Nobody saw yesterday's trade coming. Anyone want to speculate on who's next?
Not me. I'll just keep refreshing MLB Trade Rumors. But if you want to take a stab at it, feel free...
Off day yesterday. Yankees win, Rays win, Orioles win, Red Sox idle. With those three wins, the AL East improves to 34 games over .500.
No more trades yet, far as I can tell. So in the meantime, let's talk about the Anthony Gose trade some more.
I like it.
Gose is a wild card, and I don't think any of us completely understand why the Jays are so high on him. But the shape of the Jays' roster is such that trading Wallace for a wild card makes perfect sense to me.
The Jays seem committed to several players: Wells, Escobar, Hill, Lind, Snider and Bautista (or Bautista haul) as starters for the next few years. Wells' contract isn't going anywhere. Escobar looks like a keeper. Hill and Lind might conceivably be moved, I guess - you can quibble with those. But Snider's potential is so great that the Jays have to give him every opportunity to succeed, and Bautista will either be the AL home run leader or fetch a blue chipper. All told, that's six established players who are likely to be entrenched in the lineup throughout 2011. That lineup has three uncertain positions: catcher, third base, and first base.
With the resounding success of Operation Stockpile Talent, the Jays are in a great position to turn those holes into strengths. They have loads of chips to play with: a surplus of worthwhile starting pitchers, plus several talented catchers in the low minors, plus whatever they can fetch for Downs, Buck, Lewis, Overbay, Encarnacion, Gregg, plus Payroll Flexibility... The challenge is to consolidate those chips into really good players at the uncertain positions.
You could trade for a catcher, if you're not sold on J.P. Arencibia or just don't want to be patient with him. (Wieters!) Or a third baseman, if you prefer to play Bautista in the outfield. In my opinion, though, the most reasonable place to try to improve on this foundation is by adding a Big Scary Bat at first base or DH (or outfield) through a trade. A superstar. Carlos Delgado.
Brett Wallace? He looks like a decent hitter - you could do worse than an .870 OPS in the PCL at age 23, you could also do better - but unless his stats are selling his talent way short, he's not that guy. He's a safely-above-replacement-level player at an abundant position. I can't shake the image of Eric Hinske. Useful, underestimated, but more or less fungible. I hadn't thought of it this way before the trade. But in hindsight it seems that the odds of Brett Wallace playing everyday for the Blue Jays were long unless his stock increased this year. Clearly, it hasn't.
If the Jays want to trade a decent prospect who plays a position where they're looking for someone great, why not do it? And if the decent guy can fetch a lottery ticket in the low minors who the Jays' scouts swear has shorter odds than advertised, I say what the hell. Go for it. In my view, it can only hurt us in an opportunity-cost sense - in other words, if there was a better offer out there for Wallace that Alex Anthopoulos wasn't aware of, this trade hurts by not improving us enough, by replacing the better haul with Gose.
I suppose it's also possible that Wallace will become a reliably average (or better!) first baseman. Again, in light of the Jays' trading position, I'm prepared to take that chance. Then again, if we're really entering a period of decreased offense, maybe it'll be harder than I think to convert all these starting pitchers into a power-hitting first baseman. Who knows, right?
Anyway, all the best to Brett Wallace in Houston. This trade must increase his stock. Hopefully Lance Berkman gets traded so Wallace can play everyday in the bigs with zero pressure on a wretched team.
Speaking of wretched teams, the Jays begin a three-game series against Cleveland tonight. Cleveland stormed out of the all-star break with five straight wins against the Tigers and Twins. Then the schedule got tougher. Cleveland just finished a seven-game homestand against the Rays and Yankees, which went exactly as well as you'd expect: 2-5. Their next stop after this weekend is Boston.
With the deadline less than two days away, Jamaican-born sinker artist Justin Masterson will tune up for his return to Fenway by facing Shaun Marcum. Jays -180, first pitch 7:07.
https://www.battersbox.ca/article.php?story=20100730070859843