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Fowler is still getting that fat check from DeWitt whether he hits .375 or .175. He and his agent are laughing at our management all the way to the bank.
If that were the case then why would he care if he was getting at bats or not. Sure seems like he wants more than money when he calls out his ex manager for it letting him play.
So sure. Maybe his agent is happy to have potentially cashed in before a drop I performance but the player. Dexter. Wants to play and get better and contribute. And while the money is nice if that is all that mattered he’d not care about his hitting or playing. Which he does. So you’re incorrect
Heaven forbid a guy struggle and want to work through it
I don’t see the Nationals sitting Bryce Harper because he is struggling. Not will we see anyone not offering him major major money this offseason despite whatever his batting line ends up.
They’ll be paying for past performance as well as hoes for return to good performance and sustained performance. That’s what we did with Fowler too. We weren’t the only team that was wanting him heavily either and made big offers.
1 good year and 1 bad year is tough to watch and explain but it is far from a deathnail in the coffin for value or how well the signing will end up being.
Plenty of good players have bad years. This on is pretty nasty. No doubts. But it’s only 1 year at the moment. Heal up. Get a good offseason in and start fresh in spring training.
1 good year and 1 bad year is tough to watch
Fowler didn’t have one good year and one bad year.
He was terrible offensively and defensively the first half of last year and all of this year.
He was good offensively in the second half of last year, but still terrible defensively.
So, he did not have a good year. He did not even have a good half year. He had a good offensive performance in the second half of last year.
I don’t think you go from playing the best defense of your life to the worst defense of your life in one year if you truly care. I just don’t. Nobody falls off that big of a cliff on defense in one year.
1 good year and 1 bad year is tough to watch
Fowler didn’t have one good year and one bad year.
He was terrible offensively and defensively the first half of last year and all of this year.
He was good offensively in the second half of last year, but still terrible defensively.
So, he did not have a good year. He did not even have a good half year. He had a good offensive performance in the second half of last year.
I don’t think you go from playing the best defense of your life to the worst defense of your life in one year if you truly care. I just don’t. Nobody falls off that big of a cliff on defense in one year.
Heaven forbid a guy struggle and want to work through it.
You’re joking right? And I’d really like to know the reason Dexter gets so much leeway. There’s something here that most can’t seem to figure out. I have some thoughts on that.
Tell him to go home for the rest of ’18. Hopefully he’ll be moved during the holidays when no one is watching.
This is quote regarding Fowler:
“Any time you sign a free agent of his magnitude and you bring him to do a job, it’s very delicate to start talking about moving him off,” Mozeliak said. “Clearly you want to do what’s best for the team and finding ways to win and there’s no doubt when you look at the last few days with Tommy Pham, he’s made some excellent catches and had a positive impact on the team. So we have some time to decide what that next step looks like. I’m sure all of us on the decision team will have a talk, but we haven’t done that yet.”
This goes back to July….. of 2017. 2017!
This is now August of 2018. I wonder if “the decision team” have ever had that discussion? Perhaps Mozeliak just sat down and had a conversation with himself.
From Jeff Gordon’s live fan chat:
QUESTION: Fowler’s season might be over. Will the Cards let him compete for a starting job in spring training, or do you think they will be dead-set on trading him, even if they have to eat significant money?
GORDO: Fowler’s injury was a good news/bad news deal. The good news: The team is frankly better without him playing right now. They benefit from both Bader and O’Neill (when healthy) getting regular work to close out the season. Munoz gets more at-bats, too, which is a plus.
The bad news: The injury eliminates Fowler’s ability to rebuild his stock with a strong finish. I can’t imagine another team taking any of Fowler’s contract before next season, since there are hundreds of inexpensive available outfielders capable of hitting .181.
Follow-up: Do you have a theory to explain Fowler’s low BA?
GORDO: I haven’t seen a good theory. He was clamoring for regular at bats to gain his timing/stroke, but he got 189 plate appearances through May. Carpenter started working his way out of his funk in mid-May, but Fowler did not. Fowler made some progress playing every day under Shildt, particularly with his plate discipline. He drew eight walks in his last nine games after drawing just eight walks from May 18 to July 21.
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Gordon is quick to point out that Fowler improved his walk rate.We pay him now much? and some writers point out his walk rate. Marvelous.
Fowler stats by month:
April……. .188
May……… .194
June…….. .145
July…….. .203
August…… 2 for 9.Show me where there is reason for any sort of confidence that Fowler was starting to get it together. Any other player would have been long gone. But instead Mozeliak told Schlitz to play Fowler every day. That is some sort of special treatment that our other players must have been aware of. What is wrong with this?
if you want to rail on him then rail on him.. .but i dont have to play along nor care about your bias
some said he and his agent were laughing because they made all that money and he doesnt have to play well and doesnt care… that is NOT the truth otherwise he could care less about getting at bats to turn it around…
he is having a terrible and monstrous year… no doubt…
but a year is not divided into halves…it is a whole year… and how you come out of it as a whole is what ends up mattering
fowler gets NO credit for turnign it around last year and ending up with a pretty impressive stat line for how bad he was eearly… now Carp gets all that credit this year AND last year…btu nevermind and overlook that because you dont want to see your own bias…but moving on…
fowler’s defense was bad last year and didnt get better …and it was bad this year… that upsets me as that IMO was the only real reason yo go out and get the vet in CF like Fowler over sticking with Grichuk or waiting on kids…Grichuk was ran out of town for striking out and playing bad CF btu when you look at his fielding CF he wasnt really poor at all
Fowler is making so much money for so many more years the only way to move him and his salary would be to add a good prospects in hopes someone is willing to look for the rebound to his more career like norm…which is unlikely to happen from the Cardinals side OR another team side IMO…
SO…that means we have a veteran making a lot of money that we can either throw into the ditch…OR we can try to help and get back on track to get value out of the contract we have given…same goes for Cecil and Gregerson…
good players have bad years…some have more than one…Fowler deserves the chance to recover from his injury now and get a fresh start next season…maybe he is done, maybe he never comes back, but he deserves a chance to fix it and come in fresh for 2019 with the hopes for getting his starting job back from the kids…as he has already proved …he WANTS to play and play well…and with the money we are on the hook for, i am not surprised the front office wants to give him that chance looking at his history of performance…it could all be bad, or it could go well.. but right now all it takes to give him that shot is a 40man spot…and balancing the value of a 40 man spot over the potential loss of money and potential performance of Fowler playing for someone else is a pretty easy made decision to give him that spot
now should he show up healthy and yet still be terrible early next year with the bat (his defense may never return we have to be fine with that whether we like it or not)…then you start considering the salary as lost…but with so much left on it still and with the proof of his ability to fix himself in 2017 i give him one more chance to fix himself for 2019… and i dont feel bad about that at all
now…if someone woudl come calling and be willing to eat half his salary in a trade…i might change my evaluation of that 40man spot and Fowler’s future value to the team…but until that happens i wish him speedy recovery and a healthy offseason and will look forward to seeing a spring training Fowler out there with something to prove..
but since this thread isnt really about Fowler and what should be done…and more so “let’s all hate and pile on Fowler in as many ways as possible” i will leave as it is a pretty nasty hate filled and petty thread
I wonder if any trade is possible if we ate 2 of the 3 years remaining? And if Dexter would approve the trade, of course.
Mr. thej…. C’mon you are kidding, right?
i am not surprised the front office wants to give him that chance looking at his history of performance…
Some of our fans seem to think that Fowler is this one-time awesome superstar. Tell me about “his history of performance”. You probably don’t even know about it but just drank the kool-aid that Mozeliak passed out when he signed him. So now you take a look, and learn something about the guy you mistakenly believe to be so great and deserving to get a third shot to earn his salary while batting below his weight.
Lifetime BA= .262
Lifetime HRs= 104 in 10 seasons. I didn’t include 2008, his 1st.
!4 SBs/seaason (12 for us in 2 seasons)He’s now an over-the-hill outfielder with a barely avearge career.
THOSE are numbers that make him so deserving of trying to be the things that he was signed on to be?
Don’t come on spouting false info without a hint.
FYI… ‘Fowler-ish numbers’ is now a commonly used term throughout the MLB circles to say that a player is performing very, very poorly. Mozeliak should be proud of his wonder-man.
Fowler will never ever be the player he was contracted to be. Mozeliak goofed big time and just dances around that fact, trying to make it go away.
Fowler has zero trade value.
“Eat two of the three years remaining”
… GMs usually get their jobs by showing that they actually know something about players around the leagues.
Yes, Fowler is tradeable. The amount the Cards would have to eat in the off-season will depend on how his 2018 concludes.
Fowlers 18′ could be over. A best case might be he’s available a couple weeks at seasons end, because i read walking cast for a month. This is his total 18′ value, right now, for me.
The FO ate 31% of Leakes contract last August, and his 17′ in stl was not Fowler type horrible. 4.21 era / 4.24 fip
I doubt Mo can get anyone to take on more than bench player $ this offseason. Even 3mil per may be stretch.
I’ll bet my kingdom they give him the opp to turn it around again next season. They’re not going to eat 80 to 90% on him this offseason, or release ~50mil.
Realistically, who would be buying? He’s stunk, will be coming off injury and plays in a very lazy manner. You gotta hit very well to play lacadazical like he does.
It will help a lot if Fowler is done for the season. We may need to put him on the 60 day dl to create a roster spot.
Fowler is finished for this year. I have contemplated every possible scenario and not a single one has Fowler playing. If someone has a realistic one ……please please do tell….I’d love to see it.
Fowler could be a solid, although expensive, fourth outfielder next year. If we go with Ozuna-Bader-O’Neill as starters, and have Dex as a switch-hitting fourth outfielder who can play all three spots, that is a pretty strong group when all are healthy. O’Neill seems to be having a bit of a “Scott Rolen” start to his big-league career – a big strapping guy who gets banged up a lot.
In his best years Dexter was about a 3 WAR player, and had that terrific 2016 with the Cubs where he up-ticked to about a 4.5 WAR. He dropped to 2.5 last year, and you would think he could maintain a 2 WAR status. Things just went wrong from the get-go this year, and despite ample opportunities he just never could come out of it.
I am sure management will see what kind of deal they could make for him, but a reserve spot is where we are at with Dex in St. Louis.
Fowler could be a solid, although expensive, fourth outfielder next year.
This front office doesn’t have the intestinal fortitude to make Fowler a 4th OF. They’ve proven time and again they’d rather miss the playoffs than admit mistakes.
Why wait until the trade deadline to clear the roster of underperformers? Why keep trotting Fowler out there after the house cleaning?
Because they hate to admit they were wrong.
To me, generic comments like the one just above make no sense, just as does speaking with any certainty about the roster, let alone roles, in 2019. As an example, no one could ever have guessed that all three starting OFs last summer would be gone a year later (Pham, Grichuk and Piscotty – Fowler was hurt). So it is not like they have not made changes.
For those stuck on money, they admitted they were wrong about Leake to the tune of $17 million.
P.S. Someone mentioned a trade of bad contracts. Take Matt Kemp. His deal was so bad, he couldn’t be given away, and this year, he turned into an All-Star.
Of course, I have no idea what will happen, but I surely would not rule out any of the possibilities.
If Dex is with the club in 2019, I think it would be clean slate in the Spring and he would be given an opportunity to win a starting job. But if O’Neill out-plays him and wins the right field spot, I would think management will be willing to have him as a reserve.
And you never know. Like the Matt Kemp example, it could just be that if Dex starts out as a reserve, someone will go down for awhile and he will get some starts and find his stroke again.
We don’t know what will happen, but despite all of Dexter’s woes this year, no one has really stepped up and shown they should have been in there. I suppose we could say Bader, when Pham was still here but that is off the table. Martinez has been serviceable in right, as has Munoz. But there has been no one to this point who we can say “finally, we have our right fielder of the future”. We are all thinking O’Neill will be that guy, but his opportunities keep shooting themselves in the foot with injuries.
I hope he gets healed up soon and can stay healthy for about a six week stretch where he is out there day after day, regardless of opposing pitcher or how he is faring with the bat. Just play him (a recurring theme of mine for young, talented players – do not try to “put them in a position to succeed”, just play them everyday and see how they respond to success and adversity).
Rather than thinking about what bad contract we can take back it seems more logical to think what good contracts we could package with Fowler to get him off the books. Fowler + JMart + major league ready reliever? Fowler + Weaver? We do need the roster spots but it really only becomes worthwhile if the team spends the money saved by sending Fowler’s contract elsewhere.
For those stuck on money, they admitted they were wrong about Leake to the tune of $17 million.
The difference with Fowler is they were wrong by $50 million from the outset, and now that Fowler is one of the worst players in the league, that number has only gone up.
If Dex is with the club in 2019, I think it would be clean slate in the Spring and he would be given an opportunity to win a starting job.
The problem is, he doesn’t have to “win” a starting job. He certainly didn’t win it this year. It was awarded to him based on the size of his contract. They kept marching him out there because the size of his contract.
no one has really stepped up and shown they should have been in there. I suppose we could say Bader,
Bader outplayed him offensively and defensively…the only thing that makes JMart palatable in RF is that his defense really isn’t any worse than Fowler’s, and hey, he can hit!!!
Before Fowler went down with injury and Pham was traded, who was really given a chance to prove themselves?
We do need the roster spots but it really only becomes worthwhile if the team spends the money saved by sending Fowler’s contract elsewhere.
Disagree. If Fowler is the worst player on the team, and running him out there costs the team actual wins, not just WAR wins, then the team is better off by removing him from the roster.
Let’s say we miss the playoffs by two games. Do you think we might have won two more games this year by trotting Bader out there every game instead of Fowler? I do. Whether it’s catching a ball, getting a hit or turning a double into a triple, I am sure Bader would’ve helped the Cardinals win at least two more games this year.
Sports is about winning, not optimal spending. Optimal spending is a means to an end, it’s a way to get increased budgets at those times you really should be going for it. Outside of St. Louis’ fanbase, nobody cares they have “dry powder” year after year.
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