Tribe Signs Casey Blake

It's really Carroll who solves this problem for us.

i bet it saves us some options and service time on some guys too

Not really.  For a guy already on the 40-man, you burn an option for that year the minute you send him down to Buffalo on March 31.  The only way an option gets burned unnecessarily is if (a) you send a guy down who could have stayed in the majors all year, as we avoided with Barfield last year, or (b) you're forced to add a guy to the 40-man in order to promote him for only a brief time.

(a) is covered by the Carroll signing.  (b) is hard to imagine with so many guys already on the 40-man, including Gutierrez, Francisco, Choo, Snyder, Marte, Aubrey.  So if you want to preserve options, at this point, the better way to do it would be to reduce our depth in this area.

Where I depart from the Indians' (apparent) line of thinking is when liking a mediocre player keeps you from developing and exploiting young talent, more or less indefinitely.  In a rebuilding year, Marte might have been in the majors to start 2006.  Instead, he was held at Buffalo to work out some mechanical issues, yes, but mostly in deference to Aaron Boone and to suppress his service time a little.

Then, in 2007, he basically lost his job to an injury, which is something you'd never do to a veteran.  (Hell, they demoted Carmona in May out of deference to Jeremy Sowers, hard to believe in retrospect.)  Basically, they deferred to Blake and Nixon -- from May through July, Blake got about 350 PA and Nixon got about 250, while Marte got nada, nothing, zippo.  At some point you gotta ask, was that really necessary?

I mean, seriously, Francisco got more big-league time last year than Marte.  Nixon, Dellucci, Michaels, Asdrubal, Barfield, Shoppach, they all got more chances -- even Chris Gomez came damned close.

What was my point?  Oh, yeah, I like Blake.  But he's a role player.  And I don't like any role player enough for us to never bother finding out if this Marte guy can just give us three years of replacement level production on a minimum salary.  Is that too much to ask?

Think of it as a reward for past perfomances and be glad he didn't get an extension. He'll surely be gone next season.

This was just agreeing on a specific salary, and the team already knew the approximate salary back when he was tendered a contract.

You overestimate the kinds of guys who make $2 million -- Michaels, Carroll, they make $2 million.  Blake is a more valuable player than those two.  Had we non-tendered Blake, we could not have found someone comparable to take a one-year deal -- Dellucci got three years and $11.5 million.  Does that seem like a better deal to you?

So we are paying a premium for the certainty of having Blake and the luxury of only being committeed for one year.  But Blake clearly is a $4 million player.

Also!  Blake is not just insurance for Marte, he provides reasonable production certainty in the outfield as well.  We don't really know how healthy Dellucci is, and not one of our "talented" young outfielders save Gutierrez should be considered a lock for healthy, replacement level performance.