is much more that he would take away playing time from better players. His salary for next year is not bad, but if he sticks around it takes away from playing Seth Smith. I think that the $7M in resources is better spent elsewhere and letting $450K Seth (who is better than Hawpe) start. If you keep Smith and Atkins, you are paying upwards of $15M for guys who ought to be backups on this team – which in my mind is a very very poor allocation of resources, for a club that cannot afford to waste those resources.

It’s not that Hawpe is a bad player, it’s not that he’s not valuable – but given the other options we have in the outfield, Hawpe is more expensive, and keeping him around is just actively hurting the Rockies. Smith appears to be Hawpe’s equal offensively – perhaps a little worse, but his defense more than makes up for it since Smith is a plus defender whereas Hawpe is arguably the worst outfielder in all of baseball.

Also, Hawpe’s BABIP this past season was .360 – while he’s shown the ability to post high BABIP’s this will probably fall over the course of next season and hurt his trade value more.

The team knows this. They rode Torrealba’s hot streak while it lasted (and it seemed to help more than it hurt, though we won’t know what Iannetta would have brought to the table during that time either). But now, all bets are off.

Torrealba is expensive. A lot of players are going to be in line for raises, and every million we can save helps. Torrealba is an easy trim, an easily replaceable player, even if it is with himself at a cheaper rate.

The point is: I’m not willing to pay Torrealba 4 million dollars to play for the Rockies. If he wants to come back at a cheaper rate, I’m fine with it.

not this nonsense again.

to a 2-3 year deal

Given that Tracy has said he thinks CarGo can be a Beltran type player, I’m sure Boras has whipped up an informative monograph, “Why CarGo is Better than Carlos Beltran.”

My point was that 7 big hits doesn’t prove that Yorvit can be a better producer over 150 games.

However, getting both is kind of unrealistic, unless we do trade Stewart, which again, is kind of stupid. The main problem with the strikeouts was the approach. In many cases, the K’s were not a result of being unable to make contact, it was going down looking on the third strike. It seems that these hitters are trained to wait for their pitch, and if they don’t get get it, attempt to walk. When the hitters got their pitch, or something they believed was hittable, most of them made swings for the fences. In fact, the biggest examples of this was WITH Stewart, Atkins, Hawpe, and Iannetta. All 4 of them have shown the ability to mash in the past, and with Don Baylor as the hitting coach, all four of them showed some regression from last year. I actually took up some splits with Stewart, turns out he was hitting a lot more when he was aggressive. Some of these hitters need to ditch Helton’s patient approach and take their own, like Tulo, Torrealba and CarGo. So what does this all mean, the regression being connected with the more patient approach? The Rockies need a new hitting coach, one who gives them more freedom to do what they can at the plate instead of taking such a calculated approach towards hitting.

Also, the OBP is not much of big deal when you put OPS instead, since the baseball world more or less revolves around that way more than OBP. Using OPS into use, Stewart is about the same as Figgins, and while he will never have his speed and his defense isn’t up to Figgin’s level yet, it has the ability to be, and Stewart is just 24. He has the potential to be hitting 30-40 HR’s with elite defense each year, which is way more valuable than a speedy hitter who’s game revolves around OBP. Did I mention Stewart is cheaper and we’re guaranteed to have him for 4 more years?

With Barmes, we all more or less know that if he wants to stay with us for much longer, he must be more consistent with hitting and gain some more OBP. He does play gold glove defense, better than Kendrick’s, but his approach is plain awful, and needs a change. Kendrick would be a much better upgrade at the plate, and would regress somewhat on the field, but getting a hitter who nearly won a batting title last year and hit .359 in the second half is unrealistic and requires trading someone like Stewart, Fowler, or Chacin, which we should not be doing.

Figgins. He’s awesome and all that but our contract for him would just be what 4 or 5 years on the wrong side of 30? With Fowler, Cargo, and to a lesser extent EYj we have good speed. I also don’t think he’s a defensive upgrade over Stewart.

As for Kendrick, the time to acquire him was probably after 2008.

The strikeouts are annoying but Stewart didn’t really strike out that much in the minors. Another of his problems is his low line-drive rate. I wonder if it’s possible for him to improve low LD rate.

I imagine they’ll spend some money on relievers, since O’Dowd doesn’t seem to eschew the FA market for them completely. The problem with Jabberwocky’s idea is that there’s the chance of ending up with the bullpen we had in the first half. It would be nice to have 3-4 good pre-arb guys you can rely on every year, but it doesn’t seem many teams are able to produce that consistently.

If they can’t find suitable FA targets in the starting pitching or infield depth dept’s, then they’ll probably hang onto Hawpe unless overwhelmed by an offer. Seems like there’s some indication (e.g., Ringolsby) that the org would prefer to keep Hawpe if it can.

As for creating a pre-arb bullpen, that’s why we have high upside starting prospects…ease them into the majors and in so doing have our best arms in the majors. This wouldn’t work for the full season, just the end game in September.

but at the same time, Barmes didn’t have a promised starting job after 06, he had to do some dancing in AAA in 2007 to figure stuff out. Hardy’s always been the starting 2B.