Craig Friggin' Counsell?

What is Melvin thinking:

LINK

2 years and a guaranteed 6 $ mil for a 37 year old backup infielder, who has had the following batting line over the last 3 seasons:

.251/.337/.348/.685

A post in a brewerfan.net thread about this trade sums up my thoughts perfectly. From JohnBriggs12:

"For those that say they needed a backup infielder and they got one, I say by the
end of spring training I could find 10 that are better than Counsell, all
costing less than $1 million per year, that could be had with waiver claims
or for a mid level or lower prospect."

It's not that Melvin chose Counsell to be the backup middle infielder next year, since they all generally stink. It's that he apparently thinks Counsell has more to offer than any other nameless, cheap, backup middle infielder. There's no other reason to guarantee the guy $6 mil. What this suggests is that Melvin must be value those wonderful "intangibles" that Yost is always talking about and that crappy old white guys like Counsell apparently have an abundance of.

In the end, spending $6 mil over 2 years for any player isn't a big deal. Having a GM that values the wrong things is, however. I'm starting to not be able to give Melvin the automatic benefit of the doubt.

Trade: Davis, Eveland & Krynzel for Estrada, Vargas, & Aquino

Just the facts...

Doug Davis

Age: 31
Contract Status: Made $4.75M in 2006; 2007 is last year of arbitration.
2006 Stats: 203.1 IP, 1.51 WHIP, .755 OPS against, 4.43 FIP, 92 ERA+, 4.91 ERA
Links:

• ESPN
• Baseball Reference
• Hardball Times
• Fangraphs

Dana Eveland

Age: 23
Contract Status: Pre-arbitration
2006 Stats (MLB): 27.2 IP, 1.99 WHIP, .926 OPS against, 4.84 FIP, 55 ERA+, 8.13 ERA
2006 Stats (AAA): 105 IP, 1.07 WHIP, 2.68 K/BB, 2.74 ERA
Links:

• ESPN
• Baseball Cube
• Hardball Times
• Fangraphs

Dave Krynzel

Age: 25
Contract Status: Out of minor league options
2006 Stats (AAA): 359 AB, .231/.314/.359/.673, 23 SB/4 CS
Links:

• ESPN
• Baseball Cube
• Brewerfan.net

Claudio Vargas

Age: 28
Contract Status: Made $1.275M in 2006. Second year of arbitration in 2007
2006 Stats: 167.6 IP, 1.41 WHIP, .801 OPS against, 4.88 FIP, 99 OPS+, 4.83 ERA
Links:

• ESPN
• Baseball Reference
• Hardball Times
• Fangraphs

Johnny Estrada

Age: 30
Contract Status: Made $2.0M in 2006. Last year of arbitration in 2007
2006 Stats: 414 AB, .302/.328/.444/.772
Links:

• ESPN
• Baseball Reference
• Hardball Times
• Fangraphs

Greg Aquino

Age: 28
Contract Status: Pre-arbitration
2006 Stats: 48.1 IP, 1.61 WHIP, .839 OPS against, 4.87 FIP, 107 ERA+, 4.47 ERA
Links:

• ESPN
• Baseball Reference
• Hardball Times
• Fangraphs

I'll give my opinion on this trade after giving my self a little time to look it over.

Gears of War Review Roundup

TeamXbox      9.6  
OXM (print)  10.0  
GameSpot      9.6  
1UP          10.0  
IGN           9.4  
YahooGames    9.0
XPlay (TV)   10.0
 

GameRankings (composite score)

Packer Final Season Record Prediction

Ask an individual to predict the outcome of a sporting event and he can be pretty stupid. Ask a whole bunch of people and the group prediction can be amazingly accurate. This is proven in Vegas all the time. In that vain, I wanted people to give me the estimated probabilities for the Packers winning each of their final 9 games:

@ Buffalo (2-5)
@ Minnesota (4-3)
New England (6-1)
NY Jets (4-4)
@ Seattle (4-3)
@ San Francisco (2-5)
Detroit (1-6)
Minnesota (4-3)
@ Chicago (7-0)

I asked the fine folks at Lambeauleapforum.net to do just that and received 20, probably biased results. See, for this to completely "work", I would have needed to ask that question to non-biased football fans. Quite honestly, that's something a Packer fan would never be accused of. Packer fans seem to fall into two camps these days; the unrelenting optimists and perpetual pessimists. Despite that, I think those opposing forces will have a tendency to balance itself out in the long run. The resulting predictions seem to support that:



While some of those individual predictions might be unrealistic, the average of those predictions seem pretty reasonable. Let's see what final season records result from those probabilities:



Cumulatively, Lambeauleap figures about a one in two chance of the Packers finishing with 6 or 7 wins, and about a one in four chance of them finishing at .500. Again, that sounds very reasonable to me. After all, even bad teams have some chance of winning every game. While the Packers might not have the talent of a .500 team, the luck of the draw might allow them to finish with a .500 record.

The 3% chance of finishing 10-6 (and probably making the playoffs) unfortunately sounds reasonable as well. The Packers simply don't have anywhere near the talent of a 10-6 team. All the balls would have to bounce the Packer's way for them to make the post season, which only means that the Packers would most likely be extremely overmatched by whomever they would play there. Not a pretty picture.

I guess I've been right to focus on the goal of the Packers finishing at .500 this year. Hey, it's something...