Baseball Flotsam and Jetsam

Miscellaneous baseball thoughts and observations.

It will be interesting to see if Richie Sexson can turn the power back on this season. Sexson had averaged 36.5 HR in his first 2-years in Seattle but last year dipped to just 21 and his slugging percentage of .399 was 115 points below his career average. Sexson is in the last year of his contract so it will be doubly interesting to see how he does... Kevin Gregg is the highest paid player on the Marlins with his one-year $2.5 million contract. There are 16 players on the Yankees that make more than that... Johan Santana's contract adds a big burden to the Mets payroll but that should be lessened by the fact that potentially they have $41 million coming off the books after this season between Carlos Delgado, Pedro Martinez, Moises Alou and Orlando Hernandez. Of course some of those four players could be back in 2009 but I'm guessing that at least 3 out of 4 will not be with the Mets next season... It will be interesting to compare and contrast Sexson and Delgado this year as both big men are hoping to rebound from off seasons in their contract walk years... The phrase "throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks" seems to fit what the Nationals are doing at spring training. The Nationals seem to have 5 or 6 players vying for each position and the only 2 positions that seem truly locked up are 3rd (Ryan Zimmerman) and closer (Chad Cordero). Every other position seems like like it could be up for grabs and that's especially true for the starting rotation. At the very least it should make the intra-squad games interesting to watch... I'm rooting for Wily Mo Pena of the Nationals to have a big year. I always liked Wily Mo but he's got to contend with Austin Kearns, Elijah Dukes, Lastings Milledge, Ryan Langerhans, Rob Mackowiak and others for playing time...