With all of the diaries regarding salary dumps and trading our veterans, I feel obligated to make my own with my theory. I've posted similar ideas to this in other threads, but yeah, here it is . . .

I think that this trade deadline, even if we are still in contention, we should do some minor MLB for prospects deals instead of big upgrades OR downgrades. Here's the plan:

Spend-heavy teams in contention go crazy around deadline time, and I think we could easily take advantage of them, and get some prospects for the following guys: set-up men such as Springer and Franklin, Looper (as much as I'd love to keep him, it's not a bad idea to sell him while he's high), Encarnacion (if he gets his game together), and Wilson (if some team actually thinks he has pop left).

I know there are a lot of "ifs" there, but even if we traded all of those guys for purely prospects, we'd be able to stay in contention.

We could rotate Ludwick, Taguchi, Rodriguez, and Skip in right, let Mulder and Carp work their way into Looper's spot / keep Thompson in the starting role if need be, and while our bullpen would lose a little bit of substence, it wouldn't completely fall apart. We still have plenty of guys to use, and bullpen has been extremely succesful thusfar.

So what would this do for our team?

For one, our farm would be stronger. We would be dumping a little bit of salary (I know not much, but the point is more to get prospects than anything). It could also put a little change into the club house that just might get things going.

--I think we could get some young potential shortstops, especially from the Rangers. They have two top-15 shortstops while Michael Young is sitting pretty in the MLB. They are DEFINITELY expendable.--

Any thoughts?