Thats your problem here.
Hindsight is the only way you can pick a winner with that pick now, no one ten picks before or 20 picks after got anyone worth having either!

But your complaining that we passed KNOWING nothing was there to take that was NOT a reach and would not have been overpaying 1st round money to a guy rated no better than 2nd or 3rd rounder at the time!

Did I say that? I don’t think I did. The point was that he wouldn’t have came here Pedro if wasn’t signed.

You know who Omar wanted to take there?

NO ONE! Deemed no one worth taking there.
No one who would give much more than what Alou did which was to give him a shot at the playoffs!

You say we lost out on someone else…Nice assumption but no one good was taken with that pick and no one good was taken in the previous 15 picks or 15 picks after fairley that was worth a damn!

Which makes anyone we would have taken either a reach at the time or counted as a bust!
He made a decision based on what he saw there!
He saw nothing and the history of hidsight has bourne that out to be a correct decision!

It was a weak draft in the 1st round and Omar said I can get more this year than anytyhing I take will give me in 5 years….

Because he feels LUCKY?
Or because he has the will and the DRIVE to get better even when he is already good enough?
His work ethic and internal makeup gave him the drive to succeed when most others would have just given up! And his internal makeup is what is driving him to get even better when most others would say I’m good enough now I’ll just rest on my laurels!

The guys who have the proper internal makeup do thoise little things to contnue to get better and succeed even more!

The guys who throw a fastball 95+ without that makeup will sit back and let the fastball they think they have do all the work until such time as it stops doing the work and then will lose thier job because they didn’t do the work needed to maintain long term success even when the fastball left them!

Johan Santana has lost his velocity yet he is still pitching pretty good!
Thats because he had the internal makeup to not just sit back on his laurels and worked to better himself to the point that he doesn’t need that extra velocity to get by!

You’re also selling the 2007 draft short because of allstar appearances. Also drafted in the 1st round was Mike Moustakas, Ross Detwiler, Devin Mesoraco, Rick Porcello, JP Arencibia, Madison Bumgarner. There was not a dearth of talent in that 1st round at all. You put too much stock into allstar appearances.

That’s not the only issue with signing a guy like Alou.

We just missed the WS by 1 game. Our bullpen killed us. Our starting pitching was ancient, led by Pedro, Glavine and El Duque. 2 of which couldn’t even take the ball due to injury. We didn’t upgrade the rotation or the bullpen. We lost 3 key guys in the pen, Oliver, Bradford and Sanchez(injury) and replaced them with garbage.

So our big offseason Coup was a soon to be 41 year old LF who just missed a boatload of time the previous 2 years due to injury and was always injured when he was in his prime.

Signing Alou in itself wasn’t so much the problem it was the rest of the offseason for a team a Clams Ass away from getting to the WS that was a total diappointment.

And the reason why he caught flack was because everybody knew that SF was going to non tender him anyway so there was no need to rush to sign him and have to juggle around the 40 and risk losing a player on top of it all.

RA Dickey has said himself he continues to try new things with the pitch. It’s an unpredictable pitch. Minaya couldn’t have known 2012 Dickey was possible because not even Dickey knew it.

Based on your cliche, if the Nats Bryce Harper suffers a career ending injury… is that bad luck? Or did the Nats do something to create that bad luck?

Signing him was a good move. But it has turned out to be more luck than skill… and there’s nothing wrong with that at all. Sometimes it pays to be lucky.

Get hard workers and they will always do better than some guy who doesn’t work but has physical talent!

You call thier surprise lucky but truth is Talent has more to do with being Lucky to get the right genes and physical traits than hard work does!

People act like Minaya being a fan of Dickey’s makeup means he knew 2012 Dickey would happen. Dickey didn’t even know 2012 Dickey could be possible. His pitch is a continuous learning process….it was not luck that he signed Dickey. It was luck that Dickey turned out how he did after the signing.

“Well he wanted to play for the better of the 2 New York franchises, but we got him instead.” ?

I agree Pedro had something to do with Beltran, but everybody knows Beltran the back story with NYY/Beltran so lets not pretend that Pedro > Yankees. It was more like “ok I guess so, I mean they do have Pedro.” (exaggeration)

Yep and you know who we lost out on?

Wendel Fairley – One of the greats of the game if you believe anyone who complains about the Alou signing!

Omar made a concious decision…He didn’t know what would be there when we got on the clock. But he knew there wass not a dearth of talent available in the 1st and history has proved it. There were only 3 All Stars picked in the 1st and the supplemental that year.
Price
Wieters
Heyward

We were due to pick 29th that year!

Considering what was taken there and even around there he decided a KNOWN VET who was needed to push for a playoff was worth more than anything those picks would have gotten him.

And for a year it was, you can’t blame Omar for taking the second year after the good first one he had and then blame him for Alou getting hurt. Players get hurt all the time regardless of how old they are!

A smart guy, obviously highly intelligent and a THINKING man which is a better trait for a pitcher to have than any 95+ Fastball.

Most guys without the internal makeup of a Dickey would have given up and moved onto his day job by now.
But a guy with it will do anything to succeed and in Dickey’s case he learned to throw the hardest pitch anyone can throw and even taken it to another level no one else could ever imagine was achievable!

Go for guys with that internal makeup and you will not fail!

Because they dismiss them because the5re isn’t a note on thier scouting report that says 95 MPH fastball…

But there is a lot more to being a good pitcher than how fast or hard you can throw a fastball.

“Without Pedro, there is no way we would have signed Carlos Beltran”, says Minaya. “In my mind there is no doubt about that”.

I’m going to believe the guy who was involved with the signing instead of somebody who’s just assuming why Beltran signed with us.

If there’s a point to be made (aside from the radar gun point, if you feel that Dickey is still an example of that), it’s that the <$1,000,000 signings can have a good impact…you can't JUST make those signings, but they help without much risk.