Thomas Harding at the official site indicates Casey Weathers might get an invite to big league camp and also has an interesting note about how the snubbed Chris Iannetta got motivated by not seeing any postseason play despite being on the team. Harding also alludes to a post by Maury Brown at the Biz of Baseball which found the Rockies to be the most efficient team that also was effective, but doesn't provide the link, so here it is. The value of our marginal wins will certainly rise this season, let's hope that we can stay just about as effective with them, though.
Let me just make something clear as there seems to be a little bit of a misunderstanding, Troy Tulowitzki's opt out doesn't become a de facto no trade clause until year five of the contract, as he would still be under the control of the Rockies or whatever team they traded him to, he would just go to arbitration instead at that point and only the Rockies have the guarantee of his option year as Tracy Ringolsby points out. Ringolsby also notes that Garrett Atkins' agent says that the teams discussed a long term deal last winter, and even though they couldn't come to terms, that Garrett, like Hawpe, wouldn't mind being a Rockie for his entire career.
Back to the Tulowitzki deal, as it's creating a debate in the blogosphere as to whether the Rockies did well in evaluating Tulo's risk or whether they did poorly by rushing into this, as HiAspire's compelling diary on the right also asserts. In that diary, tulorocks also points to this article by David Pinto at the Sporting News. There are some very good arguments from both sides, and a couple of poor ones -Tulo's 2007 BABIP is Coors aided and right in line with other Colorado players, for instance- but I still find myself in favor of the deal. Perhaps counter intuitively, vindication for either side shouldn't be based on how Tulo himself performs for the next six seasons, but rather on how a representative sample of players like Tulo perform over the six seasons following their rookie years. The issue is that finding that sample gets muddied by combining Troy's offensive and defensive traits. Looking at his most comparable players at Baseball Reference is encouraging, however.