News from here and...there

Well well well...lots of differing opinions about yesterday's signing but encouraging signs that JP is trying to completely stock his pitching staff. If he gets two starting pitchers, the rotation would look like Halladay-Burnett-SP1-SP2-Chacin, leaving a whole lot of young pitchers out of a job. Let's see if he signs both what he would do. I think a trade involving Chacin or a couple of the young arms may be coming, hopefully for some impact position prospects (hopefully in the middle infield). In this article, it is mentioned that Russ will start the season at AAA as I expected. I did some more work on the free agent database to add the latest signings, I found some interesting tidbits offensively...

• Clayton and Counsell both had negative VORP years last season, have very similar 3 year VORP avgs and are relatively the same age. Counsell got two years, $6 million while Clayton got a one year commitment from the Jays for $1.5 million. The difference may come in Counsell's better defensive numbers last season...but still looks like JP got a relative bargain in this market, Clayton's $/3 year avg VORP is the 3rd lowest of all free agent signings
• Zaun is another terrific bargain when looking at both last year's VORP and the 3 year avg VORP, he's under $250,000 per run for each category.
• Adam Kennedy is an amazing bargain in this market, as was talked about when he signed that contract