Sox Trade everyone: Fans say, "WTF?"

 

I think the trade deadline can be best explained by my youngest daughters reaction. Let's check it out.

 

Good News! The Red Sox traded for Cespedes!

 

 

But they had to trade Jon Lester....

 

 

Says it all, doesn't it?

 

You can call Cherrington crazy, you can call him brilliant, you can even call him an idiot, but you can't call him chicken. He already has the biggest trade in history (The Beckett, Crawford, Gonzales trade) and now he has the busiest trade period on record. This wasn't filling in at the fringes, this was a major makeover.  I try to keep my language clean on the blog here, but he's got major cojones.

 

What the heck is Cherrington doing?

 

Conceptually, trading players is very simple. You want to trade from an area of strength, and pick up an area of weakness. You want to trade when you aren't desperate. With a last place finish looming, the Sox fell out of the desperate category. There's nothing at stake for them this year. And they didn't have any competition - no one else was willing to trade the types of assets that Boston was. Clearly, the Sox felt they had plenty of pitchers, and were short on bats - specifically power bats.

 

The Sox aren't alone in this.  If you haven't noticed, ERA's and OPS averages have been steadily falling. Much of this is due to better steroid testing, but I also think the level of the average pitcher in MLB is much better than it used to be. Teams used to be happy if they had one or two solid arms in their bullpens, typically the weakest part of the roster. No more. Now there are many bullpens that are 3, 4, and 5 pitchers deep. Similarly, you used to have an "ACE" and then 3 journeyman starters who you hoped could keep you in games. But now, if you've only got two decent starters, you're not going to be competitive. The A's and Detroit are literally 5 starters deep, and they have to be the heavy favorites in October. But the fact that they are so deep tells you there's more pitchers out there than quality bats.

 

Cherrington obviously feels this is the case as well. Lacking power, with a line up that was 3 bats too short, he made moves to fix it. If he's evaluated correctly, the Sox could have one of the most dangerous lineups in the league, and what has to be the cheapest Run/Salary ratio in MLB. On the pitching side, he's probably thinking some will succeed, some will not, but he has injury protection, roster flexibility and plenty of salary money to play with. He can probably find a team that needs to dump salary, have that team pick up half the player's contract and pick up a very good starting pitcher for half the going rate, and still have high quality prospects. A trade of some kind should be expected, as he has too many possible starters to keep them all on the 40 man roster I think.

 

Flurry of moves clouds the future for the Red Sox

 

On to the big question: Will it work? I think it will. If it doesn't Cherrington can keep tweaking until it does - that's the best part of this plan. The range of things Boston can do is enormous. And as noted in the last post, the difference between the best and the worst is very narrow. It only takes a little luck and key guys having good years and you can be on top.

 

I do think it's interesting that with so much moving, the writeups on the whether or not the Sox are winners or losers in this trading bonanza has been very limited. Most of the articles have focused on losing Jon Lester and not having a veteran workhorse pitcher at the front of the rotation, but no one is quite sure if we "made out". It's hard to figure - we will score more runs then we will be giving up? Only time will tell, but we will look at this at the end of the year to see what we can see.