The original point was made by a commenter who said he was sick of paying money to see players who only played for a paycheck, not for love of the game. This of course assumes that this mindset is exclusive to the Giants (or maybe a few other teams), which is just…wrong. Baseball players are committed to making as much money as they can (and rightfully so), and have been since the beginning of time. You can legitimately criticize the Giants for any number of things, but not this particular complaint, which is just silly.

But by all means, continue to misconstrue my words, attack me with straw men, and call me a troll.

You’d best move to some other country then, because every single ballplayer you see out there when you go to a game, on any team, is playing for a paycheck. If you were one of the few hundred or so best players in the world, would YOU play for free?

Where do you think professional ballplayers originate? How many 12 year olds besides Danny Almonte get paid? In this country less than 1% of the people who play this game ever earn a nickel.

Your blog is stupid and redundant. Which is probably why you can stand living in a place like Sacramento. Take your trolling elsewhere. And while you’re at it, take the two stooges whose best rhetorical efforts seem to be of the “neener-neener” variety

You’d best move to some other country then, because every single ballplayer you see out there when you go to a game, on any team, is playing for a paycheck. If you were one of the few hundred or so best players in the world, would YOU play for free?

I do tend to believe though that 90 wins is more of an “optomistic” than a “realistic” target. Just to be clear here I am not saying it cannot happen, because I do believe there is a chance we win 90 games next year. I just think that to expect a repeat performance of equal or greater standard from our pitchers next year as a given is somewhat optomistic. For starters our bullpen is in no way guarnateed to be as good as last year as most bullpens do fluctuate year to year in performance. Also I don’t know if you noticed but apart from the aging Randy Johnson we had no real injury problems with our pitching staff at all.

I think Aaron B’s valuation of our pitching staff is pretty fair. I think by optomistic he means more what we would hope for than what we can expect at best. I think that to expect something to happpen again just because it did once before is somewhat optomistic. A prime example of this would be expecting Aaron Hill to hit over 30hrs next year because he did last when he had never been close before.

Just to be clear I don’t disagree that the Giants could win 90 next year but I think it would be fair to say that that is an optomistic view whereas 86 wins is probably closer to where we end up.

Nope, I’ll just have to be content to just sit back and enjoy the complete and utter lack of conventional wisdom and bullshit de jour (sic) as it’s related to the Giants.

“Thank you sir, may I have another?!”

1) The pitching staff last year combined for 23.6 WAR and thus could just a easily beat your 22 WAR projection in 2010 as fall short and therefore “optimistically” is an overstatement and could just as easily be replaced with “pessimistically”.

2) The 46 Wins you referenced for Replacement Level is actually AL only. MLB is 47 wins and most importantly NL is 48 Wins.

3) You failed to account for what I would see as the likely 2 WAR the Giants would get from their position player bench.

Add these all up an your 86 Win projection “optimistically” is corrected to the 90 Wins needed to be a serious playoff contender “realistically”.

Our rotation goes something like this, optimistically:

Tim: 8 WAR
Matt: 4 WAR
Sanchez: 2.5 WAR
Zito: 1.75 WAR
5th starter: 1 WAR

That’s 17.5 WAR. Add 14 WAR for 7 average position players and 4 WAR for Pablo and that’s 35.5 WAR. Add the bullpen (~4.5 WAR) and that’s about 40 WAR. Add in 46 wins for a replacement-level team and that’s 86 wins. Optimistically.

86.

I think if you were to seek professional help they would suggest that you were rife with insecurities, but that’s just an opinion.

I just find it interesting that you have basically criticized the Giants from top-to-bottom, (probably with a lot of exceptions for the talented player/contributors), but the whole ‘support the Giants at your own risk’ thing, these guys are all idiots… I don’t see how the current organiztion keeps your interest. It seems like the more every detail you state is true, the less interested you would be. Because, obviously, there isn’t any end in sight. Is there?