Originally Posted by Coach (Post 11985035)

I would trust the player/agent than a uninformed reporter who has no well established connections in Kansas City. Especially if it's Alex Gordon.

The problem is, how can one identify how much the market is for Gordon if Upton and Cespedes are still on the market? The longer those two guys who are out there, I have to think it hurts Gordon's value on the market.

Plus, you do remember Michael Bourn? He had to settle for 4/$48M and Bourn was a year younger than Alex when QO-tagged.

I think Alex will find something between 4 years $80 with a 5th year option (you know how much GMDM loves those options), in my opinion.

Originally Posted by siberian khatru (Post 12004102)

Alex looked very happy, as he should be.

The repartee between Moore and McCullough at the end was funny.

Originally Posted by kcjayhawks5 (Post 12003676)

The foul balls right back into his face are worrisome. It happens so often.

Originally Posted by Chiefspants (Post 12004300)

What was said between the two? I was at the Dr's and missed it.

Originally Posted by srvy (Post 12004302)

Sal need to lose the old school mask and adopt the more protective hockey style mask like many have done.

Originally Posted by WhawhaWhat (Post 12004334)

He's tried it before and I thought they say he hated it.

Originally Posted by Sure-Oz (Post 12004381)

@kkwhb: Dayton headed to DR, which pitcher is he after this time?

Originally Posted by Sure-Oz (Post 12004381)

@kkwhb: Dayton headed to DR, which pitcher is he after this time?

Originally Posted by Prison Bitch (Post 12003979)

So maybe we should use the median here. Let's suppose it's 2-3M. Seems like a much better application to this.

Originally Posted by WhawhaWhat (Post 12004334)

He's tried it before and I thought they say he hated it.

Originally Posted by siberian khatru (Post 12004310)

At the end Mike Swanson noted it was Andy's last Royals press conference and said basically thanks for all the fish. Andy then asked Dayton if he put Swanson up to that and Moore and Gordon were laughing

Originally Posted by Anyong Bluth (Post 12004439)

I'm still pissed Andy is leaving.

Originally Posted by DJ's left nut (Post 12004063)

They weren't really given an option.

What I don't understand is why people are more upset by this system than they were the previous system. There have been compensation picks for decades and teams have always lost draft picks for signing upper tier FAs.

The only difference is that right now the team that used to have the player can control draft pick compensation whereas under the old system there was a ranking setup. Under the old CBA, there were Type A and Type B FAs. If you signed a Type A, you lost your pick to the team you signed them away from. Generally speaking there were more Type A free agents then than there are guys that get a QO now. The list for the last year of the old system included guys like Scott Downs, Mark Ellis, Carl Pavano, Dan Wheeler and Takashi Saito - you'd lose your first round pick if you signed those guys and they had been offered arbitration (which was actually cheaper than the QO was). The risk for offering those lower level guys was less, in fact, because arbitration was tied directly to performance so you weren't guaranteed that top end salary like you are now. You could offer Mark Ellis Arb and he'd get awarded what a mediocre 2b would, not the $15 million they're guaranteed under the new QO system.

The Cardinals got Lance Lynn for a pick they got after the Rays signed Troy Percival away from them. They'd picked up Percival off the scrap heap in June after he'd been away from baseball for a season. The Elias rankings system simply had screwiness all throughout it.

More teams used to lose picks than they do now. More players used to get offered arb than they get QOs now. It's not the new CBA that's doing this, it's the fact that league minimum salaries haven't gone up nearly as fast as FA salaries have and as a result, team control is now 10 times more important than it used to be.

It gets back to the same old saw - revenue disparity.

The MLBPA has nobody to blame here unless they're willing to just tell small market teams to **** off and die.