With us being 7-17 and knowing that there now is nothing coming out of the minors other than Singleton, who is to blame for these awful loses. I went to the game Weds 24th and Dominguez would not chase anything, Villar was slacking, Carter well we all know. Is it our bullpen, batting, starters, hell our defense. What is it? this is so frustrating.
Bingo. Even the Yankees relied heavily on home grown talent during their dominance. Look at the guys who came up through their system. If you don't draft quality players and develop them properly, your team will be very bad very soon. That's what happened. The good news? We resumed drafting quality players. They are a year or two away from being ready to contribute at the major league level.
This is pretty much the answer. From 06-10, after the glory teams aged out Drayon McLane continued to draft poorly, and sign Free Agents to keep us mediocre. We really drafted poorly for almost a decade before 2011. Now Crane has chosen fully rebuild, so the disastrous state of the MLB team is on him, but most of us agree with his choice. Its better to have a few 100 loss seasons in preparation for (we hope) an extended period of great teams eventually. If you are gonna be bad, be bad, get better draft picks, don't waste money and draft position in an effort to be mediocre.
I don't know who to blame, but hopefully we will eventually get some actual major league talent up here (it's coming, I know) within a couple years. I just hope they don't come up to the bigs and suck it up like others have. I was having a conversation with my brother about how almost half of our roster would probably clear waivers if they were released. Maybe even more than half. The other depressing thing is that there is a recent history of others performing a good bit better after they got away from here...
How many games have they lost leading in the 9th inning this year? Not that they should do it, but spending $10MM on an elite closer might be the best absolute value they could get. It would have won about 15 additional games last year from my understanding, and already 2 this year. There's nowhere else you can spend $10MM and get that kind of value.
I get that. You never understand the value of having a good closer until you don't have one and lose games because of it.
I suppose I blame the system. That is MLB itself. Rewarding teams near the bottom to try and lose. As long as the only way to get better is to get real bad, teams will exploit it. Been lots of talk on this. Seemingly no specific and heralded alternative to the system on the table though.
Still not worth it to win the 2 out of 25 games this team would have possibly had a different outcome with an elite closer. They're right now getting only one or two save opportunities a week. Signing an expensive closer is akin to the bandaid roster building that everybody is blaming McClain for. They need better players... Everywhere. They will eventually have to start trading some of their farm depth for established players (when their "stars" are close to being ready to be stars).
Every league rewards teams for being bad and baseball is the riskiest with respect to trying to build through the draft. It is a rare when a player can come in and contribute within a year or two of being drafted. In basketball, that top pick can turn a team into a playoff contender. In football teams generally get 2-3 immediate starters or major contributors through the draft. Baseball - who knows. Pittsburgh has certainly waited a long time for their ineptitude to benefit and the Cubs are still waiting (nothing wrong with that ).
I didn't mean to imply Baseball is alone in what they reward. And I don't even disagree with the spirit of it (helping the struggling teams via the draft). But the way its implemented certainly has room for improvement.
I've always thought they should go to a straight lottery among non-playoff teams. Not weighted in any way. Same thing for the NBA. Sucking shouldn't be rewarded. The 76ers and their massive losing streak are in much better shape than a team that honestly tried. Morally, I don't really like the approach the Astros have taken, but the pragmatist in me can't think of any reason to not take this approach.
Drayton would be the top one to blame . . .but there is plenty of blame to go around I would list the biggest offenders in this order Drayton..gutted the farm system before the big league team was gutted, started the whole mess Purpura.. just awful, unless i'm missing someone Brandon Barnes is the only top 15 pick of his three drafts that is in the majors . . .brutal 3 years of absolutely no development. Yes, he had some restraints put on him by Drayton that made his job tough, but sheesh Crane..i've been on board with the complete re-build, but to be honest Correa and Appel are probably the only guys we can say are definitely a result of the complete tear down. The other guys we have drafted over the past few years in lower rounds, we likely could have still drafted if we were picking anywhere in the top part of the draft. If we were bad, but not historically bad, maybe we pick 2nd or 3rd in those last two drafts and end up with Buxton and Bryant . .or Correa and Appel still . . .there is nothing he could have really done to have the team in contention with the system he purchased, but it could be a lot better than it currently is Hunsicker..while he was great at building a roster, his last 5 drafts were not good at all. Yes the team was usually good and picking lower, but even going 15 rounds deep those last 5 drafts basically produced Hunter Pence, Ben Zobrist and Chad Qualls as major league players. The farm system started it's downturn in 2000 and was already getting bad when Purpura and Drayton absolutely butchered it The one guy I don't really blame that many do is Ed Wade. He did not do a good job at building major league rosters while he was in charge, but looking at him from a "how are we now" situation, our best player (Castro) and current best healthy pitcher (Keuchel) were both drafted by Ed. The guy we all want to bust out (Springer) was a Wade guy, as are Deshields, Foly, Velasquez . . .Ed didn't build us good teams when he was in charge, but where we are now isn't his fault As for Luhnow and Porter, I don't blame either of them for the mess we are in, but don't know if they will be the ones to get us out of it either. I think it's really tough to evaluate Porter with this bunch. And Luhnow will eventually be defined by Correa/McCullers/Ruiz/Appel/2014 pick than any others, and it's way too early to tell how that will end up. Luhnow also hasn't had the chance to really build his first legitimate mlb team, the financial restraints placed on him so far hasn't allowed him to show how he will build a roster when the time comes damn, i need a beer
I agree it's not worth it if you don't care about results (and I don't). But the question was what's to blame for the team's losses. If the goal is to win more games quickly now, it's the single most effective move they could make. And if you have $10MM to spend, there's no move or combo of moves that would increase this team's wins more than an elite closer. One or two save opportunities a week is a lot - that adds up to 25-50 save opportunities a season. As I said, last year, it's would have been a 15 game difference. For comparison, it's doubtful that adding Miguel Cabrera would add 15 wins to this team. At the current pace this year, it would be worth 12. But I agree that it's only a bandaid. Absolutely - that's a major reason to have a deep farm.
