Friday, August 03, 2012

Cliffhanger

From "The Dodgers Should Claim Cliff Lee" by Dave Cameron at FanGraphs:
While the Dodgers might not have unlimited resources, the new ownership group clearly intends to make the organization of the big spenders in baseball, taking full advantage of their television market to establish something like Yankees West. If the Dodgers run out an opening day payroll of $175 million next year, I don’t think anyone would be too terribly surprised.

Based on the contracts currently on the books, the Dodgers have $135 million already allocated to players under team control for 2013, while A.J. Ellis is their only significant arbitration eligible player. So, if their payroll target was $175 million (which, keep in mind, is a number I pulled out of thin air, and may not actually represent their budget), that would leave them about $35 million to spend to fill out the roster, meaning they could take Cliff Lee's contract and still have enough left to buy a new first baseman. While Lee's contract would be a budget buster for most organizations, it might not prevent the Dodgers from making further upgrades in other areas as well.

And from MLBTR:

Teams have two business days to claim players off of waivers, which suggests Lee hit the waiver wire yesterday, when the August waiver period opened.

So if anything interesting is going to happen, it's going to happen soon. But we're not holding our breath.

2 comments:

Fred's Brim said...

I am terrified we will give up all of the pitchers we refused to give to the Cubs in order to get him

Fred's Brim said...

But I am for it if we will just be taking on his contract