Quote:
Originally Posted by Superdude
We had plenty of reason to believe both of those guys would be decent role players. Give any mediocre player 200 sporadic at bats, and sometimes it's just going to end up the way it did. H Rod was out for a lot of the year, Gregorius is still viewed as a potential starter and needed regular at bats...who else was supposed to fill those 200 plate appearances?
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There are dozens of players throughout baseball that could have been acquired very cheaply at any time who would be upgrades for Valdez and Cairo. Replacing the worst player in the league is actually pretty easy to do. It wasn't done because Dusty wanted to stick with Valdez and Cairo. If he had wanted to replace them they would have been quickly and easily replaced just like they replaced Willie Harris with Xavier Paul.
To replace Valdez or Cairo you don't need to sell the farm. You likely won't get a star player to replace them, but a player worthy of being in the major leagues is not all that hard to get. Sometimes all it takes is cash considerations or a minor league journeyman PTBNL. The bar for upgrading the Reds bench was very low.