New Blog

Well I have a new, new blog. My other blog will be just for stuff in my life, and this one will be for my musings on sports. Sometimes they will be short entries, other times I am sure they will be long and extended, depending on me mood. This is part of an effort to just expand the amount of writing that I do. I think more writing will make me happier.

Just something I was thinking about earlier, has any player capitalized more on free agency than Adrian Beltre? Beltre is a good player, but is he elite? He has had 2 different career years, in contract years. Paul Depodesta partially lost his job as the Dodgers GM, at least according to what I have read, because he elected to let Beltre go into free agency rather than sign him to a high priced long term deal.

Beltre in 2004 with the Dodgers made $5,000,000 and had a WAR of 10.1 which was second in the league. Which he was able to parley into a 5 year $64 million contract with the mariners and over the course of 5 years there he had a total of 13.8 WAR, or 2.76 WAR/year. These numbers are from the WAR stat on Baseballreference.com not Fangraghs.com.

Of course during the writing of this I read and article on Fangraphs.com that was completely denouncing what I am writing here. I don't agree that because he had a bad final year with Seattle, that it disproves my theory here, its hard to have a career year when you only play in 111 games, and I guess he missed those games after getting nailed in the junk and he has chosen not to wear a cup. He went on the DL with bleeding testicles. So very uncool. I don't blame him for struggling the rest of the season after having some broken balls. I guess I didn't imagine my first sports blog post would talk about Adrian Beltre's testicles. Oh well, so it goes.

I am not arguing that he is not a good player. He is, but he is a 1 time all star, and that was just last year, during which he was playing for a new contract. I am saying that of all of the players that I can recall, he is the only one who has turned contract years into big contracts twice. Potentially making more than he was worth both times. I think Mariners fans would probably agree on that. Please let me know if you can think of someone else who I have forgotten

I think in later posts I will do some discussion of Sabermetrics, to help explain some of the stats to those who do not spend as much time reading about baseball as I do. I would also take suggestions of things people would like my take on.