Beltre had a very solid season last year, exactly the kind of year we ought to be expecting him to have. Is it the same as that monstrous 2004? No, but if anybody thought he was going to have lots and lots of years based on that single anomalous season, they probably weren’t thinking very clearly or at least were very optimistic. As it stands, we’ve got an above-average bat for a 3rd baseman with a killer glove that would be getting accolades if it weren’t for the presence of Eric Chavez. The team overpaid, yes, but not half as badly as they overpaid for Richie Sexson, who always seems to be left out of these sorts of discussions.

I wonder if this means Hargrove will be allowed to let Hernandez pitch 24 complete games, a la Ralph Houk & Mark Fidrych in 1976. Fidrych was 21, for those who don’t recall, and blew his arm out the next year.

This is a defensible parallel because Houk at the time was suffering through the same endemic synaptic sluggishness as Hargrove is today.

Unless he was the first coming of Chien-Ming Wang, Fydrich wasn’t going to be much of anything anyway. 97 Ks in 250.1 IP does not spell long-term greatness.

Anyway, the pendulum has turned way over the other way in terms of handling pitchers. Nobody’s going to go the route of Ralph Houk in ‘76 or Billy Martin in ‘80 because the current conventional wisdom is that you never, ever let kids pitch throw more than 100 or so pitches every 5 days because that’s what a bullpen is for. At this point I’m convinced that with only a few exceptions what pitching injuries you see are the result of mechanics or genetics, not overuse. Well… I will say that if you train a guy’s arm to last 95 pitches and then you try to run him out there for 115 a night, he might get hurt due to something similar to “overuse” but I don’t like the term there.

When he won the MVP in 2001, Ichiro hit 350/381/457. In 2004, he hit 372/414/455. That’s an MVP candidate in my book, particularly if he plays CF. Last year at 322/370/416 not so much.

A leadoff hitter who hits the same amount of doubles last year as the slowest player in the league doesn’t scream out “MVP candidate” to me.

WHen he’s your centerfielder, he does.

I think Ichiro and Felix. Really, I think Ichiro should be a lock with a continuance of past performance, and if Felix performs up to what he can do he should be a lock as well.