Bleacher Bums Forum

Nashville, Illinois, is a hotbed of baseball activity, yes, you are right, JR.

This is getting ridiculous...the Dodgers could go for Youkilis or Sanchez next:

http://www.cbssports.com/mlb/blog/danny-knobler/21350054/whos-next-for-big-spending-dodgers-could-be-youk-or-anibal

Clearly Los Angeles needs some more teams if they can afford to spread that kind of money around.

Really, the Royals probably should have been bidding with the Cubs on guys like Scott Baker and Scott Feldman.  We're certainly not much worse off with Baker/Feldman than the Royals are with Santana/Guthrie, and we're paying our guys a whole lot less.

When you believe you have a window of opportunity, and particularly when it is likely to be a limited window, you do what you can to expand the window, and you are not always able to make all of the decisions at the same time.

If all of the decisions on all of those players were made at the same time, with the team knowing that each of the other pieces would be available if it acquired them in a different order (allowing different acquisition prices), they likely would have done so, but that is not the way the real world works.

DMF, I'm trying to remember the old PCL of the 50's...San Francisco Seals, Oakland Oaks, Hollywood Stars, San Diego Padres, Los Angeles (Angels?), Sacramento Solons, Portland , Spokane (Indians, I think), Seattle , Salt Lake City Bees, Denver Bears.   Some of those came in when the Giants and Dodgers moved to CA and later the Padres came about and then the A's moved to Oakland.  Remember any others?

You know, everyone talks about rebuilding through the farm system, which is what we're in the process of trying to do right now and what we tried to do under Hendry, without a great deal of success.

The difference in the acquisitions budget, the number of scouts, the quality of scouts, the standardization of scouting, the investment in facilities, and the efforts to actually develop the players in the system instead of simply giving them playing time with little meaningful instruction, is seriously different from what we saw under Hendry.

If the best thing we have to hang our hat on is that we made the Ricketts family a couple of extra million by being frugal about which mediocre players we signed, it hasn't been a terribly good offseason for the Cubs.

The Mets must not really want RA Dickey around past 2013.  They've offered him a new contract, but it's the same contract that Jeremy Guthrie got from the Royals (3 years, $25 million).  I know Dickey is getting pretty old in baseball years...but he's worth more than Jeremy Guthrie.