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02 Jul 2009 |
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Houston, we have a problem. Well, it’s not necessarily Houston’s problem, but they certainly are part of it. With the trade deadline approaching, General Managers across the league are scrambling to identify their teams weaknesses and surplus in order to make the proper moves to push them into the playoffs. Many teams however, often become sellers, a term that we use when teams trade away major league caliber players in order to acquire players that will help them down the road, and trade those that will have an immediate impact on other teams.
 Most often times you can look at the standings on July 1, 30 days before the trade deadline, and any teams that are more than seven or eight games back will be sellers, and those within six games will be buyers. There are of course a few exceptions, because you have to take the Wild Card race into consideration as well. Currently, the San Francisco Giants are seven games out of first place in the NL West, but are first place in the Wild Card race. There are also teams like Seattle, who although they are only 3.5 games out of first place, are fully aware that they’ve been lucky in the first half of the season. In their case, they’ve had the worst run production in the AL, but have relied heavily on their pitching staff, which is destined to take a downhill tumble as the season rolls on. At this point, most people reading this article have decided that they already know all of the prior information and there is no point to continue, but those who do so are crazy. The picture that I’ve painted is how many people think of it, but many times they are wrong. Of course, every year during the months of June and July trade rumors are omni-present, however, 99% of those rumors never come true. Most rumors are speculation, simply driven by newspapers to increase readership and to draw attention to their paper. Truth be told, only very few trades that actually go through are rumored in the week or two before the actually occur. Not many people expected the Lastings Milledge to Pittsburgh trade, or the Eric Hinske to the Yankees trade. Sure, we all expected the Mark DeRosa deal, but there are some like that which are just too obvious. We can’t predict every trade, but there are certainly some players that we know will be on the move. There are also many trades that we hear about for weeks and expect to happen, when in the long run the move never goes through. In this past off-season we heard rumors of Jake Peavy headed to Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, and a few other clubs, and sure enough, he’s still a San Diego Padre. There are times when we learn about deals that almost happened; in Peavy’s case, heading to the Atlanta Braves. We have since come to find out that a deal was in place, but the reason that it never went through is because the Padres and Braves had different opinions on the fifth player the Braves would give up in the deal between two mediocre pitchers. Now that I’ve gone way off track from Houston, it’s a good time to bring them back into the mix of things. Here we have a team that sits four games out of first place in a lackadaisical NL Central that is currently being led by a team with one of the worst 2-5 pitchers in baseball. Four games? That means they count as a buyer as we previously mentioned. But if their team is made up of mostly veterans and a very weak pitching staff, does that change your opinion on them? What if I were to tell you that Houston has a couple of players that suffered a rough couple of months, but have both been to multiple All-Star Games in the past? Doesn’t that make them a buyer? They should be trading the farm, looking for guys to help provide a spark to their lineup and take over the division. Here’s the problem, which is most of all Houston’s problem. There is no one to trade. They were ranked last in Baseball America’s 2009 Prospect Handbook, and for a good reason; they can’t draft. I’m not sure on the specific numbers, but there are only a few players that were drafted by Houston that are actually on their current roster. In this day and age of free agency, we’ve lost our focus on the draft. We’ve decided that it’s just easier to spend time scouting other players whose contracts are about to expire and upcoming opponents. Now, since the Astros’ have lost all focus on the draft, and are now out of prospects, they can’t make moves. The best part is that ownership claims they want to build from within anyways. We have a crisis in baseball, and there’s a few reasons pointing to it. The crisis is that we consume ourselves with so many rumors that we tend to believe at least some of them will come true, when almost all of them will not. We decide in our minds that there’s no reason for the Milwaukee Brewers to hold onto J.J. Hardy, and they should bring up Alcides Escobar. We can talk ourselves into infinite possibilities that would help each of our teams reach the playoffs, however, when it comes down to it, they hardly ever happen. This year, we have lots of rumors of big pitchers being on the move which we’ve covered in the past few weeks, and even some hitters, but after it’s all said and done, we’ll likely be disappointed. It’s likely that we’ll see a couple of big names being dealt like Matt Holliday, however, we all have to slow down. Too many teams have lost focus on keeping a stocked farm system to bring up young talent and now they can’t play the game that everyone else does, buying and selling at the deadline.
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