Fair enough, I perhaps over-emphasized your lack of excitement for the deal. I apologize.
If they brought back EE they would have had to go cheap on the outfield, stick with Upton who was terrible, Carrera would was less terrible but still not good, hope Pompey suddenly finds it(my favorite option of the 3), or some cheap bad free agent option, and they would have had to pick 2 of those 4 options to start.
Then there's the pen, which they may have also had to cheap out on. Osuna's great but a lot of the disdain from the more casual viewer this past year was the blown leads from the pen.
Morales was probably more of a the signing that hinted at EE being gone. Morales and EE at 1B/DH would have went against what they've been saying they've wanted, which is more versatility. Now we know they had an offer of 4/80 on the table and pulled it and signed Morales instead.
If we're directly replacing Edwin in our minds, it's Morales that's replacing him. That big power bat, at 1st but mostly DH. He could hit 40 homeruns this year. 30 or 35 is more likely.
This is just a value signing from a guy who can hit well over a 100 game sample in a year. It adds versatility, and production, all the while allowing you to allocate the bigger money to other areas of need. Yeah he might not be able to play 150 games but if he only plays 100 he still adds plenty of value. Especially for the amount spent.
If the choice is EE + cheap pen + cheap OF or Fowler/Jose + Pearce + Mid range pen arm that choice is easy for me. Sure there's less power, but we still added Morales, and Jose is still an option, the HR's are still there.
It's not a sexy move, but the money is still there for 1 of the top tier guys, and these are the types of underrated moves that you need to add additional value to your roster to help you win ball games.
You don't have to get excited about it, but that doesn't mean you have to tell or we signed Carlo Colaiacovo or tell us you're not buying what we're selling, we're not selling anything. We understand that for this roster to make the playoffs next year a vlue signing like this that adds additional wins for cheap is vital and we're happy about it.
A bit of both. As far as I know he was underutilized early in his career, some of that was believing he needed to be platooned. Once given more time the past couple years he's had some injuries.
there's certainly some injury risk involved, but the numbers suggest he need not be platooned. But even at 100 games of production I think this is a steal. I know you're not into advanced stats, but 1 fWAR usually costs about 8 or 9 million dollars in free agency. So he'd need to put up roughly 1.5 fWAR over the 2 years to be worth the contract. or 3/4 of a fWAR per year. The past 3 years he's put up 2.0, 0.4, and 4.9 averaging 93 games per year. If he stays the same and plays the same there should be plenty of surplus value here. If he can survive the rigors of a full season and get say even 140 games it's highway robbery.
