The salary contract demands of young players have reached the national media’s attention, which will ultimately exacerbate the situation for teams.  Quite honestly, I hold O’Dowd to blame to a large extent.  The precedent that he set with Troy Tulowitzki was reckless and will likely do more damage to the sport than Alex Rodriguez’ contract.  I had been talking about it with my friends lately and it really has me cringing at the ramifications.

I mean, look, the ‘superstars’ will always get their money when they are a free agent.  But O’Dowd has effectively minimized the ‘control’ a team has over their players, which has a far more reaching impact than A-Rod’s ridiculous contract.  When players like Prince Fielder, Cole Hamels, Nick Markakis, and Jonathan Papelbon publicly complain about their salaries prior to their arbitration years, then that is outright crippling to small and mid-market teams.  

Where this affects the A’s should be obvious; they have just traded for a bucket load of prospects and being that they are high-end ones at that, then means that they will also feel a sense of undue entitlement.

If this epidemic does not get addressed very soon, then I really believe that the contract infrastructure will be irreparable truly leading to only large-market teams being in control of all players like they are now with more expensive players.  My opinion is, is that now is the time to institute a salary cap like there are in the other major sports and I know that it makes baseball different and I like that about it, but I do not see any other alternative.

Please enlighten me or… at least mock me…

So, I guess that means that it is very likely that Blanton stays with the A's until at least the trading deadline.  Sure, Josh Fogg and Jeremy Affeldt are not any good, but I would have to believe that that is the notion going through Wayne Krivsky's mind.

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Just out of curiosity because I remember the Rockies doing something like this a couple of years ago and presumably they still do:

Will any team, but more specifically the A's, be using portable video players to show players what their previous PA looked like, but with a Pitch F/x theme to it this year?

I ask because while I would like to think that the A's are using the Pitch F/x data to analyze how certain players are pitched to so that they can work on better pitch recognition for those types of pitches and similarly how effective certain pitchers are with their assortment of pitches; I do not know if they do, but would like to know if they do...  I agree that too much information during the game would be bad, but I wonder how much is too much and I wonder if the prep beforehand is sufficient. 

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I should say that I am not from the bay area, but at the very least I do find this Ratto article to be interesting if not hopeful for the A's should they not be able to work out a deal with Fremont.

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So as Nico has hinted at in an earlier post about Blanton and why it appears he has not held the value in the market as BB considers him to have.  But what should his value be in the market?  And remove the notion that you do not want him to be traded and consider what would parameters would make a successful trade for both sides.  What I am going to discuss starts with the premise that the A's should get a highly-rated SS in the deal.

So, in that regard here are the only teams rumored to be interested in Blanton (as far as I have seen):

Dodgers
Mets
Mariners

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