Slow News Day

If you’re like me, you spent your sports capital this weekend watching Michigan-Ohio St. or the Iron Bowl and lamenting the dearth of baseball stories coming across the wire. At one point, I got excited about the Red Sox interviewing Dan Wilder from the White Sox front office to potentially fill their GM spot, but taken in the average baseball week, that barely amounts to a story. So, with apologies, I present a two part column dedicated to Mike Piazza and the Blalock-for-Beckett/Lowell trade rumor.

First, the Twins are apparently interested in bringing in Mike Piazza to DH and catch a few games, contributing mainly as an offensive stopgap. Personnel-wise, the move makes lots of sense, as they need someone to spot Joe Mauer every few days to keep the young stud’s legs fresh and nimble. Piazza won’t give them great defense in those starts, but he has remained above replacement level defensively, and can do a lot more on offense than Mike Redmond. Redmond hit .311 last year and accumulated 8.8 runs of VORP, but it’s all going to go downhill for a slow catcher who doesn’t walk and has an isolated power of .081. Ryan gave Redmond $2.2 mil for two years, handcuffing him for that position in 2006. Could Ryan have signed Redmond for one year at $1.3 mil? Probably, and that extra $900,000 would not be a sunk cost for 2006, and they probably could have renewed the contract for this year at the same price, costing 500,000 extra for a player who would actually play compared to $900,000 for one who would not. The lesson: don’t sign crappy players to multi-year deals.

But back to Piazza. It’s no surprise that the rumor comes up just after the report that Jason Kubel’s knee is behind schedule in rehabilitation from a brutal injury similar to the one that turned the Vikings’ season around. I was under the impression that the Twins expected Kubel to come back and DH next season while he knee fully healed, grooming him for part-time RF duty by year’s end and full-time duty by 2007. Instead, they have to find another short-term DH solution, creating perfect conditions for a guy who can give them some pop behind the plate every now and again. While Piazza’s stats have fallen pretty dramatically since 2001, it’s hard to say how much of that decline could be offset by spending most of the time DH’ing. The Strib pointed out that he has hit .313 with power as a DH in interleague games, which is encouraging, but too isolated to prove much. Even if he duplicates last year’s numbers, he’s Matt Lecroy without the platoon splits (and probably not that much more salary). The upside is probably in the neighborhood of .275/.360/.475, which would do an on-base starved team like the Twins a world of good. This scenario is the type of shit-or-get-off-the-pot decision that Ryan has avoided for several years, instead trusting his own guys to get near 90 wins. But Chicago and Cleveland have dedicated themselves to actually being good, so Ryan needs to start taking some calculated risks or be relegated to third place for several years, wasting Mauer and Santana in the process. Sometimes it works (Stewart), sometimes it doesn’t (Boone), but when they have ground to make up, it’s better to try.

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Much further South, but staying in the Central Time Zone, the Texas Rangers are rumored to be close to a deal that would bring them Josh Beckett and Mike Lowell for Hank Blalock and a top pitching prospect. Texas seems like they’ve deserted their trade partners at the altar numerous times over the last few years, constantly dangling Soriano or prospects for pitchers. That’s not to say John Hart was gun shy in his GM tenure, as he made the blockbuster A-Rod trade, but new GM Jon Daniels could do worse than to dump all of his resources on a couple of real front-line starters.

Think of the Rangers’ situation this way: Kenny Rogers wildly over-performed last year, and it didn’t get them close to the playoffs. The offense was great at home and average on the road. To get back to where they were, they need the offense to stay the same, and they need the rest of their pitchers to improve to make up for the loss of their best starter. Alternatively, if they get rid of some of the offensive fluff that gets good numbers secondary numbers from the skills of their truly elite core (Texeira, Young); they can make gains on the mound that more than make up for the marginal loss in runs. Blalock will still be only 25 next year, but he took a big step back last year in terms of plate discipline and power, and if the Rangers can sell the memory of a 22 year old who hit .300/350/.522 in 2003, they will receive an overly generous return.

Beckett, on the other hand, will be a pitcher on the sigh-of-relief end of the injury nexus (age 26) who just posted career highs in Wins, IP and Ks. He brings with him the ability to keep the ball in the park (14 HR in 178 IP- invaluable in Arlington) and a reasonable likelihood of becoming a real ace over the next few years. Plus, he has the intangible benefit of being a native Texan, making him extremely marketable in the Metroplex. The two pitching prospects who are causing Texas to hold up the trade are John Danks and Thomas Diamond. Both started strong for a couple of months in high-A ball before going to AA and posting unimpressive K numbers, low G/F ratios and ERAs in the 5.00s. Since TNSTAPP (Tins-Tap: There’s no such thing as a pitching prospect), this seems like the perfect time for the bird in hand axiom. Beckett is still young, but at very least we know that he can succeed in the bigs, while Danks and Diamond might be highly projectable, but what are the chances that either will be better than Beckett? I would unload the overvalued Hank Blalock and Diamond (the right-handed bundle of uncertainty as opposed to the left-handed one) for the prized Beckett and Mike Lowell’s unfortunate salary, then cross my fingers hoping that Arlington’s park effects help Lowell and don’t touch Beckett. But I wouldn’t stop there; I would then shop Alfonso Soriano for a true mid-rotation innings eater, shift Mike Young back to second and plug Ian Kinsler in at SS (.274/.348/.464 at AAA, with a much better glove than Young). Then the IF would include Lowell, Kinsler, Young and Texeira, while the OF would have some permutation of Nix, Matthews, Dellucci and Mench. Promising enough, especially considering that they have built a young rotation that’s quickly approaching decency.