Thursday, January 14, 2010

Heatin' Up...

-- Unless they've not learned their Mad Capper lesson, the suits are gonna have deal Delwyn Young or Brandon Moss; both are out of options and Ryan Church (Fangraph's Jack Moore loves the deal) is making at least one of them redundant. Steve Pearce, Brian Bixler, and Neal Walker all have at least one option remaining.

The beat gang also says a couple more free agent signings are in the air, along with a possible trade. Change is Pittsburgh's only constant. Neal Huntington is at a GM meeting in Arizona now. We wonder what Zach Duke or Ryan Doumit are worth these days?

Our guess is the signing of Luke Carlin was to shore up the catching spot if someone meets Huntington's price for Doumit. The Bucs didn't suffer too badly with Jason Jaramillo and Robby Diaz splitting dish time last season.

-- The beat guys and gals are also reporting that a deal for Octavio Dotel is just around the bend, on the heels of agreeing to terms with long-man D.J. Carrasco for a minor league contract with an invite to spring training. It'll be worth $950K if he stays in the show and some bonus sugar if he pitches enough, according to Dejan Kovacevic of the Post Gazette.

-- Adam LaRoche overplayed his hand a bit, so it seems. After reportedly turning down a two year/$17.5M deal with the Giants, he ended up with the D-Backs, getting one year and between $4.5-5.5M, according to tweets and stuff collected by Major League Trade Rumor's Tim Dierkes.

-- Green Weenie may have to give up on sabermetrics. No, not because he's too old school to do the math, but because according to the Associated Press, someone wants to trademark the term, which has been in the public domain for 30 years. Lawyers and baseball, bah!

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