er.
1. They knew Scioscia would give him too much playing time as long as he was on the roster;
2. Every day Jeff Mathis was in an Angels uniform was another reminder that they chose him over Napoli;
3. They finally figured out that Mathis really, really sucks.
I was puzzled by this until I realized I got my Belliards mixed up. Was wondering how he was on that list since I recalled him being a pretty decent player for a while.
I am not a statistician, there's a good chance that something's gone terribly amiss in the calculations that follow. Nevertheless, this is free, so:
Bautista hit .260/.378/.617 (OPS+ of 164) in 2010, vs a ZiPS projection of .227/.324/.389 (OPS+ 89, worse than Jarrett Hoffpauir!).
ZiPS projects Mathis to hit .205/.258/.313, OPS+ of 57 next year. If you plug that into the Bautista-izer 2012®, you get a line of .235/.301/.496, for an OPS+ of 121.
But, you might think that the ZiPS line is too optimistic. If you assume that Mathis' baseline is last year's stats you can Bautista-ize® his 2011 line of .174/.225/.259 (OPS+ 37), and wind up with .199/.262/.411, or an OPS+ of 87.
I know, I was hoping for a bigger negative number too but Chone doesn't see Mathis as sucking that badly, only -2.5 WAR. Even 2011 is only -.3 WAR, 2010 was his real disaster year.
Everything DiPoto has said or done since he arrived in LA has rebutted what I wrote on that thread. This trade is just the cherry on the VA was wrong on the DiPoto hiring sundae.
To recap I said that while Moreno is very willing to write checks, like almost all owners he has no ability to grade GMs other than on results and track record, and has to rely on Scoscia a lot for input. Given DiPoto essentially has no track record of success (in wins), he will be on a short leash and be forced to keep Scoscia happy to avoid having the leash shortened further. I thought they went for Jerry because Scoscia probably scotched the hiring or recruitment of strong GMs with long track records because Scoscia was afraid they'd neuter him, and that was why Scoscia was pushing for Moreno to interview his former subordinates, so he could get someone pliable in the GM spot.
Clearly, based on his frank public comments and his actions (the trades he made), Jerry is in firmly in charge, he's been given all the authority he needs and he's using it to do what he thinks is best regardless of what Scoscia thinks, and this bodes very well for Angels fans, and it's a disaster for Oakland fans.
Mathis having a colossal year at bat would be one of the greatest things that could ever happen for sabermetrically wise baseball organizations. This fluke would become a famous rebuttal meme to the pointy headed types, and keep scouting pre-eminant at dumb organizations. Please baseball gods, make it happen!
That is just so dumb and so wrong. And so, so dumb.
If by dumb and so wrong you mean brilliantly correct I accept your compliment...
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