It was in the Stars

I was reading through an interesting article on The Hardball Times discussing the 1994 Expos and Where Are They Now? and it seems like it was meant to be for Marquis Grissom (what a car! Luckily he wasn't named after the Nova, that would have been ironic given his speed) to eventually become a Giants because he was traded for players who were with the Giants at one time or another in their career before Gris joined us.

First, there was the trade to Cleveland for Alan Embree and Kenny Lofton. Then he was traded with Jeff Juden to the Brewers, who had a brief, if controversial cup of coffee with us. OK, nothing earth-shattering, but I thought it was interesting from a Giants fan perspective.

He's also been involved with A's players in trades as well, Mike Fetters and David Justice. But I doubt he'll ever end up with the A's, Billy Beane has rarely signed free agents that old, though he's starting with "The Big Hurt".

Maybe Beane's trying out Sabean's methods now that some site (was that The Hardball Times as well?) had validated Sabean's method of signing older players as being effective, even it is is odd and ridiculed. They said that he's doing "Moneyball" tactics, which is finding undervalued commodities, but that he has found his own pocket of inefficiency in the marketplace and has exploited that.

I would argue that giving up draft picks like he has been doing is another form of exploiting inefficiency in the marketplace. I'll have to update my thoughts and writing on that given the time that has passed since I published that research and others have published similar research which contradict mine, or so my detractors have said. Hopefully I can find the right way to present the data, I've given another try on McCovey Chronicles and I'll use that info in a future post to try to show that giving up draft picks are logical under certain circumstances.

Sidenote

Can there ever be a more obvious headline? There is a news article entitled, "Alou Counting on Bonds Health". Of course he is, almost any manager is counting on the health of their best players, whether he has a history of health problems or is a model of health or just an old fart.

ADDITION: Weaver just signed for $8.4M with the LAnaheim Angels for one year (couldn't find any takers at $10M/year for multiple years). That makes our signing of Morris look like a bargain, Morris is much better than Weaver. Boras does it again for his clients.