Melky is a MUST trade imo at the deadline. He isn't that good of a CF'er and Cain has upside. Not sure why big willie thinks otherwise.

Frenchy i would listen, hell listen to anyone just about..

I wouldn't mind frenchy one more year, but this may be the highest his trade value gets too esp. if an injury happens to an OF'er out there

I understand your perspective, but I think the biggest hit to perception comes from dealing a guy like Greinke, primarily because he was adamant about wanting out.

Moving Soria would be logical, while trading front-of-the-rotation guys, who are damn near impossible to find, is just plain dumb in most cases.

I like the Soria trade idea, i mean Leo Nunez is a solid closer. I think we can still get alot for Soria, and should explore it.

Moving him may be logical to hardcore baseball fans, but assuming he reverts back to the "good Soria," would trading him seem logical to a majority of the Royals fanbase, which is probably sick of the "trade all your good players for prospects" philosophy that has been so prevalent in the last 15 years? Sometimes, the business/PR side of a move is just as important as the baseball aspect, especially for a small market team.

God, I hope this team turns a corner & starts winning games in the next 2 years...

Yeah, good point.

Now that I think about it, I don't see Frenchy being traded cause of DM, if anything he stays until Myers is up. I hope we get somehow get rid of Melky, Francis, Davies, and any other junk

While I would love to get rid of our shitty pitchers, the problem is that all we have is shitty pitching.

Have I explained before how much I detest guys like Hochevar?

Too damned bad. You make the moves that help your team win, and the rest takes care of itself.

That may be logical in a vaccuum, but at this point I think we're married to Soria and Butler until they completely fail or until we've become successful and have signed some young stars to long contracts.

You might get the last laugh 4 or 5 years from now when you point back at how the trade worked out for you, but the PR damage would be rather significant. We'd take an immediate hit at the gate for a while and it would take longer to ramp up to sellouts when we do find success.

It might be suboptimal, but you can do worse than hang on to a DH and a closer who both signed team-friendly deals. No one cares that much about hired guns and mid-tier players (frenchy and melky). We can be colder and more calculating with our top players after we have won something.

I don't see it. Our attendance can't get any worse. It's almost entirely made up of casual fans who are just there to see a game or diehard fans who understand the process. Neither are going to be turned off by trading good players in order to build a better team. The fans who cared about that are long, long gone.

The big risk would probably be that the casual fan is exceedingly slow to come back when we start to win a little bit. "they won a few games? Big deal, they traded Butler and Soria, they wont keep Moose and Hosmer, I'm not watchin'!"

In addition, it's not just fan attendance. Free agents over the next couple of years, when we need to fill in talent gaps, will see our youth and get excited about the future. On the other hand, if we trade two of three twenty something All-Star caliber players (regardless position), they'll wonder just how likely it is that that collection of talent will stay together.

As I said, at some point, you have to show your fans and the league as a whole that you're for real and willing to keep good talent. Could we get young talent back for Soria? Sure. But is it All-Star caliber? Who the hell knows, and I love young talent as much as the next guy. Soria just turned 27, and is moving into the prime of his career in theory. How would it look if we traded Greinke and Soria, two 20something pitchers moving into their prime in back to back years?

I'm actually not against trading the guy when you consider the move discretely, but I worry about the impact it would have across the board.

it still amazes me the bullpen we had a few years ago, which consisted of 3 closers (Dotel, Soria, Nunez), a cy young winner (Grienke), plus a guy who was a solid as all of them that year (Riske). Wasn't Ram-Ram on that team too, or did he come up next year?

The Chiefs were pathetic for decades, made the playoffs a few times, and 80,000 people begged to watch them lose in the playoffs.

dotel was terrible.......so was Riske