Jim Hendry has apparently quashed any rumors he will consider trading anyone who is signed through next season, or that is what he appears to say in this note from Tom Dierkes at MLBTradeRumors.com (there is a little more detail here in an article from the Des Moines Register).
Of course, you can always assume he was just speaking gibberish or some sort of strange tautological mishmash, saying he will not trade anyone who will be with the team next year, which, of course, is true if they are traded and means, well, nothing, I suppose.
In any case, Big Jim is right in holding on to players genuinely under team control like Castro and Barney and Marmol and Marshall and all the usual suspects. But by the standard interpretation of the man’s words, this presents only Ramirez, Wood, Pena, Fukudome, Johnson and Grabow as chips that might figure in a trade.
Given that Ramirez has reiterated his rejection of any trade, and given that Wood has some sort of special dispensation in the matter and is likely to reject any move, and given further that Pena and Fukudome are players that Hendry will consider re-signing in the offseason, that leaves Johnson and Grabow on the block.
Slim pickings there, but dig in, contenders, because that is likely all you are going to see if we are to take Hendry at his word. In other words, expect the same kind of wheeling and dealing that occurred last season when the Cubs dumped Lilly and Lee.
Jim thinks he has the makings of a winner with just a couple of tweaks. Otherwise he would not be talking such nonsense. Now, he is right that teams can be turned around in short order in modern baseball, but the notion he has any idea how to do it is one that Cubs fans will find hard to swallow after watching the team’s woeful performance and incompetent management from top to bottom this year.
Sooner or later, someone in the front office is going to figure out that you cannot consistently trot out a lineup that includes only two left-handed hitters, no speed, limited athletic ability, no brains, and that literally cannot take a pitch if their life depended on it and expect to score runs.
So if some benighted baseball executive comes along and offers me anything worthwhile for players like Soriano, Byrd, Baker and Soto, players who, although they have some individual virtues, are among the keys to why this team loses consistently, I’d have to think twice before I’d retain the services of a GM who turns them down.
The problem with the Cubs, though, is that they don’t know they are a bad team—and I want to emphasize team here—and they don’t know why they are a bad team.
It has been a perennial problem for this franchise. They are always wondering why they have players who appear to have good numbers who collectively never quite knit together as a unit. It is just because these guys individually seem to be able to produce individual stats that make you think they are not all that bad that the team as a whole never quite measures up.
Source: http://bleacherreport.com/articles/775823-chicago-cubs-mlb-rumors-is-jim-hendry-standing-pat
Derek Fisher Pau Gasol Lamar Odom Baron Davis Blake Griffin Chris Bosh
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen