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Hot Stove League '07-'08


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Respectfully, I'm not a fan of that thing, bjorn. Why should someone get paid to not break the law?

It's a utilitarian approach, and your response was deontological in nature. It is awfully hard to reconcile those two approaches to ethics.

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King Kaufman's Sports Daily

 

Where's the former trainer who says he was interviewed four times and blamed management, not players, for the steroid mess?

 

Dec. 18, 2007 | Interesting point brought up by some people with nothing better to do than to post about this column's Monday edition on the Baseball Primer Newsblog: Where was Larry Starr in the Mitchell Report?

 

Who?

 

Starr was a trainer for the Cincinnati Reds and Florida Marlins before leaving baseball in 2002 to become an assistant athletic director at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. In late November, he told Florida Today writer David Jones that he'd been interviewed by former Sen. George Mitchell four times and expected to be contacted again.

 

He also said he refused to name the names of players he suspected of steroid use -- he said the first time he suspected a player was in 1984 -- and that he blamed baseball management and the players union equally for turning a blind eye to the steroid issue for more than 20 years.

 

"The commissioner's office, Bud Selig and that group, and the players association, Don Fehr and that group," he said, "they sit there and say, 'Well, now that we know that this happened we're going to do something about it.'

 

"I have notes from the Winter Meetings where the owners group and the players association sat in meetings with the team physicians and team trainers. I was there. And team physicians stood up and said, 'Look, we need to do something about this. We've got a problem here if we don't do something about it.' That was in 1988."

 

Though Starr had unkind words for the union, he defended the players themselves.

 

"My whole thing is, I don't totally blame the players," he told Florida Today. "They didn't abuse the system. They used the system."

 

"If Mark McGwire's hitting home runs out of the stadium, wouldn't you want to do the same thing?" he continued. "Especially when this stuff came from GNC, and they weren't told they couldn't use it. They weren't told they couldn't use steroids. So why not? Especially when people that were selling it to them were telling them there were no harmful effects."

 

Starr said that, with no testing in place, he couldn't accuse players of using something illegal, so he took the tack of offering to help them by telling them everything he knew about performance-enhancing drugs while protecting their confidence. "It really put the medical people in a bad situation," he said.

 

Now if you'll turn to your PDF copy of the Mitchell Report and search for the word "Starr," how many times does his name show up in the report, after at least four interviews in which he blamed the union and management but not players?

 

I also get zero. Interesting.

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Guest David Puddy
Edmonds is so amazingly overrated in the field.

 

i've never hated a professional athlete more than i hate jim edmonds.

 

well, other than dan marino...

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So on the topic of most annoying or unusal batting stance.

 

I choose Craig Counsel. If I was a pitcher, it would be hard not to plunk him in the head while he is standing there like a weirdo waving the bat. Also annoys me that he seems to somehow squick out hits. Craig, please just calm down and act like a normal batter.

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Carlos Silva to Mariners, 4 yr./44M.

 

http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20...7&fext=.jsp

 

Ron Mahay to K.C. probable, 2 yr./8M:

http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/story/7584366...3162&ATT=49

 

Wow! A pitcher with a .500+ record and a 4.50 era as a starter scores $11 million a year. Where do we go from here? Maybe Santana is a bargain if you can lock him in at $20 million. I didn't see the particulars, but I imagine even Kip Wells got a raise this year when he signed with Colorado!

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silva is definitely not worth that. he is an overweight pitcher who is .500. i cant stand the economics of baseball these days...

I'm not sure if it's the economics you should hate or the lack of quality talent. Baseball player salaries have actually increased at a pretty small rate compared to the money teams/owners have increasingly made and shared of late. It seems absurd to give mediocre players millions but you need to look at the big picture in a lot of these cases, too.

 

Sure, Silva seems overpaid with a deal like this considering his mediocrity, yet this is what mediocre players are getting these days and it's relative to how well teams and baseball are doing. Actually, a case could be made that most players are underpaid when looking at the bigger picture.

 

 

 

Schilling speaks his mind.

And is annoying as hell.

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I'm not sure if it's the economics you should hate or the lack of quality talent. Baseball player salaries have actually increased at a pretty small rate compared to the money teams/owners have increasingly made and shared of late. It seems absurd to give mediocre players millions but you need to look at the big picture in a lot of these cases, too.

 

I don't feel as though there is a lack of quality talent in baseball, although there certainly is in the free agent market. But that is also a reflection of the economics of the game -- the high quality talent are securing longer term contracts, and so the free agent market is thin.

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$11 mil/yr to Carlos Silva? :blink

 

Can you imagine what Bob Gibson, Tom Seaver, Steve Carlton or (gasp) Lefty Grove, Walter Johnson or Christy Mathewson would command in today's market? Does $30mil/yr almost sound conservative???

 

I'd say so, doesn't Santana want close to 25 a year?

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$11 mil/yr to Carlos Silva? :blink

 

Can you imagine what Bob Gibson, Tom Seaver, Steve Carlton or (gasp) Lefty Grove, Walter Johnson or Christy Mathewson would command in today's market? Does $30mil/yr almost sound conservative???

 

Assuming they would have had the same numbers, sure. But that's a big assumption.

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silva is definitely not worth that. he is an overweight pitcher who is .500. i cant stand the economics of baseball these days...

Supply and demand, dude.

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Assuming they would have had the same numbers, sure. But that's a big assumption.

The first three are close enough to our age to figure they would have been good, even with bandbox parks and steroids. The other three - harder to say.

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I'm not sure if it's the economics you should hate or the lack of quality talent.

 

When Dave Winfield came out of college, he was drafted in baseball, basketball, and football. If he were that age today he would have a) probably come out after one or two years; B) probably wouldn't have goofed around with multiple sports; and c) probably wouldn't be playing baseball at all.

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When Dave Winfield came out of college, he was drafted in baseball, basketball, and football. If he were that age today he would have a) probably come out after one or two years; B) probably wouldn't have goofed around with multiple sports; and c) probably wouldn't be playing baseball at all.

I don't know about that. In terms of salary, career length and not being a total physical wreck after your career is over, baseball is still the best bet.

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