Snobs vs. Slobs

It’s times exactly like this that I know I am going to miss Taft’s masterful blogging capabilities.

On Monday the Brewers, who are roughly 4 or so games behind the Cubs, pulled off the trade of the year in acquiring last year’s AL Cy Young winner CC Sabathia for prospects. Then the Cubs pulled off the trade of the year, trading Matt Murton, Eric Patterson, Sean Gallagher, and some low level catcher to the Oakland A’s for Rich Harden and Chad Gaudin. Presumably Ross has already posted about this, but I don’t read Ross’s posts because what do I care what the White Sox are doing?

Anyway, I like this trade on a couple of levels. First off, I view the trade as Gaudin for Gallagher, and then Harden for Murton, Patterson, and Catchy McGee. And that is pretty great. Gaudin looks like he is basically Gallagher, but a little bit older and more experienced, so I would say the Cubs come out ahead on that one.

As for Harden for the other three, while I love Matt Murton (We hardly knew ye, Murt McGirt), he clearly was never going to play for the Cubs in any meaningful role. So know the Cubs have actually traded him while he still has some value, and this will allow him to play more regularly. Who knows, perhaps he will become an All-Star? Or more likely he will become a competent platoon/4th outfielder guy. Which can be very valuable to some teams. Patterson wasn’t really bringing anything to the table that the Cubs can’t get from Mike Fontenot or Micah Hoffpaiur, and he seemed like he was going to become the type of AAAA ball player the Cubs are fond of churning out. (I’m looking at you 5-Finger Roosevelt Brown. You broke my heart.) And then Catchy McGee was tossed in, presumably as part of some “fox, chicken, and a bag of seed crossing the river in one boat” type logic problem.

And of course, the Cubs got Rich Harden, a pitcher I would say is pretty uniformly respected and slightly feared, but is pretty fragile. And while I like the pick-up of Harden as a high risk, high reward scenario, I LOVE the pickup of Harden and Gaudin for a bunch of league average players with modest upside at best. Which is fine type of player to have and one that has value for most teams. Except not the Cubs this season, with their best start and offense in pretty forever.

So it is great to see the Cubs actually utilize their assets in an efficient manner. Harden may end up injured like Mr. Mia Hamm, last high-profile, must-have Cubs mid-season pickup; but at least the Cubs didn’t blow their wad for a rent-a-player (Harden has a $7 million club option for next year), like say the Astros did for Randy Johnson in 1998 when they traded Carlos Guillen, Freddy Garcia, and John Halama for half a season of Johnson. The Mariner’s of course went onto the win the World Series…wait, wait, my sources are now telling me that neither the Astros nor the Mariners have won a World Series since the 1998 trade. So really, in the grand scheme of things that trade tells us nothing.

The point is, way to go Jim Hendry on making a big boy trade. It makes for an great story and it absolutely took A LOT of the thunder and media exposure away from CC Sabathia’s start, which I thought was pretty awesome. And despite the Brewers still being a bunch of bums, the division is shaping up for a great second half of the season.

Oh, on a side note, Mark Mulder came out of last night’s Cardinals-Phillies game after one inning with arm pain. Mark Mulder of course was traded to the Cardinals from the A’s for Rich Harden and some other players. There has been talk about that trade that GM of the A’s, Billy Beane, knew or correctly predicted that Mulder would have trouble staying healthy. It will be interesting to see if the same logic holds true for Harden, that Beane traded him because of the injury risk. There of course is a lot more that goes into it than that, but it is an interesting corollary to the story in light of Mulder’s inability to pitch the last two seasons. And while you never should be happy that a player is injured, cause that sucks for that guy, at least he pitches for the Cardinals.