Sully to Chi Sox with $$$ For PTBNL

[Falls City Beer]

"I'll take that bet, Branyan doesn't get the bat on the ball enough (or walk) to do that IMO.

Branyan had a .349 OB% in 2100 ML ab's and a .320 in 1003 MLB AB's. In the ML he K'd every 2.55 AB in MLB it's every 2.44 (Dunn every 3.1)

Hummel has roughly (since I don't know his HBP or SF) a .358 OB% in 1700 ML ab's."

It's possible that he OBs better than Branyan, but I'll bet the ranch he doesn't out-OPS Branyan.

Hummel's fine bench ballast or an upgrade to Juan Castro if Branyan isn't available, but he's hardly a Prospect (with a capital P).

Also, except for Dunn, the Reds won't have a whole lot of left-handed power (assuming-correctly-that Griffey will see sporadic action at best).

I suppose what would work well enough would be to play Hummel at third and Branyan in the outfield next to Kearns and Dunn. But who plays short?

[REDREAD]

Originally posted by Raisor
The problem with number one is that Sullivan is a free agent, and there's little chance he'd be brought back. Hummel for five weeks of Sullivan is a deal I can live with.

If any potential free agent was willing to come back, it would probably be Sully. Look how long he's hung around here, through good times and bad. He said he was willing to come back..

Now I agree that Allen might not have been willing to bring him back.. but that's not Sully's fault.

Assuming we didn't have an idiot running the team (Allen), then bringing back Sully is a very viable alternative, even for a rebuilding team. Better than giving him away for nothing.. and hummel is nothing.

Look at the implications though of not keeping a guy like Sully around.. you get stuck on the perpetual rebuilding treadmill..
If you can't afford a guy like Sully when times are tough, you are you going to afford Kearns and Dunn in 2005 (We'll probably still be rebuilding then)..

Since 1999, we've been on that perpetual rebuilding treadmill.
I'm tired of it. I want to legitimately build to try to win for a change. Instead we see the total talent level in the organization drained a little more every year.

[westofyou]

Assuming we didn't have an idiot running the team (Allen), then bringing back Sully is a very viable alternative, even for a rebuilding team. Better than giving him away for nothing.. and hummel is nothing.

I can't believe that you think that a 32 year old middle reliever (who had an era of 6 last year) is worth more than Hummel.

We have middle relief, we don't have many options around the infield.

Slam Hummel all you want, but building Sulliven into a sacred cow and discounting that this team doesn't need to pay a middle reliever big bucks nor does it have many OB options in the IF is refusing to see the forest for the trees.

I for one would rather see Hummel play 3rd for teh Reds the rest of teh year as opposed to Castro.... and if all it costs is Sulliven then so be it.

Branyan and Larsons injuries forced this trade more than being cheap, Sulliven just happened to be the perfect bait for the deal.

Nothing?

[CougarQuest]

I'm almost starting to feel sorry for Hummel. We haven't even seen him play and he's ready for the trash heap.

[REDREAD]

Originally posted by westofyou
I can't believe that you think that a 32 year old middle reliever (who had an era of 6 last year) is worth more than Hummel.

We have middle relief, we don't have many options around the infield.

But this year, Sully, despite being hurt is 6-0, .206 batting ave vs,
1.26 WHip, 3.44 ERA.. not bad. Not to mention he's had more good seasons than bad in recent history..

Obviously, if Hummel plays well, it's a good trade.

But if Hummel can't outplay Branyan or Castro, it's a bad trade, Sully at around 1.5-2 million/year isn't so bad..Not big bucks, IMO.. a lot different than the 3.5 million Gabe was due.

How many games are going to be lost next year when Reith/whoever pitches instead of Sully?

Originally posted by westofyou

Branyan and Larsons injuries forced this trade more than being cheap, Sulliven just happened to be the perfect bait for the deal.

Nothing?

I don't buy the urgency to get a 3b immediately just because of injuries.. this season has already been written off... why trade for another mediocre stopgap guy? We've got plenty of them already..

We undersold Sully, just like Williamson (although not as lopsided)..

[westofyou]

But this year, Sully, despite being hurt is 6-0, .206 batting ave vs,

21 innings in the past 80 days, 21 innings.

I'll take a 25 year old IF who plays 3 positions over what we were getting from Sulliven.

We undersold Sully, just like Williamson (although not as lopsided)..

This stuff doesn't happen in a vacum, every deal has 2 sides that have needs, every organization has needs that extend from the ML to Rookie league, I have no assumptions about whether we were taken or not, I'll wait and see before I declare Hummel fish bait and Sulliven capable of sustaining the load of innings his arm has logged beyond Hummels stay as a Red.

FWIW many folks here would have HATED Branch Rickey as a GM, he hardly ever kept a player past age 30, holding to the belief that it's better to trade them a year too early than a year too late.

[Stormy]

Williamson, White, Mercker, Sullivan combined to log 164IP of 3.29ERA on a team with ERA over 5.00 this year. When you add in the likely loss of Heredia you have about 236IP of 3.19ERA ball. Try to fathom the team ERA without these guys lowering it, saving the rotation, eating the innings that they do... and now try and figure out who we obtained in any of those deals to replace their innings.

What of impact did we add to replace that? Oh yeah, in none of those trades did we receive a single reliever, much less a MLB ready reliever. Only the wild and completely unproven Valentine arrives (in a separate deal) to pick up a minor portion of this enormous slack in any of our trades. Sure, the arrival of the already overworked phenom Wagner helps, if we don't blow him out. However, we just diluted the only healthy strength of this team... and received ZERO MLB ready impact arms in return. It was ok to trade some of them, but you might want to replenish the system with more than a bunch of single A arms, a few guys with potential and a AAAA guy like Hummel is en route to becoming.

We'll get a "who cares the Reds always manage to cobble together an effective BP" response. However, the fact remains that a team whose extremely volatile rotation DEMANDS a deep and extraordinarily effective bullpen, just tossed away 164 Innings (soon to be 236?) of 3.29ERA ball (nearly 2 full runs better than our team ERA), and have zero proven answers to account for any of them. And the BP is still the sole bright spot of the Reds roster when you consider the impotent infield, the non-existent bench, the completely TBA rotation of unprovens and retreads, and the injury plagued uncertainty of the OF.

[buckeyenut]

If I am not mistaken, dealing Sullivan actually makes it easier to bring him back next year. If we would have held onto him, I think we would have had to offer him a contract with a min of a 20% cut or lose him to FA until after May 1. Same way with Mercker (although since he was making next to nothing, not the issue).

That is why we have been reading so much in the press lately about how Palmero vetoing the deal to the Cubs actually made it tougher for him to come back to TEX next year.

CIN cannot afford to overpay out of loyalty. Quite frankly, maybe they want Sully back next year and this is the best way to do it that allows the contract to be market value.

[J "Cooper"]

So if we added Haraung and Claussen to the bullpen next year would that make the trades seem more balanced?

This FO feels they can do 3 things:

1. You can find middle relief pitchers by shaking a tree. It's not that difficult to do.

2. The middle relief core we add was decent, but beginning to be overpaid for the work they did.

3. Miley has a good record of building a pen out of whatever comes to him. He did it every year he was in AAA and he's doing it now.

If you keep the former core where do Reitsma, Reidling, Wagner, Bale, Acevedo, Harang, Claussen, Almanzar, and a host of other guys pitch next year? Are those players that much of a drop off from the players currently listed? I don't think they are. We need arms in the lower levels and we got some good ones.


If the plan is folly then why has the team ERA bottomed out lately? I have faith that Kullman and Miley can get it done. At least let's let them fail first.

[PuffyPig]

Sullivan, White, Mercker and even Heridia are FA's at the end of the year.

I can't fathom why some of you can't understand that. Add the fact that Williamson might cost $5M next year, and trading all 5 makes sense today.

Our chances of bringing back the FA's actually increase by trading them now, as, it would be too risky to offer any of them arbitration, so we couldn't negotiate with any of them util may 1 if we kept them. Now, we'll be able to negotiate with them immediately.

These pitchers were all good. But not trading them does nothing to ensure they will be back next year. In fact it hinders that possibility.

Certain posters are confusing the return we got vs. the need to trade them.

[REDREAD]

Why is Sullivan at around 1.5 million/season overpaid (let's assume that's about what the market would bear for him...
Based on the assumption that Lightenberg, another pretty solid RH releiver.. only got 1 million last year as a FA).

Waiver wire relievers are about 500-600k a piece.

I can see the arguement that maybe Sullivan at 32 might be on the verge of a
downward slide.. I don't agree, but I can respect that theory.

But if you assume Sully has a good shot of being solid next year, why is paying
an extra 500k-900k for a proven, good reliever "overpaying".. No one is
asking the Reds to give Sully a Graves type contract. It's not going to
kill us.

If this team has reached the point where it refuses to pay 1-1.5 million for a
good reliever, then I guess Reitsma, Wagner, and Reidling won't last long either.


I think folks are greatly underestimating the effort required to build a
solid pen. I really don't want to see Brian Reith have a major role out of the
pen.

[PuffyPig]

At $1M Sullivan might well be a solid addition. I would just think that with Reitsma, Wagner, Reigling and Graves from the right side, we would be more interested in Mercker and Heridia than Sullivan. We also have Reith and Valentine as options from the right side.

[Raisor]

Originally posted by REDREAD
Why is Sullivan at around 1.5 million/season overpaid (






I can see the arguement that maybe Sullivan at 32 might be on the verge of a
downward slide.. I don't agree, but I can respect that theory.

.

Over Sullivan's last 131 innings (all of last year, and this year to date) he has an ERA of 5.02

He's thrown over 650 innings since the beginning of the 97 season, which is a ton for a middle reliever.

Risk vs Cost.

[REDREAD]

Originally posted by PuffyPig
At $1M Sullivan might well be a solid addition. I would just think that with Reitsma, Wagner, Reigling and Graves from the right side, we would be more interested in Mercker and Heridia than Sullivan. We also have Reith and Valentine as options from the right side.

I agree with you that signing Heredia should be a higher priority than Sully would've been.. I think we lost our chance to bring back Mercker though..if he does well, Atlanta will resign him..

Also recall after Mercker's first rehab tour with us, he left us for StL because he thought they had a better chance to win.. I think he was probably gone after this year regardless..

I'd prefer Sully to Reith and Valentine, IMO.. I can see why people would want to invest the time in the two younger guys, but my theory is that if you can get a decent proven vet reliever for around 1 million (say Sully, Lightenberg, etc)..
then why waste your time on a crapshoot guy like Reith or Valentine.
The $$ savings isn't that much.

I guess Graves going back to the pen gives us even more RH depth though.
I'm assuming we're stuck with him for 2 more years.

But I see next year's rotation of Haynes, Wilson, and 3 kids needing a lot of
bullpen innings. If things go well, we'll be in a lot of close games, and I don't
want to see Reitsma and Wagner overworked. (I'm guessing there's a good
chance Graves will be moved back to closer, in hopes of making him more
attractive to trade.. thus Reitsma and Wagner get the setup/"keep it close" role
that Sully racked up 100 IP seasons doing..)

[PuffyPig]

Originally posted by REDREAD
I agree with you that signing Heredia should be a higher priority than Sully would've been.. I think we lost our chance to bring back Mercker though..if he does well, Atlanta will resign him..

..)

The reds got mercker's permission to trade him to Atlanta, even though they didn't have too. He signed with Cincy because it's very close to his home, which is very important to him.

The Reds respected that, thus they sought his OK. He's indicated he would very much like to return to Cincy. It's no guaratee, but it's probably more likely to return here than Atlanta. Mercker will not be offered arbitration, as he could easily get $3M or so that guys like Stanton, Rhoades got. So, the Braves can not negotiate with Mercker until May1 at the earliest.

That's the main reason why trading Sullivan and Mercker actually increase the chance of coming back.