Post#18 » by HeavyP » Wed Jul 29, 2009 8:54 pm
I absolutely love this trade. Love everything about it.
We gave up 3 minor league arms, Aaron Pribanic who is a 22 year old guy who is at least 3 years away. He has 3 pitches, however his fastball doesn't have enough movement and his other pitches aren't that good for him to be anything other than a reliever in the big leagues.
Nathan Adcock is a 21 year old who pitches in the High Desert, therefore you cannot look at his stats. Luckily, I trust JackieZ to look past his stats and look at his skills. He has one pitch, a curveball. His fastball is below average and he doesn't have a changeup. Also looks to be a reliever in the bigs.
Brett Lorin is a 22 year old who has a plus fastball but not much else. However, if he developed more of a repertoire he could have been an end of the rotation starter.
That being said, when evaluating minor league arms one must be careful because a lot can change in a few years. That's why Dave Cameron is so against this trade, he's from the philosophy stack a bunch of arms with one MLB quality pitch, and HOPE they develop something else to make them into a quality pitcher, more often then not they don't pan out though.
We also traded Clement (who I am higher on then most everyone else I know) and Cedeno. Clement had no home in this organization. We have a lefty 1b who actually can play D and take pitches (Carp), we have a LH DH who can come up if need be (Nelson) and we have a catcher of the future (Moore). That being said, Clement was the odd man out. Trading Cedeno doesn't bother me at all, now that we have a SS we just need a utility player and Woodward is under club control for a long time and cheap.
Who we got:
Jack Wilson, is a defensive stud. He will make us forget about Yuni's mishaps. He's a gap hitter so I think he benefits coming to Safeco (although he is RH). He is 31 so he's not young (However, keep in mind Beltre is 30). He has an 8.4 club option for 2010, however we're only paying him 400k for this year as Pittsburgh pitched in the rest of his salary. He's not the young stud we were all hoping for, however he is a massive massive massive upgrade over Yuni/Cedeno
Ian Snell is massively thought of as a headcase. He was a good SP for the Pirates in 2006 and 2007, now he hasn't been good the last two years. During that time Snell has publicly said how he wanted out of Pittsburgh. Dave Cameron was saying he was a potential buy-low candidate but by reading what Pittsburgh's Gm said, I don't believe that was ever the case. Well, since Snell has been at AAA (After saying he'd rather kill himself than pitch for the pirates [paraphrased]) he's been pitching very well. It's likely he's taking Bedard's spot in the rotation later this week. Pittsburgh also sent us money to cover his contract.
One other thing, Jack Wilson is a type A free agent if we choose to let him become one. Which we've been over a million times, but it means we get two picks if he signs somewhere else. It's completely possible that Zdurienck viewed this as an opportunity to give up two players who were redundant (Clement and Cedeno) to get Wilson (who will either be our SS or he will be turned into two picks that may be able to turn into something useful) and only costs us 400k (what we will pay Wilson).
From there he was able to turn 3 minor league arms (none of which I was very high on) into a pitcher who has flashed #3 starting stuff before, and doesn't have a bad contract.
The Wlad trade is fine by me too. We got a guy who strikes out guys and doesn't walk guys at the AAA level. He may not amount to much, but Wlad was going to be a FA in a week. We improved our team for 2009, and 2010 without paying anything that was going to help us during those years. We still have Washburn and Morrow available so we may not be done trading yet.
