satyr9 wrote: It's my fundamental problem with free agency, that it only takes 1/30 to make a serious mistake to continually drive the market higher and there's always 1/30 GMs either stupid or desperate enough, or just flat out hoodwinked by a more devious and experienced agent, to make that mistake.
Hah, try bidding for a house in Toronto. I quickly learned that the "fair market value" concept we were taught in university economics actually means "what the biggest idiot is willing to spend" in the real world.
I like the way AA put it recently, that if you win a bidding war for a free agent, then the guy is automatically untradeable because you're the only team who thought he was worth that much. From that perspective, AA would never let himself or the team be drawn into getting Fielder. It would be completely antithetical to his value-oriented mindset.
But it's his own fault that the Fielder/Darvish sweepstakes have become a symbolic litmus test for whether Rogers is "serious about winning" or not. If he had just kept Napoli ...