Winter Meeting Kickoff

Well, since I've largely ignored this blog since mid-August, it's high time I start it up again. The Winter Meetings starting Monday seemed a perfect time to do just that.

The Padres are expected to non-tender Kevin Correia. This surprises me based on how Correia pitched in 2009. From the biz of baseball, here's what non-tender means:

If a club has no interest in keeping a particular player, the club may choose to non-tender him, or to not offer him a contract. A player generally becomes a candidate to be non-tendered when he is arbitration-eligible and his club determines he is not worth the salary he might command in arbitration. A player who is non-tendered becomes a free agent and may sign with any of the 30 Major League clubs, including his former team, at any price.

Correia has over 4 years service, so he's arbitration eligible. He made $750K last season, but his 2.4 WAR in 2009 meant he was worth just under $11M dollars. No one is going to pay Kevin Correia eleven million dollars to pitch for them. However, if he went to arbitration he'd make substantially more than 750K. Heck, Brad Penny is about to sign a deal for $7.5 million - and he was awful for most of 2009! And for a cash-strapped franchise, that's a deal breaker.

With Correia's non-tender (and it isn't official until 12 December), the Padre rotation stacks up something like this:

Chris Young, Mat Latos, Clayton Richard, Tim Stauffer, Wade LeBlanc.

I think I'd rather have Correia in the rotation than either Stauffer or LeBlanc.