Rockies sign Ryan Spilborghs to 2-year deal

He could start for a lot of teams but he has four OFers with better resumes ahead of him. He’ll certainly get ABs against lefties, but other than that, his PT will be one of the more interesting developments of the season

and carring a Hawpe trade, he would be the fifth outfielder

I see you love Troy Tulowitzki. You will fit in very nicely. :-)

in 393 PA. That doesn’t sound like many to me.

Are their any other players you really don’t like?

definitely not like Tulo, Helton, or Hawpe – those guys are REAL players

I’m gonna go ahead and pretend like you made the argument that the grand slam was one game and he grounded into double plays alllllll the time. So I went through his game logs on Baseball Reference to figure out whether his grand slam outweighs all of his double plays. Therefore, according to Baseball Reference’s calculations of WPA:

1 Game-winning grand slam: WPA = +66%

9 GIDP: WPA = -84%. But one of those double plays just happened to be in the game in which he hit his grand slam, and it was a doozy, the worst of the bunch at -33% WPA. So, we take that out and get:

8 GIDP: WPA = -51%

So that one grand slam outweighed all of the times he grounded into double plays last year.

The last time he professionally played at 1B was with the Drillers in 2003. It’s not at all a stretch that he can be re-trained as an emergency backup (which he will be during ST), however, I still expect a free agent corner infielder to be signed, if not to a major league contract, then as an NRI, to give us our final bench spot.

In response to you liking Payne Stewart I have a cool story about him.

In 1999 when the Ryder Cup was held in Brookline Massachusetts my dad took me to one of the practice rounds. During this particular practice round Payne Stewart’s foursome was playing a best ball match to prepare for the upcoming tournament. The match was all square when the group came to the final hole which was a long and difficult Par-4 that had an elevated green and a huge sand trap in front. To make a long story short, Payne ended up in that bunker in two shots. I was standing behind the back left portion of the green and all I could see was that classic old golfer’s hat he used to wear. The rest of his body was hidden by that deep, deep, trap. The next thing I know a ball comes popping out of there, takes a couple of bounces, and just as it’s about to run out of speed drops into the hole. That shot won the match (practice round so it didn’t mean anything but still) and the gallery went nuts. (I guess it was just a preview of the heroics to come from that week. Sorry biondino) The shot was crazy though. I mean from where he was anything within 30 feet of the hole would have been good shot. You could have given him 100 more chances to hit a ball from that same spot and he probably would not have made another one. It was that good.

Anyway just a childhood memory I had of Payne Stewart. It’s what I always think of whenever I see his name.