Writings on baseball by Matt Barnard and Dan Stein.

 
We play a little catch-up again, in hopes that the regular daily updates are resuming right now.

The Millwood debacle
Atlanta Braves get: Johnny Estrada
Philadelphia Phillies get: Kevin Millwood

Unbelievable. As people much wiser than I have already commented, this is one of the worst trades in terms of talent ever. There's really no way around that. It's disgusting, it undermines competition and really, it should be disallowed by the Commissioner, if there's any way to do that. Not that there's any chance of it. John Schuerholz can complain all he wants, and he's certainly done so. But this is a result of a really bad job by him in terms of managing his team's budget. That's on him. How did the Braves, owned by an incredibly wealthy entity, turn into this? Johnny Estrada has virtually no value as a major league player, the Braves are squandering millions of dollars left and right (Vinny Castilla being the best example), and they could easily have gotten a hell of a lot more for one of the better pitchers in baseball, one would think. This is nothing short of a travesty, and I really don't care about Schuerholz's accomplishments to date (which are debatable to begin with)...he should lose his job over this.

Cliff Floyd signs with the Mets, $26 million over four years
As we've stated on this site previously, it's obvious that the biggest issue the Mets needed to address this offseason was improving their offense, especially in the outfield. While this doesn't make the Met lineup great, it sure helps a lot. Position for position, with the removal of Rey Ordonez (even if Russ Johnson is the replacement there) and the addition of Floyd, this is simply a far more dangerous team offensively. The Mets can sandwich Floyd between two Hall-of-Famers in Roberto Alomar and Mike Piazza and try to milk him for all he's worth when he's on the field. Additionally, he's very capable of spelling Mo Vaughn at first, providing the team with some added versatility. I had thought that the Glavine signing would prohibit this move, but I'm real glad I was wrong about that. I'm not a Met fan per se, but as a New Yorker who has been to the Eyesore more than a few times in my 20 years, it'll be nice to see a legitimately improved product out there. The next step would be to now make a serious push to sign Jose Hernandez, but it remains to be seen if the Mets will do much of anything further, even though they should have some money to burn (as they can spend elsewhere the money they had alotted for Norihiro Nakamura, who apparently is staying in Japan). We'll see, but this a much better team than it was yesterday. And it'd be that much better with Edgardo Alfonzo, but that train has sailed.

Godzilla comes to the Yankees, $21 million for three years
I'm excited. As Rob Neyer points out in his comments on this signing (available at the above link), at the very worst we can reasonably expect given his career in Japan, the man known as Godzilla will be a major improvement over what the Yanks were throwing out there last season. And of course, there's the opportunity for him to be a lot better. There's no question that Hideki Matsui has really good power, as evidenced by his 50 home runs a year ago and very high slugging percentage. And he's left-handed. And he's going to play half his games in a ballpark with a real short porch in right field. Of course you've got the risk that he's going to bomb, but there's very little reason to believe that'll be the case. Pitching is pitching, and while what he faced in Japan certainly isn't on the same level as what he'll see here, what's that difference worth? This is the best hitter in what is probably the second best baseball league in the world...his time has come, his time is now, and I'm pleased that he's coming to New York, he's going to help that lineup immensely.

As always, we strongly encourage our readers here to take a look at our father site, The Dump. Enjoy.
posted by VZW Watcher at 12:39 AM -