I see this as a list of career underachievers. They are not a market failure, but are individual failures as baseball players. Worth noting and taking a flyer on occasionally, but they aren’t a source for a way to strategically obtain talent through market efficiencies. An example of that would be determining that high-OBP guys or groundball pitchers are undervalued, and buying those guys while their average market value is low.

This is exactly what I was getting at. When you hear that Theo Epstein and “the crew” are considering players as a class, you have to feel (or at least I feel compelled to feel) that some strategy is at work.

These are simply players who were hailed for their skills at one point and, for various reasons, have failed to become contributing major leaguers. This is the scrap heap that is always there.

Here’s a hypothetical market inefficiency to illustrate. GM A believes that veteran right-handed relievers over 30 years old are being undervalued by the market, and can be signed under market value if given multi-year deals. GM A signs one or two such relievers every year at what he feels is 50 cents on the dollar, and flips them for prospects at the trading deadline. That would be a systematic method of capitalizing on a market inefficiency that would dry up once other teams started signing 30-year old right handed relievers at a higher price, so they wouldn’t have to trade prospects for them mid-season.

Stewart thing.

From a recap I did awhile ago on draft days, where Art Stewart was quoted as watching Lubanski swing and remarking to Allard “you will remember this day for the rest of your life.”