For months now, everyone has been talking about how second baseman Akinori Iwamura’s $4.85 million 2010 option might be too expensive for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays to pick up, especially with the explosive emergence of Ben Zobrist (your 2009 MLB leader in WAR). But all the speculation I’ve seen has focused on whether the Rays would pick up Iwamura’s option or let him walk.

Nobody mentioned the smarter move, which would be to simply trade Iwamura to a team that found his $4.85 million price tag acceptable. But of course the Rays and GM Andy Friedman were ahead of the curve on this one, and it’s clear that they have been thinking trade for several weeks now, and never even entertained the idea of letting it get to the stage of picking up the option or not.

Instead, they shipped Iwamura to the Pirates today for cost-controlled reliever Jesse Chavez. This move makes sense for both sides. The bullpen was an issue at several points last season, and the Rays were definitely in the market for an arm, so Chavez is a useful addition, especially when their only viable option with Iwamura was going to be to let him walk and get nothing. Meanwhile, the Pirates get a league-average to slightly above league average at a not-unreasonable price to serve as a one-year stopgap at second while they continue to rebuild.

The emerging consensus around baseball is that former White Sox starting pitcher Jose Contreras is old and just about washed up. Certainly, his traditional stats of a 5-13 ERA and a 5.42 ERA do little to convince you otherwise.

Which is why I was shocked when I looked at Alejandro’s White Sox WAR pie and saw that Contreras has actually been the fifth most productive player on the White Sox this year, with a 2.3 WAR. Clearly some investigation was warranted.

Reports out of Colorado are that GM Dan O’Dowd’s first choice for a replacement starter was Brad Penny, but that manager Jim Tracy, who had had to deal with Penny when he managed the Dodgers, was against acquiring him, so O’Dowd was forced to fall back on Contreras as a second choice.

But looking at Contreras’s FIP this season, it is a mere 4.12, which is significantly better than Brad Penny’s 4.48 FIP when he was signed by the Giants. Indeed, looking at Contreras’s peripherals, they are all right in line with his career norms. In fact, his groundball rate is slightly up, and his line drive and home run rates are slightly down, all of which are good signs for a pitcher.

Well, actually there is one glaring exception. Contreras’s strand rate is at 56.8%, which is one of the lowest strand rates I have ever seen. So basically, Contreras is not letting all that many guys on base, but when he does, almost half of all baserunners score.

Now, some old-school baseball guys might tell you that this is a reflection on the weakness of Contreras’s character, and that he must be somehow “cracking under the pressure” when guys get on base. But given that most stats guys are convinced that strand rate is almost entirely based on luck, and that Contreras’s career mark is a much healthier 67%, a natural conclusion to draw is that the Rockies just got themselves a much better pitcher than they maybe even realized.

Everyone is wondering who the “player to be named later” is in the trade that sent Jon Garland to the Dodgers, especially since the Diamondbacks are paying all of Garland’s salary for the rest of this season, plus his $2 million buyout after the season is over, meaning it’s got to be someone good.

One of the rumors out there is that it’s 2B prospect Tony Abreu, and based on a wide array of circumstantial evidence, I’m going to go ahead and say that it’s gotta be Abreu.

First of all we know that it is someone who played for the Dodgers this year, and is still on the 40 man roster. That limits the options quite a bit.

Second of all, we know that Ned Colletti and his cheapskate boss Frank McCourt are not at all afraid to trade a really good player just to save a bit of money. Although the Diamondbacks probably would have taken just about anybody for Garland if the Dodgers paid the rest of his money, it would not be strange to see the Dodgers give away Abreu, despite the fact that he posted a .991 OPS at Triple-A this year, just to save a few million bucks. That would make no sense for most teams, but we’ve seen the Dodgers do stupid shit like this before, as when they “threw in” rock god grade-A catching prospect Carlos Santana into the Casey Blake trade, just to save $2 million.

Third of all, we know that Joe Torre hates Tony Abreu.  And not just hates him in the normal way Joe Torre hates all young players, simply because they are young and not veterans, but in an extra-special, Tony-Abreu-only kind of way. Torre has been badmouthing Abreu to the press ever since spring training 2008, when he was convinced Abreu was faking an injury in what later turned out to be a sports hernia that required surgery.

Finally, we know that the Diamondbacks have a huge hole at second base, with no real options in their system, and after trading away Felipe Lopez, had basically no one to play there, other than taking a gamble that Ryan Roberts is somehow for real.

Nope, it’s gotta be Abreu.

At the beginning of this season, we asked if putting Joe Torre and Ned Colletti together in the same organization was going to mutually exacerbate both of their well-known predilictions for big-name “experienced veterans.”

Clearly, the answer is a resounding “YES.”

Dangling well-known veteran players in front of Colletti and Torre must be like dangling porn videos in front of Hideki Matsui, because over the past two weeks the Dodgers have gone on a wild spree of acquiring big-name veterans, trading at least 4 prospects and putting down at least $7.5 million dollars combined to acquire Vicente Padilla, Ronnie Belliard, Jon Garland, and Jim Thome.

None of this makes any sense, no matter which way you slice it.

First of all, the Dodgers still have the best record in the entire National League. Yes, that’s right, best record in the whole league. They are a mortal lock for the playoffs, because even if the some how lose the division, they will end up with the wild card. So acquiring these guys for the “stretch run” makes no sense.

But at the same time, it’s not like you really need these guys for the playoffs either, when you cut about five guys from your pitching staff. At least, the Dodgers better not be stashing these guys for the playoffs. Because if you are a Dodgers fan you gotta be pretty frightened if Colletti and Torre are planning to make Vicente Padilla and Jon Garland a big part of their playoff plans.

Because the more important point here is, none of these guys are all that good. Ron Belliard has a career OPS of .753, and he’s already on the downside of that. He’s basically Tony Abreu, only 10 years older at 3 times the price. Oh wait, I forgot, he’s an “experienced veteran.”

As for Padilla and Garland, I’m not sure what to say, other than that these guys are scraping the bottom of the replacement level barrel. Padilla struggles to even achieve replacement level, and Garland has hovered just a smidgen above it for most of his career. Are these guys really going to give the Dodgers anything that they couldn’t get from guys they already have, like Charlie Haeger, Eric Stults, and Scott Elbert?

And as useless as the first three guys are, I consider Jim Thome the most useless acquisition of them all. Oh sure, Thome is a probable hall of famer and all, but he hasn’t played an inning in the field in more than two years, and now here he is on a National League team as a glorified pinch hitter. Thome even spoke with Ned Colletti on the phone and explicitly told him that he could only be asked to play first base in an absolute emergency. What use is that on an NL team? You can’t even double switch with him. Is 40 days of that that really worth a whopping 2.5 million dollars PLUS a minor leaguer?

Maybe Matsui has it right. I’m pretty sure you’d get a better return on your investment investing in porno tapes.

So Scott Kazmir just got traded to the Angels for three prospects.  I think inevitably there is going to be some bafflement at this move, with people wondering what the Rays are doing trading away their most well-known player, who has basically been the face of the franchise for several years now, in what appears to be a cheapskate, salary-dumping move.

But I think trading Kazmir makes a lot of sense.

For most of this decade, the Rays have had one of the lowest payrolls in the game, but after making it all the way to the World Series last season, ownership allowed the payroll to balloon by 50%, from $44 million in 2008 to $64 million this season.

Naturally here was an expectation that fans would reward the team for their fantastic 2008 campaign, but unfortunately that has not been the case, as attendence has only upticked slightly from an average of 22,259 last season to 24,168, which is still only good enough for 22nd place among major league teams.

In light of this reality, it simply doesn’t make sense for the team to allow payroll to keep soaring even further, given that there is no sign that there would be much of any return on such an investment from the fans down in Flordia.

Moreover, the problem the Rays were facing was that, even if they just kept exactly the same players they have now, salary increases to players under contract or eligible for arbitration were going to push the payroll well over its current $64 million, probably up into the range of $75 to $80 million if the Rays just stood pat.

So even if the Rays just wanted to keep the payroll where it already was, which makes sense given their stagnant attentance, someone had to go.

Given this situation, letting Kazmir go makes the most sense. He was due for a large raise, up from $6 million this season to $23 million over the next two years, but more importantly, the Rays are loaded with top-shelf pitching prospects.

Rather than trading away somebody like Carl Crawford or BJ Upton, who would be much harder to replace, the Rays dealt from strength by moving Kazmir, whose production they can at least approximate for the major-league minimum salary. Hopefully, the Rays will now be able to hold on to Crawford and maybe Akinori Iwamura as well, at least for one more season.

It’s also important to remember that there are no guarantees Kazmir will remain the ace he has been going forward. While he has pitched well of late, he has always suffered through arm and shoulder injuries almost every year and he has had a down year over all this season.

The only real question I have about this trade, which we won’t be able to start to fully answer until the player to be named is revealed is whether or to what extent the Rays may have sold too low on Kazmir during a down year, and maybe should have let him pitch out September and dealt him in the offseason to maximize his return.

But then again, given Kazmir’s history of arm injuries, maybe now was precisely the right time, coming off a start in which he struck out 10 Blue Jays in only 6 innings.

If the departure of Nate McLouth warranted a candlelight vigil in the Pirates clubhouse, you have to wonder how many suicide notes are being written over there in Pittsburgh now that Adam LaRoche, Jack Wilson, Ian Snell, and Freddy Sanchez have all been traded over the past week (not to mention Nyjer Morgan this past month).

Those five players – including McLouth – had been the most recognizable faces of the franchise for a few years now and following their departure, I’d bet that 90% of baseball fans can no longer name you more than three guys on their big league roster. On the surface, this sounds like a terrible setback for a team that has not had a winning season since 1992. But there’s a big difference between getting worse and rebuilding, and GM Neal Huntington appears to have made the decisions necessary to achieve the latter of the two.

Let’s discuss these deals individually:

July 23 – Adam LaRoche traded to Red Sox for Argenis Diaz and Hunter Strickland

The elder LaRoche came to Pittsburgh prior to the start of the 2007 season and immediately became one of the team’s most reliable offensive players. But once you took a step back and compared him to the rest of the regular first basemen around the league, you could see that his overall skillset was below average at the position.

Among the 24 first basemen who have made at least 1000 plate appearances since the beginning of the 2007 season, LaRoche’s adjusted OPS of 113 is 14th, his SLG of .470 is 16th, and his OBP of .339 is 21st. These are numbers that a team could live with if the defense was superb, but this was not the case either. In his time in Pittsburgh (as well as in his entire career), his Ultimate Zone Rating has been in the negatives, meaning that his glove was more likely to hurt you than help you win ballgames.

LaRoche is a free agent at the end of the year and offering a player of his skillset and age (turning 30 in November) a contract extension would have been foolish. And as of this writing, there is no guarantee that a player with his numbers would have garnered the Bucs with any compensatory draft picks. Not only that, there was the fear that he would have accepted arbitration had the franchise gone that route. Once they made the decision that Adam LaRoche was not the player they wanted to play first base in 2010, management did the most sensible thing and traded him away in a salary dump, saving the franchise $3 million in salary. And Pirates fans would be better off considering this trade as just that – a salary dump – because the two minor leaguers they received aren’t exactly “prospects”.

Argenis Diaz is a 22 year-old  shortstop who has never hit at the professional level. His power is nonexistent, doesn’t make much contact and doesn’t walk nearly enough to be an offensive asset. He is, reportedly, quite a good defensive player, but you usually have to have some ability to hit to make it to the bigs even as a defensive replacement. Hunter Strickland’s prospect status isn’t much better. His fastball is average at best and relies solely on control and location to get guys out. And combined with his numbers, his ceiling looks to be as a middle reliever.

Out of the three trades over the past week, this one is my least favorite from the Pirates’ perspective, but I at least still understand why they pulled the trigger. If the choice was between nothing and saving $3 million, I would have taken the $3 million too.

July 29th – Jack Wilson and Ian Snell traded to Mariners for package of prospects including Jeff Clement plus Ronny Cedeno

In retrospect, the writing was on the wall for both shortstop Wilson and double-play partner Freddy Sanchez when both players were offered contract extensions that seemed designed to be rejected. And once they predictably were, the Pirates moved ahead by trading them both in separate deals.

Read the rest of this entry »

Metsblog.com is reporting that the Mets and Braves are swapping outfielders. Jeff Francoeur is Queens-bound while Ryan Church is heading down to Dixie.

Now, there aren’t too many times when I’ve lost my head while writing a post. But let’s add this one to that short list.

HOW IN HOLY HELL IS THIS GOING TO MAKE THE TEAM BETTER??????????????

HOW IS JEFF FRANCOEUR BETTER THAN RYAN CHURCH? IN WHAT WAY? FRENCHY’S OBP? IT’S AT .282. TWO-FREAKING-EIGHTY-FREAKING-TWO. HE’S OPS-ING .634. AS A CORNER OUTFIELDER. DEFENSE? CHURCH IS BETTER. POWER? CHURCH HAS A HIGHER SLUGGING. SIMPLY PUT, JEFF FRANCOEUR IS ONE OF THE WORST PLAYERS IN BASEBALL.

IN WHAT UNIVERSE IS JEFF FRANCOEUR BETTER THAN RYAN CHURCH? AND WHY WOULD THE METS MAKE THIS TRADE??? WHY??????????

…

Dear God, I am not a man of faith. But I pray that this is a precursor to another trade. Because quite frankly, there’s no other possible reason other than pure idiocy as to why any GM would make this deal. IT MAKES ZERO SENSE. NONE.

Yesterday, we learned that the Jays will listen to offers for Roy Halladay, who is pretty much the most bad-ass pitcher on the planet.

I think there are several compelling reasons why the Rays should trade for Halladay, and a couple reasons why they won’t.

Why they should:

1. According to J.P. Ricciardi, via WEEI.com’s Rob Bradford, he apparently wouldn’t hesitate to deal to an AL East competitor. So there’s no barrier there.

2. SI’s Jon Heyman hears that the Jays may want a top SS prospect for the Doc, and the Rays have no shortage os shortstops. There’s Jason Bartlett, Ben Zobrist and the organization’s top prospect, Tim Beckham. So who needs SS Reid Brignac? Why not include him in a deal to land Halladay?

3. Riccardi has insinuated that he wants a bigger package than the Rangers got for Mark Teixeira. That’s probably just posturing, but if any organization is deep enough to put together a comparable package, it’s the Rays. The Braves sent rookie catcher Jarrod Saltalamacchia and four minor-leaguers to Texas, including slick-fielding shortstop Elvis Andrus and three pitchers: right-hander Neftali Feliz, left-hander Matt Harrison and left-hander Beau Jones. Saltalamacchia and Andrus were rated as the Braves’ top prospects before they were dealt. The Rays could send Brignac and a couple of pitchers — maybe David Price and Jeff Niemann? That would be a pretty great haul, and one that few organizations could match.

4. Even if the Rays lost Price and Niemann, they could promote Wade Davis, who is ready for his shot at the big show having struck out 75 batters in 90 innings in triple-A Durham this season with a 2.90 ERA.

5. The Rays have the best run differential in the AL, yet they’re in third place, 5.5 games behind the first place Red Sox. Acquiring Halladay would help them make up ground in a hurry. Imagine a rotation that boasts Halladay, Shields, Kazmir and Garza. That’s just whacky.

6. The Rays are poised for a big second half. Pat Burrell, Jason Bartlett and Kazmir are back from the DL. BJ Upton’s shoulder is finally healthy. The time is now.

7. Halladay has $7MM left on his 2009 salary, and will make $15MM next season. That’s a lot of money, but the Rays can count on selling a lot of Halladay jerseys once the world’s best pitcher joins the team. Plus, think of all the money they’ll make selling playoff tickets!

Why they won’t:

1. Halladay probably wouldn’t waive his no-trade clause unless the Rays guaranteed him an extension. And the Rays, who are not a big market team, probably don’t want to make that kind of longterm investment.

2. Halladay, a groundball pitcher, must pine for the opportunity to escape Toronto’s turf. So he’d probably be less than excited about moving to the only other turf field in the majors (the Twins will go grass in 2010).

What do you think? Should the Rays trade for Halladay?