Let's take a quick look at a few brief-but-relevant notes on some high-profile free agents, the first two of whom remain unsigned:
- The Mets do not have an offer on the table for free agent shortstop Stephen Drew, reports Kristie Ackert of the New York Daily News (via Twitter). Indeed, New York has made no offers to Drew, tweets Rob Bradford of WEEI.com.
- It has long been clear that Ervin Santana's asking price has dropped from its one-time nine-figure level. But his market value has now dropped so far that Santana may only be asking for three years at present, tweets Buster Olney of ESPN.com.
- The Angels offered Matt Garza a four-year deal for about the same money he ultimately received from the Brewers, tweets Olney. Los Angeles pulled the deal when Garza did not act upon it, however.
Typical Arte, if you wont take my offer now its gone…. now we still have Blanton as #6 on the depth chart and no one behind him 🙁
Yeah when I saw this report last week I didn’t have time to comment on it, but wow Arte really? This isn’t the billboard advertising business, sheesh. It’s a little different. Like maybe it’s okay to let the free agent check his other options for a little bit. Me thinks he would have ultimately chosen the Angels in regards to a chance of winning sooner. Maybe this ploy worked with Pujols and Hamilton because the $$ was obscene.
It depends on how long the offer was available. It sounds more like Garza was going to use the offer to start a bidding war and so Arte pulled it. I don’t have a problem with that. If a guy doesn’t want to be here then we shouldn’t fall all over ourselves to try and woo him. I would rather do what Arte did than do what the Lakers tried with Dwight and use those awful billboards and look like noobs.
Better off leaving the offer on the table. If he accepts it great, if he uses to get another team to devote more of their resources to signing him thats good too. By taking the offer off the table Arte made sure he had 0 chance of signing Garza and other teams had better shot a signing him at a discount.
So? No team in Baseball just leaves a contract on the table for months. Angels need a backbone and it seems like we are finally starting to get one.
I agree. Epstein uses this tactic also, especially with Boras clients and sometimes gives them as short of a time as 24h to ponder them.. Remember back to the winter of ’08/09 when Holliday was a FA.. He gave boras 24h to consider an offer (think it was 75-80m over 5y) or the offer was null and void.
It’s a sound tactic. That money can be used towards another FA, or different player sometimes rather than held up by a player/agent to go show off to other suitors.. Epstein learned that early on with pedro Martinez the winter of 04/05.
I have no issue with the approach. The team needs to move on. Given that we don’t know when the offer was made or for how long the deal stood it’s pretty hard to criticize him.
I really was hoping for Garza but I’m fine moving forward with what we have.
I like Garza but I’m not losing sleep over this report. The Angels can do fine spending half the money for 1 or 2 years of Paul Maholm. They’d still get better depth than they have now, and would even have enough flexibility left to get another reliever, or perhaps leave the remaining funds open for a deadline deal. Plus, If Garza really wanted to be an Angel, he would’ve taken the offer.