Around the SaberSphere 11/14: The Marlins fire sale, a Canadian super team, Nate Silver's return

Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports thinks Bud Selig needs to take some of the blame for the Marlins recent moves: Marlins trade is a baseball tragedy, and Bud Selig deserves his share of blame - Yahoo! Sports

What he'll never say is that Jeffrey Loria is a far worse owner than Frank McCourt on his divorcingest day. He is the Voltron of awful owners. Like McCourt, Loria didn't have a whole lot of money; he bought his controlling stake in the Expos for $75 million Canadian, around $67 million U.S. at the time. Like Rachel Phelps in "Major League," Loria did everything possible to destroy his franchise in an effort to move it. Like Dan Snyder, he allowed his megalomania to influence personnel decisions. And like nobody else, he hoarded massive checks from MLB while passing along the bill for the stadium to the taxpayers.

Grant Brisbee says this is the same old Marlins: The Miami Marlins become the Florida Marlins once again - Baseball Nation

Think to the next time the Marlins have an interesting team, with young players coming up and succeeding. Unless they have the 2020 equivalent of cyborg Mike Trout, no one's going to care. Even if it's Bryce Harper's six-year-old son hitting 40 homers, no one's going to care. If the Marlins somehow manage to bamboozle a free agent into coming to Miami, no one will care. He won't sell tickets. He'll just be traded again. The apathy will be thick and corrosive.

Not to be outdone, Dave Cameron of FanGraphs makes a similar point differently: For Marlins, Perception Is Now Reality | FanGraphs Baseball

And if you can’t keep a 22-year-old superstar, then what’s the point of any of this? The whole point of having cheap young Major League talent is that you can get quality performance at a low cost, allowing you to redistribute the majority of your payroll to expensive veterans and build a good team around them. But if you alienate your franchise players and have lost any credibility in negotiations with free agents, then all you are left with is a bunch of minimum salary kids who aren’t good enough to win on their own.

Mark Simon of ESPN takes more of baseball spin on the trade: Marlins give up on $100 million dream - Stats & Info Blog - ESPN

What are the Blue Jays getting for the more than $160 million they’re making in payroll commitments? From a statistical perspective, they’re getting a group of players whose performance in 2012 was not up to their peak standards.

Also at ESPN, Christina Karhl re-visits memories of Toronto Blue Jays teams of the past: Bringing back the Blue Jays superteams? - SweetSpot Blog - ESPN

First, that this won’t be the first superteam built north of the border. The Blue Jays were "just" a good, competitive team in the late ’80s, but starting with a pair of megadeals with also-ran franchises (the Angels and Padres), GM Pat Gillick started reaching for big solutions to build a superstar-laden team strong enough to beat anybody in any number of games.

Also, the great Nate Silver shifts from politics for a moment to discuss the AL MVP "debate": The Statistical Case Against Cabrera for M.V.P. - NYTimes.com

Perhaps 10 or 20 years ago, when evaluations of base running, defense and clutch hitting were murkier, stat geeks would have argued that Cabrera deserved the M.V.P. on the basis of the hard evidence. Now that some of the "intangibles" have become measurable, we know that Trout did more of the little things to help his team win. It’s the traditionalists who are using statistics in a way that misses the forest for the trees. Now that some of the "intangibles" have become measurable, we know that Trout did more of the little things to help his team win. It’s the traditionalists who are using statistics in a way that misses the forest for the trees.