Free-agent slugger Vladimir Guerrero

[TSE]

Which is why we would move to trading Ordonez or Martinez or Avila etc. if we could have got an $8M big vet bat like that for half price. Getting an $8M player for $4M is a lot better than to get a $12M for $12M, cause if you do the first deal then when you also get a $12M player you can get in effect a $16M player for the same net investment (and in our case Martinez and Guerrero are both guys that pretty much are purely a batting role yet Guerrero should project to a more likely effective bat, since Martinez is a negative on defense it only makes that $4M gap larger every time Martinez sees the field, why pay an extra $4M for a worse bat that you hope never sees the field?, and don't say to have a lefty in the lineup behind Cabrera cause there's other ways to invest in high priced marquee players where you can get that included by managing your choices more effectively for the long-term).

That's why I said it was crazy for ANY team in baseball to pass up on a deal like that, cause even an NL team for $4M that would be a deal with a small profit, but for an AL team that's the type of deal you always need to look for and hunt for aggressively. And DD didn't want to go hunting cause it was inconvenient due to previous deals he made that skirted the convenience of this move. Just another cost to the equation that DD should have calculated into his decision making before doing other moves. I have gone against all of his offseason moves this year and I did that with no knowledge that Guerrero was up for a good deal at $8M with a rumored chance for less, and even without that it didn't make sense to me to do those previous moves, so now my objections to them are ever so slightly stronger.

A little more background on the $4M extra comment and how it relates to the value of having that lefty behind Cabrera, we can logically break this down to some subjective analogous terms. First, we know most teams don't carry a $100M+ payroll, so we know that an extra $4M being spent for that privilege is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1/25th of the entire value of the payroll, or 4% thereabouts for us. Think about all the other constructs of strategy that relate to all aspects of the game, then weight them by importance, do you think that the concept of having a lefty versus a righty behind Cabrera for that differential gain is really worth a full 1/25th slice? Start assigning other slices to things like spending big bucks for a closer or to get a set of 5 starters or the values to fill each of the positions with the dollars it takes to get those guys and the differentials they have over the alternative choices for those spots, and what you will find is you are going to run out of slices to pass out really fast, that money is proportionately too big to be blown on a whim when you can calculate it into your solution set for a far lower convenient cost by just having your entire short and long term strategies planned out and cohesively tied together so that they aren't having a civil war in the middle of it while the citizens living there are trying to enjoy a peaceful existence. The fans are quick to point out the value of having that lefty, but we pay for that privilege and there is a pro and con connection that equalize out, and in the end it only matters about what you net, and the problem with the perception is that the costs aren't often considered and appreciated which in a sense exposes the fans to an effect of "double counting" and perceiving a value of 2 when they should only see a value of 1. i.e. a kid sees a candy bar he really wants as worth $2 in value but the store only sells it for $1, so he buys it and he feels like he has a $2 product in his hand, which he does, but it's only worth $1 cause 1 of those 2 dollars was an even trade and cancels out of the equation, leaving him with a real value of 1, not the 2 that is seemingly obviously 2 since he can touch it and eat it, that's the issue with DD is he can't escape the shroud of bad fortune and luck that clouds our team due to the illogical weather experiments that he undertakes that nobody asked him to do. He's like Doc Brown from Back to the Future but without having first prepared the scientific homework to logically support his crazy theories, and thus the path of our timeline leads us to mission failure.