That thing’s a pain in the rear.

If you’re at all good at math, you’ll probably find that part’s pretty easy, but the verbal section is a total killer if you haven’t spent like 5 hours a day for 10 weeks studying all those vocabulary lists.

I’m even an English teacher and the vocab kicked my butt.

has a great swing, hope he can develop some discipline at the plate.

MUCH better OF than Duncan.

My hope is that he’s the 4th OF, platooning w/Skip in RF.

Good luck on the GRE.

On to Mather, a few weeks (or more) ago I did some projections of my own for next season. Over the past few years, I have been very hit or miss with my projections. I never really share these projections with others, just have them saved on my laptop…occassionally I share certain sets of data when we do these exercises on VeB.

After reading the last two days’ posts, I think that I was a little harsh on Mather in my projections that I made back in late October or early November. My line for Mather was over 440 PA, 400 AB. I have him with a .238/.307/.438 line, with a well-rounded 20 doubles and 20 homers, 40 walks to 100 Ks.

I could see him dropping his Ks down to 80 or so over 400 AB, and his line peak at about a .260/.350/.525 line for his first full season. Probably, though, he will be somewhere in between. I hope I was a little low on him on my original predictions…but who knows.

If he can get closer to the second line than the first one, then I have no problem trading Ankiel for a starting pitcher and letting Rasmus take over center, Ludwick take over RF, and having a platoon/OF glut in left of Skip/Mather/Barton or Duncan (if Duncan is healthy).

Kudos.

but it looks like the angels have turned their attention to fuentes!

let us rejoice in this fabulous news…

but his “loping” athleticism was apparent even when transmitted and reassembled digitally. What impressed me most about Mather, besides some absolute defensive gems in right field, was his wide receiver build. The man is an athlete.

The ultimate optimist in me looks at his first 200+ ABs from last year (AAA) and the year before (AA), before the promotions, and hopes that there’s a trend where Mather needs the second half of the year to adjust and then blows up at the beginning of the next season.

’08 G AB H 2B 3B HR BB K AVG OBP SLG
AAA 59 211 64 14 2 17 32 36 .303 .411 .630
’07 G AB H 2B 3B HR BB K AVG OBP SLG
AA 64 234 71 17 0 18 29 32 .303 .387 .607

I think his defense alone wins out in any platoon competition with Duncan and his power and speed wins out against Barton. I would like to see how he does as our starting RFer with Schu a very capable 4th OFer.

…from the Baseball Guru on the (potential) Japanese imports.

(I apologize if anyone has already linked to this.)

will beat out Barton in spring training. hopefully some of the outfield glut is gone, otherwise, it would suck to try and manage this situation.

He had surgery on his hand which can take power from his swing plus back problems

Looks like they have signed Teixeria to a mega deal.

Are the yankees just trying to make baseball empose a salary cap??

who likes the nickname “Joe Masher”? Cause you know, the dude can mash.
Thank goodness the Tex drama is over… maybe we can now see all those moves that we were promised were waiting to see what happened.

The Blue Jays now clearly don’t have the slightest chance at winning with those three teams in the division, I wonder how open they’d be to dealing Halladay? If there’s someone worth Rasmus, he’s it…

The newspaper reported that the team remained in contact with Fuentes throughout the Teixeira talks and have made him a top priority after those discussions ended.

The team being NotTheCardinals