There’s a week to go before the MLB trade deadline without waivers and, around baseball, talks for Padres’ reliever Heath Bell are heating up. According to ESPN.com and Fox Sports there is a lengthy list of teams that have shown interest in Bell that includes many of the usual suspects, the Cards, the Rangers, the Phillies, the Angels, the Braves, the Reds and, oh yes, the Blue Jays.
The Jays? Yes. The safest bet in baseball is that if there’s a major player being dangled that Jays’ GM Alex Anthopoulos has at least made preliminary inquiries to find out what it would take to acquire that player. Knowledge is power and Anthopoulos, heading into the trade stretch, knows not only what his own team wants and has available, but also the 29 other teams from prying phone calls to GMs
This Bell case is different than other test cases. There are so many reasons why a Bell deal makes sense for Anthopoulos. First of all, there is the Type A status attached to Bell, which means if the Jays were to offer him free agency at the end of the year and he signed elsewhere, Toronto would get two draft picks in the top 75 in next year’s June draft. There’s also the fact that Anthopoulos would have an exclusive signing window until 15 days after the World Series to try to ink him long-term
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