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Brewers, Fielder avoid arbitration with $15.5 million deal

January 18, 2011 / Anthony Stalter

Prince Fielder and the Brewers successfully avoided arbitration on Tuesday by agreeing to a new deal worth $15.5 million. The contract makes him the highest-paid Brewer in team history and it’ll likely be his last arbitration contract.

Craig Calcaterra of NBC Sports Hardball Talk brings up a good point about Joey Votto’s deal with the Reds as it relates to Fielder’s new contract:

Attention Reds fans who keep asking me why the team would agree to buy out Joey Votto‘s arbitration years for $38 million while not getting any free agent years from him: this deal is the reason. If Votto had gone to arbitration for all three years, he’d easily exceed $38 million given the precedent set by Ryan Howard and Fielder’s arbitration deals. It gave the Reds cost-certainty and saved them several million dollars. That’s not nothing.

Calcaterra goes on to mention that Fielder has apparently lost weight and is “poised for free agency” after the 2011 season. That makes it sound like Fielder doesn’t want to be a Brewer beyond next year, although I think the main point is that he’s looking to cash in big after the upcoming season.

Fantasy baseball owners should take note because it looks like the Prince is in for a monstrous season.

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One reason the Nuggets might be dragging their feet…

January 18, 2011 / John Paulsen

I missed this tidbit from a TrueHoop post from about a week ago:

The Nuggets have a great offer on the table now, but might see some merit in stalling, too. For one thing, it’s hard to see what could happen to make the Nets’ current offer disappear. Derrick Favors has spent much of the season playing behind Kris Humphries in New Jersey, and unlikely to increase his market value drastically. Then there’s some gamesmanship surrounding the Nets’ 2011 draft pick. Very high picks like that one, used skillfully, are nearly essential ingredients to winning titles, and they’re damned hard to find. As the Nuggets root for that pick to be as high as possible, they root, of course, for the Nets to lose. And every loss matters, as a heated battle is under way for the NBA’s worst record. The 10-27 Nets have the NBA’s fifth-worst record today, but they’re a mere two games out of the 8-29 Cavaliers’ first, or last — depending on your perspective — place. Of course, the Nuggets can’t do anything to make the Nets lose more … or can they? Giving them an All-Star like Anthony may well cause the Nets to rip off some wins. It sounds a little out there, but one thought is that the longer the Nuggets keep Anthony from the Nets, the better that Nets’ pick is likely to be.

Gamesmanship, indeed.

Let’s assume that on Jan. 7 the Nuggets decided that the offer of Derrick Favors, Devin Harris and a first round pick for Melo and bad contracts was an agreeable offer. The trade deadline isn’t until Feb. 24, so during that span, the Nets would play 20 games. If the Nuggets were to trade Carmelo on Jan. 7, it would almost certainly help New Jersey’s win/loss record during that span. The Nets are currently winning at a .244 clip. Let’s make another assumption: They start winning at a .500 rate once Carmelo is on board. So that means they would go 10-10 during the 1/7 to 2/24 span instead of 5-15.

Those five wins could be very important come lottery time for the Nets’ 2011 first rounder that will no doubt be included in the Anthony trade. As an example, at the end of last season only four games separated the team with the third-worst record (Kings) from the team with the ninth-worst record (Knicks). As a result, the Kings had a 15.6% chance of landing the first overall pick while the Jazz (who had the Knicks’ pick) had just a 1.7% chance of winning the #1 pick.

So assuming that the Nets aren’t going to pull the offer from the table (and that Carmelo is agreeable to signing an extension with the Nets), Denver stands to benefit by dragging its feet as long as possible.

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Ten QB-needy teams that passed on Aaron Rodgers in the 2005 draft

January 18, 2011 / Anthony Stalter

The sight of Braylon Edwards doing back flips after the Jets beat the Patriots on Sunday must have made Brown fans want to puke. He didn’t help their team win anything in Cleveland and now the jagoff is knocking on the door of a Super Bowl appearance.

What makes the situation even tougher for Cleveland fans is that the Browns could have had the quarterback that absolutely shredded the top-seeded Falcons the night before Edwards and the Jets beat the Patriots. Twenty-one slots after the Browns selected Edwards with the third overall pick in the 2005 NFL Draft, the Packers nabbed California quarterback Aaron Rodgers. Where would the Browns be today had they taken Rodgers instead?

Granted, no two situations are ever exactly alike – especially in the NFL. There’s no guarantee that had Cleveland selected Rodgers over Edwards that the Browns would be where the Packers are today. It just doesn’t work that way in sports – or life for that matter. Rodgers could have turned out to be the next Tim Couch for all we know and as I point out below, had the Browns drafted him that year, they may have never acquired feature back Peyton Hillis in 2010.

But for a moment, let’s play the “What if?” game. Let’s pretend that everything would have worked out for Rodgers in Cleveland, just like it has in Green Bay. Let’s assume that the quarterback-needy Browns would have set themselves up by taking Rodgers at No. 3 and with that in mind, what other teams blew it by not selecting the California gunslinger?

Come with me on a journey back to Saturday, April 23, 2005. Below is a list of 10 quarterback-needy teams that passed on Rodgers that fateful day and at what pick in the draft. Also listed are the players those teams took ahead of Rodgers, and a brief look at their current situation.

No. 1 San Francisco 49ers
Who they took instead of Rodgers: Alex Smith, QB
This one probably stings the most. Smith and Rodgers were the only quarterbacks that were worthy of taking at No. 1 and the Niners were set on taking a signal caller. They decided on Smith because they fell in love with his athleticism, which was something Rodgers supposedly didn’t have enough of. Thanks to constant coaching turnover and an unstable situation, Smith hasn’t panned out and Rodgers is running around the Georgia Dome carpet making plays with both his arm and legs. So much for not having any athleticism…

External Sports, NFL

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Strength of Schedule: Playoffs, Week 3

January 18, 2011 / John Paulsen

For those of us playing fantasy football (in one form or another) during the NFL playoffs, I thought it would be worthwhile to calculate end-of-year strength of schedule. I won’t be updating the SOS data throughout the playoffs, but I should be able to post a table each week with updated matchups.

What am I looking at?

Below you’ll see a table with a list of team names on the left and a list of positions (including PPR data) along the top. If a square is pink, it means that the matchup is tough. If it’s green, it means it’s a favorable matchup.

It’s important to note that this is NOT straight fantasy points allowed. I removed the bias of schedule by looking at the opponents of each defense and how they fared in their other games. For example, if a particular defense faced a series of great QBs, then that is taken into account in these tables.

For those of us who are going to play fantasy football through the playoffs, I thought it would be worthwhile to calculate strength of schedule for the first week of the playoffs. I’m not going to be updating SOS throughout the playoffs, but I should be able to post an updated table each week with SOS data updated through W17.

How do I use SOS?

Generally speaking, I use strength of schedule as a tiebraker between two similarly ranked players. Let’s say I’m trying to decide between starting BenJarvus Green-Ellis and Cedric Benson. All else being equal, these two players are very close in my mind. But if BGE has a great matchup and Benson has a bad matchup, the choice is clear. In fact, if BGE just has a mediocre matchup while Benson has a bad matchup, I’d probably go with the Law Firm.

Be careful not to read too much into these tables. You aren’t going to bench Chris Johnson in a bad matchup unless you have a bona fide RB1 with a good matchup waiting in the wings.

Ben Roethlisberger has the best matchup of the QBs, but keep in mind that the Jets numbers are inflated due to the stint where Darrelle Revis was out earlier in the season. I’d still start Rodgers ahead of Big Ben despite a so-so matchup with the Bears…James Starks looks like a sleeper at RB this week, while the NYJ wideouts could surprise against the Steelers…Greg Olsen looks like the best play at TE, and seems to have good games against the Packers.

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