It may not be Jingle Bells but Mickey, Yogi, Whitey and Moose (no not that Moose) singing Take Me Out To The Ballgame seems some how appropriate

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drOdOCuWNRY

ISTM that when you take variance into account, Kuroda’s value may be greater than 1 additional win.  Players don’t always perform at their expected level.  AJ could be worse than projected.  Hughes or Garcia could be a bust.  Any of the starting 5 could mave a major injury.  Taking all these possibilities into account, I would think that having Kuroda to replace the worst (or most injured) of the current starting 5 might be worth more than SG has calculated.

Happy Christmas, everybody !

Mo bless us, everyone!

Mo has certainly blessed us all.  I wish all a yiz Happy Molidays.

http://www.youtube.com/fiatusa?sid=1037056&KWNM=2011+fiat&KWID=3109631781&channel=paidsearch Little bit hotter than J-no…no??

ISTM that when you take variance into account, Kuroda’s value may be less than 1 additional win. Players don’t always perform at their expected level.  AJ could be beter than projected.  Hughes or Garcia could be a bust.  Any of the starting 5 could mave a major injury.  Taking all these possibilities into account, I would think that having Kuroda to replace the worst (or most injured) of the current starting 5 might be worth less than SG has calculated.

Happy whatever to all you guys that give me a welcome break from the work day.

I agree with David and Damn Pasqua.  Kuroda would be insurance against another one of the starters’ having a CMW/Javy Vazquez/Phil Hughes -type season where they suddenly struggle to maintain a single-digit ERA.  It isn’t necessarily a matter of improving upon AJ’s projected performance; it may be a matter of having another quality arm to guard against another pitcher’s complete ineffectiveness.

I assume there has to be some way to take a Yankee rotation - CC, Nova, Burnett, Garcia, Hughes - and project what would be the most likely worst season among the latter four. You could probably throw half a Noesi in there too, for injuries. So let’s say that none of Nova, AJ, Freddy or Fuse project as .5 WAR pitchers, but given those four guys it would be expected that one among them would have a .5 WAR season, which would make Kuroda a 2 win upgrade instead of 1. (This of course would also rely on Girardi and Cashman removing the worst pitcher from the rotation, which they haven’t been that great at in the past, objective pipes and all.)

Basically the idea is quantifying what BD was talking about with “insurance”.

[10] I assume we’ll be getting this in the non-distant future as SG is able to give us individual projections and percentiles. The worst case scenarios are going to be terrible for those 4. Probably sub .5 WAR for all of them escept maybe Nova.

Anyone catch the defensive plays of the year article on ESPN?

Lillibridge wins for his catches of the Arod and Cano catches on what turned out to be Arod’s last hard hit ball of the year…

and then there’s also this gem:

http://mlb.mlb.com/video/play.jsp?content_id=19228203&c_id=mlb

FREE SHELLEY DUNCAN!!!

You could say there’s a chance that every single pitcher on the Yankees may not provide any WAR if they get hurt.  So yeah, in that case having Kuroda around would be beneficial, even if it’s not much more than a win of improvement on paper.

I guess you can also envision scenarios where some of the starters are healthy enough to pitch but pitch poorly enough to be below replacement level.  I’m guessing Burnett’s 20% forecast will qualify in that regard.

[13] Exactly, CAIRO can’t take playing while injury into account while projecting. Which is why I would not be surprised to see Hughes’ 20% under .5 WAR.

Realistically, even as uninspiring as he has been Hughes has still been at least ~average when healthy.

Oswalt

The last CAIRO spreadsheet had Burnett at 1.9 WAR but I had replacement level set too low so he’s at 1.3 now.  We’re more interested in the difference though.

What’s the spread between Kuroda and Garcia?  I know they got a good deal on Garcia but since both could be had for a 1 year deal Kuroda would have been a much better signing than Garcia. Especially since you could offer Garcia arbitration and get a pick when he signed elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the cost of adding that additional win is likely $12M for at least one year.  It doesn’t really make sense if you look at it that way.  So I think the Yankees are probably right to sit tight here, even if it’s a little boring right now.

That to me is where trading AJ comes in.  Say they really CAN trade AJ and eat $20M of what’s left.  So now they’re paying $5.5M for a 1 win upgrade.  Sounds like roughly market rate.  PLUS again - especially with Jackson - there’s some serious upside for him being a 4+ win pitcher, which I just don’t see in AJ’s future any more.  Also of course they don’t have to deal with AJ again next year, and have that $6.5M for then as well.  Not to mention they could get a potentially useful player for AJ.  Perhaps only useful as an organizational player, but sometimes those are necessary. 

The key of course is trading AJ…