I was totally against the Rasmus trade. So WTF do I know.

But, I do know we cant keep shipping off our best prosepects for rental players and expect to compete every year.

On my Cardinals board I said we needed a lock-down 5 man bullpen. Matheny isn't a good enough manager to make chicken salad out of this mess.

What he needed there was Lance Lynn to turn to. He got stuck, as many mediocre managers do, in trying to massage the 7th inning. Right now he has 2 legitimate bullpen arms in Motte and Boggs and that's it. If he has Lance Lynne in his bullpen, he wins this game because he goes to Lynne in the 7th there.

The great managers can get by with a mediocre bullpen. They can mix and match and cajole until the staff falls into place. Matheny just isn't a great manager. He needs to have a 'pen where he can simply smile and dial.

This 'pen needs 3 more parts; 2 lefties and a hammer righty. Scrabble could do us a favor and become one of those lefties. Mozeliak will have to get us the other 2 because Sanchez is lost, Salas was never that great anyway and the rest of them are just warm bodies.

I'd strongly consider trading Shelby Miller for Tim Collins and Aaron Crow.

Scrabble stinking it up, too. Jesus. We'll be lucky to get out of this inning without it getting any worse. :shake:

That would probably work out pretty well for us.


I would have really liked or would like to make a deal for a starter.

Jocketty did.

The trick is to make sure that 'best prospects' /= 'best players'. Jocketty was a master at knowing exactly which of his players were legitimate ML prospects and he held onto them like grim death. He'd misfire on occasion (refusing to trade Aybar for Kevin Brown, who then kicked ass in SD for a year), but for the most part he was aggressive and it served us well.

I've been of the mind for awhile that Jenkins, who is not our best 'prospect' should be our most tightly guarded pitcher because I thought he projected best at this level. In my world, you trade Miller because he's the 'best prospect' but not Jenkins because he's likely to be the best player.

We pay scouts for a reason. When Shelby Miller was throwing 94 to start the year, our scouts would've known before everyone else's. Miller's star as a prospect didn't really start to fall until the last few weeks. He should've been dealt before then.

Does anyone not remember the Dan Haren trade?

Whew.

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If Rasmus gets it together and becomes a perrenial All-Star we can live with that, not just because we won the WS but because it just wasnt working out for him here. Maybe with Methany it would have been different but we had a log jam in the outfield. Someone had to go.

Haren would be like throwing in Jenkins.

Haren was not considered a gem within the system. He was considered a guy that was just another decent arm probably destined for middle relief or the 5th starters role. Hell, many thought Kiko Calero was a bigger loss.

He was a scouting failure. If you're going to cite Haren, it has to be for the proposition that you trade nobody. Because Dan Haren would most assuredly not be analogous to Shelby Miller.

The 'gem' in that deal was Daric Barton and I notice you didn't call it the 'Barton' trade; which was what it was considered at the time.

If you trade Trevor Rosenthal or Tyrell Jenkins and he ends up being a stud, you've duplicated the Dan Haren trade. The Mulder trade perfectly illustrates my point, though. It wasn't Barton (the 'stud' in the deal) that hurt us - at all. Barton was among the top 10-15 prospects in baseball at that time and dealing him didn't hurt us a bit because ultimately our scouts knew more than everyone elses did (he wasn't going to stick at C or ever hit with enough power for 1st). I think dealing Miller is likely to have similar repercussions.

Like I said - it's a scouting issue, not an approach one. We need to make the right scouting decision here and I think we have already failed in doing so by allowing Miller's value to depreciate to a point that we can't get the talent we would've snagged for him before the rest of the league saw him throwing slop.

Trading Miller for Hamels would be just like trading Barton for Mulder. You have to hope that Hamels is better than Mulder (likely) and that we don't throw in Jenkins for giggles. I absolutely remember the Mulder trade and it does very little to bolster your argument.

Carpenter delivers - Freese with a chance to tie or win.

If Miller sucks so bad why would any MLB team trade anything of value for him?

Because you're asking for 2 relief pitchers for him and everyone and their brother thinks they know something that nobody else does. Teams will still be intrigued by a guy with a sparkly Baseball America label because they think they'll be able to fix him.

You're not going to get star value for him at this point. You won't be getting Cole Hamels for him after his last 2 starts, that's for sure. But if you offer him to a pitching starved team like KC for 2 relief arms, especially when their GM prides himself on his ability to re-build a bullpen on the fly - well hell you just might get something valuable in return.

Do you happen to recall the guy we refused to include in the Mulder deal? The guy that was the next 'ace in waiting' and future superstar. The guy you certainly would've been referring to as a future CY winner?

Anthony Reyes. The unquestioned #1 pitching prospect in the organization.

Trading your best prospects doesn't hurt you. Trading your best players does. If we'd have traded Daric Barton (our top prospect) and Anthony Reyes (our best pitching prospect in a decade) for Mark Mulder, we'd have been a far far better team for it.

The window to get a Mulder returned has closed, but if we trade Miller now, we can probably get a little more than the Luis Perdomo we got for Anthony Reyes.

Great AB by Descalso.

WINNER WINNER CHICKEN DINNER