Have a good weekend. This will be a fun one with good baseball and the NFL draft tomorrow AM.

I respect your insight and diligence with your posts.

I will pop on tomorrow.

Take care.

-dennis

You were clear. I was just reemphasizing the point about Theo being a top baseball guy.

The question with masterson is his secondary pitches. But when you look at a guy like Wang, a power sinker ball guy doesn’t always need that great a secondary pitch.

He was the guy from your system I thought could help the team this year (i was assuming the pen) but I thought it would happen much later than April.

Enjoy happy hour.

cb-

you’re missing my point that a sea change has happened with revenue sharing and as a result no team can stock pile stars. i don’t care about any one deal a gm makes.

it’s an opinion, but i’m not impressed with cashman’s ability to juggle a lot of variables when he can’t buy his way out of it. he’s in a baseball world where he can’t do that like he did before. if he could santana would be the yankees #1 and pettitte would be the #3.

to be cont…

Perhaps I was unclear. I did not take your post at all to be a knock on Theo. Not even close. I didn’t even think you were negative.

My point was to not put too much credence in April era’s.

I like they pulled up Masterson. He is 23. Let’s see what he can do.

I also happen to be a fan of Cashman as it has to be great to walk in his shoes but it also has to suck. I think he is a bright, loyal, hard working dude. That is my impression from a far.

Almost happy hour.

-dennis

Again – the point of my post was not to knock Theo at all. I think Theo is a very, very good GM and obviously done a great job.

The position players you guys have developed are very impressive. When a Lowell gets hurt and you can bring up a Lowerie – that’s a great luxury.

At the same time I don’t think Theo would have wanted to call up Masterson for an emergency start from AA if he could have helped it.

I just think that Theo and Cashman are really going about things in a very similar way.

Very objective post.

It is early on Hansen. He had pitched 121/3 innings without giving up an earned run in AAA this year. He came in the other night for two innings and gave up a HR but struck out 3 topping out at 97mph. Stiil a viable prospect but the book is still out.

April is April when it comes to stats. The Chicago White Sox had the lowest bullpen era last April in the AL. They finished the season with the highest in all of baseball.

Both teams are a work in progess. I think Cashman is every bit as smart and capable as Theo. Cashman was late in getting authority not a plan.

-dennis

Then you are attaching an unreasonable parameter than Epstein doesn’t have to ever deal with so that makes the comparison off in the first place.

If you’re never allowed to think/ build long term but the other guy is then you really can’t say the first guy is doing a worse job because he’s not building depth and thinking long term.

The Yankee’s aging and roster inflexibility was years in the making. It’s going to take some time to fix and it’s already moved a a break neck speed over the past 2 1/2 years.

he’s trying ,but the yankees don’t have the luxury of an ugly duckling year like the red sox had in 2006. it’s a matter of degree how far you can go in any one year. i think the yankees have gone too far overboard this year with fragile rookie pitchers. their rotation and their bullpen is a mess because of having to treat delicate arms delicately .

and as far as every gm makes mistakes, give me the one who has 2 world series rings in the past four years.

Despite the yankees having essentially 4 rookies on their pitching staff they have a lower team ERA than the Red Sox.

Take a look at the Red Sox pen besides Okajima and Papelbon. They are horrible. Really, just look at what guys like DeClaramen, Aardsma, Lopez and Timlin are doing – especially their walk totals.

Then take a look at their AAA pitching. There are no major prospects on their AAA staff. The best one is Craig Hansen who no longer seems like much of a prospect.

They just had to rush Justin Masterson up from AA to make an emergency start in the major leagues because they had no decent pitchers in AAA to take the start.

No one wants to thrust a good prospect like Masterson from AA to the bigs unless they are forced to.

Dice-K has a 3.14 ERA so far this year. Great. In 5 starts he’s thrown 28 innings. He’s averaging less than 6 innings a start. Their net expenidtures on Dice K average out to over $17 million a year over the life of his contract. Last year he got off to a good start and then faded into an league average pitcher.

This was supposed to be Jon Lester’s breakout year. Coming into this year he had made 28 career starts. He has a 5.4 ERA and thrown 31 innings in 6 starts – 5 innings a start is not a step forward. He’s walking 5.5/9 innings.

Kevin Cash is their backup catcher. His career batting average is LOWER than Will Nieves’s. He is arguably the worst player in the entire AL. Jason Varitek has had recurrent injury problems.

Theo tried to cut Manny Ramirez to dump his contract. Think about that.

I think Theo is a very good GM. Cherry picking moves any GM makes is not productive.

The fact is that the Red Sox and Yankees are building their teams in a similar fashion. The Sox have been better with developing position players. The yankees with pitchers. The big difference – the Yankees got a later start on changing the direction of the team.