Writings on baseball by Matt Barnard and Dan Stein.

 
It's been a slow day for me, so there's a bunch of new stuff up. Dan and I are working on an article (the first one in the brief history of this site) on the promising catchers of the past ten years, and hopefully that'll be ready for your reading pleasure before too long. As always, if you've got any feedback for us, you know what to do with it.

Baseball Prospectus for money
Most of the content that we've had on this site in the month and a half it's been around has been directly related to on-field baseball matters, and that's as it should be. That said, I think it's worthwhile that we take a moment (or, at least, I take a moment) to acknowledge the step that Baseball Prospectus has announced it'll be taking shortly. As a subscriber to Joe Sheehan's newsletter over the past few months, I was privy to his announcement that the Prospectus would begin to charge for its content soon, and today, the site has gone public with this information. People can (obviously) decide to do whatever they want, but I really don't have a problem with paying the $40 a year for the content they provide and are promising now. As a college student, it'd certainly be nice if they offered some kind of student rate. As someone who buys the annual every year, it'd be nice if there was some kind of discount thrown in for that. As someone who is a bit concerned about the quality and quantity at the site since Joe Sheehan's departure, I think it'd be good to see them offer up a month or so free of charge so we could see if it was worth our money. That said, I read/check BP just about everyday, and I really think it'll be worth the $3.33 a month. There's a hell of a lot of free content, analysis and information out there now, but the work of the guys who really got me interested (along with Rob Neyer) in the objective analysis of baseball is just about the best there is. Not that anyone involved will ever come across these words, but congratulations to the Baseball Prospectus team.

Torii Hunter: 4 years, $32 million
I'm not as enamored with Hunter as some people, and I don't know if this the best way for the Twins to allocate their resources, but it sure is nice to see them spending some money. Hopefully, this is the continuation of a trend (with a bunch of young hitters that should be very good coming up in the system) of signing their own to long term contracts at reasonable prices early in their careers (we saw this with Brad Radke and Joe Mays last offseason). Is $8 million reasonable for Hunter? I'm not sure. My initial reaction was that it seems like quite a bit in the depressed market we're now in. However, the fact is that this contract is going to keep him in Minnesota through what will likely be his peak years (he'll be 30 at the end), and if he performs at a similar level to where he was in 2002, he's one of the top five center fielders in the American League, and while the Twins have a whole bunch of good, young, cheap corner outfielders who are ready or almost ready, they don't really have a replacement lined up for center. So while I'm not totally sold, this seems like a defensible investment and a good sign, if indeed it is indicative of how the franchise will be run going forward.

posted by VZW Watcher at 11:06 PM -