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You may be right GSCOTTAR. Maybe I’ll change my mind if things don’t work out in 2024. For me, working out is at least getting to the NLDS and playing competitively. After that it’s a bit about luck and being hot at the right time.
I believe the rangers also DFA’d Garcia and resigned him back after no other team claimed him to add a little context.
My biggest concern is the cardinals scouting of Latin Players, including their own.
I think Mo’s strategy this winter is look for somebody who just hit 32 homers and 96 RBIs in 132 games in AAA (162 game equivalent 40 homers and 117 RBIs) and who is being given away for nothing. We know it could happen.
I think Mo’s strategy this winter is look for somebody who just hit 32 homers and 96 RBIs in 132 games in AAA (162 game equivalent 40 homers and 117 RBIs) and who is being given away for nothing. We know it could happen.
That was Moises Gomez, pretty much.
That was Moises Gomez, pretty much.
Sounds more like Luken Baker. But either way, who of you that actually watch games instead of only reading stats think that, based on their MLB performance, think either one will have any success in the big leagues? Who thought Lane Thomas could be an everyday outfielder? That’s what I thought. Hindsight is perfect, yet some are defending it. There’s plenty of other things to criticise Mo and our evaluations of players about. If any other teams think those guys (Baker and Gomez) have value, they will offer something of value for them. But they don’t have value (they both are 1.5 htv. That’s not good) and nobody will want them for anything but organizational depth as a throw in on another trade. Garcia was even worse. Nobody wanted him period. So, congratulations to Garcia on his success and to Texas on their good fortune. But quit acting like anyone should have been able to predict it.
But yet, quite a few did predict he should’ve been kept. Quit acting like they didn’t
I don’t recall anyone saying we should have kept Garcia until after the fact. All major league clubs passed on him. People claim we should have known. OK sure. So who are the quite a few you speak of?
I have no idea what I thought about letting Garcia go at the time, but nobody pays me to evaluate and project prospects. If I was paying attention, I would have objected to giving away a player with that kind of power without a good look in MLB. I feel the same about Baker. The Cardinals got well below average production from the DH slot last year and were in last place with no hope and still did not give him a stretch of regular PAs. Granted he doesn’t have the defensive value and athleticism of a Garcia, but now Mo has to decide what to do without having had a good look.
I don’t consider Gomez a comp. Garcia was good going back to Cuba right on up to AAA. Gomez mostly flopped around until the 2022 suprise year, and he was way less exciting this year. I understand there are questions about his work ethic and conditioning also.
There are probably threads, live or archived, from back then. It woud be fun to see what, if anything, folks were saying about Garcia.
I don’t recall anyone saying we should have kept Garcia until after the fact.
So because you don’t recall, it didn’t happen? And that makes you feel like lecturing/telling others that they need to get in line and adopt your view, as you did in the following?
Who thought Lane Thomas could be an everyday outfielder? That’s what I thought……. So, congratulations to Garcia on his success and to Texas on their good fortune. But quit acting like anyone should have been able to predict it.
There were quite a few fans critical of the move at the time. I guess you weren’t reading twitter then. Even a few respected posters on this very sight said they didn’t like the move and talked about other moves Mo could’ve made.
Hindsight is perfect, yet some are defending it.
This is the weakest of all arguments to support a guys whose very job is to develop rosters of prospects and established players who will deliver future MLB performance. FORESIGHT is critical in Mo’s job and he needs to be evaluated on exactly that. It’s not easy, but he’s well compensated. I don’t think too many people judge him harshly based on one move. It’s the accumulation that is wearing on many fans. As for Garcia specifically, it is certainly a valid critique to say that you shouldn’t “give” away your most athletic prospect, which he was, because they usually have higher ceilings.
Which leads to another thing the Cards stubbornly adhere to at their detriment — the sunk cost fallacy. As an example, some fans thought Cecil should’ve been canned much earlier. Some people like to say you’ve got nothing to lose by hanging onto Cecil because you’ll still have to pay him, i.e., nobody would claim him if you waived him. That’s really a load of economic ignorance. Evaluate the players and get rid of the liabilities who have next to no chance of rebounding. You’re not getting the money back. You’re just compounding the problem by wasting a roster spot. It can have consequences such as we are discussing now.
O’Neill was a star. But just for 1 season. His 2021 was worth more than Garcia’s 2023 in FWAR. Yes. That is a fact. Injuries keep tanking him. He’s hardly a whiff.
Perennial = more than one year. I said he was a whiff because he was assessed to be a “perennial” star. Mo’s job is to get and keep prospects who will perform highly over multiple years, not find one-hit wonders. Star to you, whiff to me.
Euro sounds like you are the one lecturing, but I regress. I agree with a lot you say about the inconsistency of this front office the last 5-7 years. But we are just going to have to disagree about this hindsight business. No one had any way to tell that Garcia was going to be as good as he is. Just like no one can accurately predict when a highly touted prospect like Colby Rasmus or Brett Wallace don’t live up to their expectations. Here’s the only evaluating I could find pre cardinals about Garcia.
I don’t think any baseball gypsy anywhere could have predicted Garcia’s career to date, but at this juncture, any comparison of Tyler O’Neill to Adolis Garcia is not at all unlike a comparison of Rosie O’Donnell to Princess Grace of Monaco.
Euro sounds like you are the one lecturing, but I regress.
Yes, I was lecturing you on not lecturing. 😉
But we are just going to have to disagree about this hindsight business.
Correct KCB, disagreements should happen sometimes and be okay . . . . . and sometimes productive.
1td, I think I heard Rosie was attractive in high school, even a homecoming queen. Who could’ve predicted then what she looks like now? 😉 I think she cleared waivers years ago.
Rangers offense didn’t do much with their star clean up hitter going 0fer. Similar to us with Arenado in wild card games.
Until the DBs broke it open, the game was all about Kelly keeping it under control and then going deep enough to limit the pen’s exposure.
I have never had much luck using the search function of this site but for those you more tech savvy than myself I bet you would find a quote from me at the time being critical and surprised that we gave Garcia up for basically nothing.
This analysis over the last decade has the Cardinals slightly below the midpoint and negative overall in trade values. 18 orgs are better and 11 worse.
An Offseason project I'm working on, here's a primer of teams' success with trades. #analytics pic.twitter.com/VZMCAimeyA
— Robert Frey (@RobertFrey40) October 31, 2023
Our management group has done well in the 2000s, but are trending down as of around 2015 or so.
I missed on O’Neill. I thought he would be a star and follow up his 2021 campaign with an MVP caliber 2022.
Didn’t know a lot about Garcia when we let him go, but generally like athletic guys and if they have power as well, then you give them a lot of reps. The real intangible is work ethic. Management knows if guys are putting in the effort. Combine all that and those are the keepers.
Marmol made a statement a few weeks ago about the club purging some players this off season. Sounded like he was referring to guys who go through the motions. Guess we will see.
Sorry to see Jose Adolis Garcia injured. He is fun to watch.
Good point. Both will get HOF votes. Both Arenado and Goldschmidt may get into the HOF. I think they will.
At first glance, that graph seems like a way to eval GMs and owners, but after I thought about it a bit, I’m not sure what it really says. Need to know more about how the calculations were done.
I wonder how the graph accounts for a guy like Betts? As some say, you trade player contracts, not players. Betts had one year left on his contract when the Dodgers traded for him. So do the Dodgers get just his WAR for that one year? His second year with the Dodgers was by virtue of his new contract, not the one that was traded.
On the other side of the ledger, do the Red Sox keep losing WAR on the graph multiple years because Betts resigned with the Dodgers? What if Betts had stayed just one year in LA and then signed as a free agent in StL, would they lose just one year of Betts’ WAR in that case? Should it matter what Betts did his 2nd season after the trade as it relates to Boston losing WAR on the graph?
I suspect some things like that, because at first glance, it seems like the sum of the WARs should be zero (negatives = positives). The numbers on the graph have the positives outweighing the negatives by 47.9 WAR. That’s a lot. I’m not sure how you could trade away a player where the other team gains WAR, but you don’t lose an equivalent amount of WAR. Seems like that violates something like an accounting principle where credits equal debits or a physics principle like the law of mass conservation. Or maybe baseball is not that complicated and you can trade away Mookie Betts, replace him with a cardboard cutout, and not lose any WAR.
Also, the graph doesn’t account for trades like the Garcia trade. That might tell us WAR gained/lost is not the best way to approach this. Maybe WAR normalized or proportioned to the $ value of the contracts involved (saved vs spent) would be helpful.
Euro, I agree with your sentiments. While nice to look at, aggregating data like this always makes a mess of things. All the nuances get lost. Another example is if the Rangers only get 2 WAR from Jordan Montgomery this season but he helps them win their first WS and the Cardinals end up with hypothetically 15 WAR from Roby and Sagesse, who wins? The reality is they both win regardless of what the chart shows.
The other problem with a graph like this is that often a good player is traded for prospects. So the good player may have accumulated some WAR and the prospects may no have done so yet, but that doesn’t mean they won’t in the future.
KeepComingBack
I don’t recall anyone saying we should have kept Garcia until after the fact. All major league clubs passed on him. People claim we should have known. OK sure. So who are the quite a few you speak of?
Stlcard25 was very high on Garcia and adamant that trading him when it happened was a bad move. A lot of people were including him as a throw-in on trades right before the DFA.
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