Love him or hate him, Peter Gammons' column is a must read. I know, he could use a better editor; on a site with the budget of ESPN.com, there's no excuse for so many typos and "unusual" sentences. Yes, it's easy to make fun of his style, or the number of rumours he floats that never come to pass, but I don't know where else you're going to get so much juicy gossip on one page.
Today, the well-connected one starts with a potentially gigantic deal -- A-Rod to Boston. It's way over the heads of the GMs, we are told; the owners are negotiating directly with Rodriguez and his agent, Scott Boras.
"If Alex doesn't take some of the money back, this thing is dead," says one person close to the deal. "If he wants this to happen, he is going to have to make it happen."
There's plenty of Jays name-dropping, too. As usual, despite repeated denials from J.P. that he is on the trading block, Orlando Hudson is mentioned, in a convoluted series of spinoff deals that even Petey admits is "a long, long, long way off." This one assumes Nomar going to the Dodgers, then gets (who else?) Oakland and Joe Blanton involved, with the O-Dog landing at Fenway.
The final paragraph features another rave for the Jays' #1 prospect and the man who drafted him.
One esteemed scout says, "the story in Puerto Rico is Alexis Rios (Toronto CF). He is not far away, and he's going to force them to move Vernon Wells to right field. He's a very good center fielder, old style in that he gets great breaks and busts it to where he thinks the ball is going to be so he's always in position to throw. He hits the ball very hard, like a Dave Winfield. Tim Wilken deserves more credit than he received in Toronto. He got Rios and Wells in the first round when most teams had them lower. Roy Halladay. Dustin Magowan. Tim did a great job."
We've gone on and on about this before, but if Rios is actually better than Wells defensively, what a wonderful "problem" that will be for the Jays. And yes, Tim Wilken did a great job, but it's not as if the Jays are lost without him, as evidenced by the last two draft classes. With Bill Livesey now gone to the Mets, there may be room in the Toronto inner circle for another veteran "baseball man" to advise J.P., but don't expect it to be someone who insists on drafting 18-year-olds.
Gammons also touches on the situation in Detroit, where it seems that owner Mike Ilitch has lost patience with the Dave Dombrowski rebuilding plan, and suddenly thinks he can fix that "horrific mess" by waving money at Miguel Tejada and settling for the likes of Fernando Vina. The pizza man isn't afraid to spend money; just look at his stable of goaltenders.
https://www.battersbox.ca/article.php?story=20031206031729999