Shouldn't you be spewing outrage over the travesty that Bryce Harper won the derby?
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Trade for Clint Hurdle. He is a stud!
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I can't wait until you guys pay Harper 350M next offseason!
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I'd be happy to pay Manny or Harper $350 million. No issues with paying 26 year olds for 10 years. Not okay with paying 31 year olds for 10 years.

The owner is making boatloads of money with this team. Shitty team and still will have the 3rd highest attendance in baseball this year. Team value up from $140 million to $1.2 BILLION. Making boatloads of money off the retail complex located next door.

We have the money to pay either one and not hamper our future but they are not coming to the Midwest.
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Which would you prefer between Machado or Harper?
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Machado
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A) Dewitt won't pay it. He's a bottom line owner and that would cut into his margin significantly. He's become a bit like Lamar Hunt was through the 90s. He doesn't feel the need to take big risks because merely not sucking will be enough to keep fans coming in.

B) If Dewitt DID pay it, I'd have a Harper jersey the minute the ink was dry. Kid's struggled his ass off this year, no question. But you don't just lose the skills he's demonstrated time and again throughout his career and frankly he demonstrated them for 6 weeks or so this year. Through the first 150 PAs of the season year he put up 12 HRs and an OPS near 1.100 to go with some absurd plate discipline figures (39 walks to 22 Ks).

Granted, 150 PAs isn't a large sample, but it isn't nothing either. I just think the pressure of his walk year got to him, especially when combined with the rest of his team getting hurt around him after Murphy, Zimmerman, Eaton and Rendon all went down and Turner was struggling/dinged up as well.

He just started swinging at everything. A guy who's never demonstrated a real K problem is suddenly hacking like a 250 K guy. That's not him and it's not going to be him going forward. If I had any concerns it would be over some pretty sharp declines in his defensive efficiency but as a hitter I absolutely believe he'll get back to being the force that he's proven he can be in the past.
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Why because his father started throwing pitches before the rules state he is suppose to and Bryce told him to speed it up?

I dont even care. I dont even watch the HR derby and only tuned in for the final round to see if Schwarber won. Harper would have probably beat him without the bullshit anyways.

I've thought for a long time that its absolutely stupid to reset the HRs for each round. It's a HR derby... You get 4 mins + 30 seconds to hit as many HRs in each round as you can. Didn't Bryce hit 2nd every round? So as soon as he hit 1 more than the other guy he got to stop. Schwarber hit 8 more HRs than him and had the most swings on the night and was visibly exhausted by the time he was winding down his final round.
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I'd have said Machado until he showed that he's not a shortstop. He's been somewhere between 'bad' and 'historically awful' at short this season, depending on your metric of choice.

Defensive metrics aren't all that fantastic but they can at least put you in the general vicinity and Machado's general vicinity is that of a really shitty shortstop.

So if I could get a RH third baseman with 35-40 HR skills and and good but not great plate discipline or a LH outfielder with 40-45 HR skills and elite plate discipline (provided that this year's the one-off), I'd take the latter. We need LH power more and while we have better OF options in the system than we do 3b prospects, I think Gorman will prove himself to be a big time keeper long-term and that's really the timeline you need to be looking at with a signing of this magnitude.

With Harper your ceiling is substantially higher, IMO. There's arguably more risk there, but his natural ability is off the charts. And frankly, this team needs a guy with his fire in the worst way. That guy plays like each play could be his last; he's just a damn treat to watch play if you can forget the fact that he came into the league as a teenager. Since his indiscretions at a young age, his only real problems have been with 2 guys - Matt Williams and Jonathan Papelbon. Both of those guys are monumental assholes.

But again - it's not relevant. Neither guy will be here. I just hope neither of them ends up in CHC.
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Manny by far. Not even close. Manny ain't Trout but he's rated by everyone to be one of the top players in the game. Harper is a helluva player but maybe a little over rated. But, I love the passion and this team needs that passion.

I looked at his SS WAR and its 4 and his 3B WAR is 7. He is a force at 3B. He's not bad at SS but man 3B, the man is a dynamo. It would seem that if we pay you $350 million you can play 3B for us where we have a great need but he may say no thanks and get that money somewhere else that plays him at SS.

Manny hitting 3rd totally changes our lineup and franchise trajectory for the next 8 years.
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Not convinced Harper is a more disciplined hitter. They both are about equal when it comes to swinging at balls, but Machado makes waaaaaaaay more contact.

Machado is also much less of a dead pull hitter and can carry a respectable average. Bryce is getting murdered by the shift because he pulls the majority of his hits and pops up most of his opposite field hits.
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The shift isn't helping him, no doubt. But the shift was around in 2015 and he was a dead pull hitter then - didn't hurt him when he won his MVP. Moreover, his BABIP was great last year and the shift was around then.

It's approach. On the season his overall O-Swing, and contact rates haven't cratered yet because he was virtually impossible to catch off guard for his first 150 PAs. But since then, when his production has fallen to shit, it's because he's swinging at too much slop and especially because he simply can't keep the front shoulder in on pitches away.

Like I said - this is a new problem for him; it's not something he's demonstrated in the past. He's never gotten carved up by that outside pitch the way he has been for the last 10 weeks or so. And he looks completely healthy. I think he's simply pressing something awful and it's wrecked him.

I don't expect it is permanent. I could obviously be wrong.
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I would obviously take either, but preferentially I'd be a Machado guy. For some reason, I don't know why.

I think it's that I could actually see some magical small ass chance he could come here, whereas Harper wouldn't ever.
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I don't see a magical small ass chance either way at this point.

Perhaps had we been able to get one of them in the offseason, but honestly Matheny would've just made him miserable and run him off either way.

No, unless you have a time machine that can take us back to 2014 and we can do what we should've done (and what the Cubs had the stones to do) and fire Matheny to bring on Maddon, there's no way we could've pulled it off.

I'd convinced myself that some fresh faces and winning games could get that miserable despot to be less of a buzzkill. As it turns out, there's nobody he can't beat the fun out of. Matheny murdered any of those dreams in the womb.
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I honestly have no idea what Harper is going to do, I think there's a decent change he stays in Washington.
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