no kidding. Much bigger news than Bray IMO. Soooooo glad to see him gone.
And so the Wilson Valdez era ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.
“I don’t care,” Votto said of passing his friend and former teammate. “He’s in the past. Bye-bye, Jay.”
Who would've thought the Reds should've traded Bray for Valdez instead of Jeremy Horst?
Get MLBtraderumors Reds updates on Facebook.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Reds-R...33794710005587
http://i.imgur.com/1bCKpaH.jpg
Games are won on run differential -- scoring more than your opponent. Runs are runs, scored or prevented they all count the same. Worry about scoring more and allowing fewer, not which positions contribute to which side of the equation or how "consistent" you are at your current level of performance.
Exactly. The Reds instantly became a much worse team after the trade. The two worst players in the deal were Clayton and Majewski. Majewski, in fact, is one of the greatest post-trade flops in any deal ever made. How he was given 78 IP of work by the Reds remains a mystery. He was never anything but awful.
Say what you will about Lopez and Kearns, they both went on to have extended careers in baseball. Lopez had a horrible 2007 (after a serving as a functional leadoff hitter in 2006), but was pretty useful for a few years after that once he shifted to 2B. Kearns gave the Nats a season and half of decent production before falling to pieces. Since then he's picked up the pieces and he's still playing in the bigs. Given that it cost the Nats NOTHING in terms of talent to get those two, I suspect the view from the DC side of things is folks hoped for more, but it was worth a shot at the time.
Meanwhile, all the Reds got in return for their starting RF and SS was an oft-injured LOOGY. I don't care who the RF and SS are, a team that does business like that is headed for trouble. And, sure enough, trouble is what the Reds found. The organization's inability to recover from that deal ultimately cost Wayne Krivsky (who did a good job overall) his job.
I'm not a system player. I am a system.
Get MLBtraderumors Reds updates on Facebook.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Reds-R...33794710005587
http://i.imgur.com/1bCKpaH.jpg
True, the trade ended up saving them some money because the players they received were so terrible that they failed to earn any raises and were eventually released. The trade was not designed to save money. That was never part of their rationale for making the trade. The Reds were in a pennant race at the time and were not trying to purge salary. The trade was made with the idea of improving the team for the stretch run and it failed miserably. The Reds earned a lot of laughs around the league for getting taken to the cleaners by Jim Bowden.
Saving money only means something if it is reinvested to either obtain other players or help key important parts of the team when existing payroll is maxed.
Trading Kearns and Lopez did nothing at the time to explore either of those.
It was an awful trade at the time, and really, even in hindsight. There's just no way they got fair value at the time of the trade, and it directly hurt our playoff chances that year.
The fact that Lopez and Kearns had pretty bad careers after the trade helps ease the pain, and perhaps shows some foresight on the Reds part in targeting them as tradeable parts, but the bottom line yielded nothing positive for the Reds.
The deal had supporters here. Not me for sure, but there were some.
http://www.redszone.com/forums/showt...ghlight=Valdez
Get MLBtraderumors Reds updates on Facebook.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Reds-R...33794710005587
http://i.imgur.com/1bCKpaH.jpg
Get MLBtraderumors Reds updates on Facebook.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Reds-R...33794710005587
http://i.imgur.com/1bCKpaH.jpg
Board Moderators may, at their discretion and judgment, delete and/or edit any messages that violate any of the following guidelines: 1. Explicit references to alleged illegal or unlawful acts. 2. Graphic sexual descriptions. 3. Racial or ethnic slurs. 4. Use of edgy language (including masked profanity). 5. Direct personal attacks, flames, fights, trolling, baiting, name-calling, general nuisance, excessive player criticism or anything along those lines. 6. Posting spam. 7. Each person may have only one user account. It is fine to be critical here - that's what this board is for. But let's not beat a subject or a player to death, please. |