Deal of the Century

it’s good to see you’ve put so much thought into your posts today!

Lugo’s triple! Damn he is fast! The ball hit the wall and I said out loud. ’He has a stand up double. OH shit he is on third!"

This is going to be a great team with great chemistry. They will have a lot of fun and they will win a lot of games. OH BOY IS THIS GREAT!.

Now I know It was a bad trade.

For the first time in months, I was EXCITED to see us at the plate. Before yesterday, it was always exciting watching the pitching and then just hoping the offense would bloop a run or two in. That new “enjoyability” of watching this team must be worth something . . .

the shock and indignation is what the family and cemetery workers did to his body.

The credulous nonsense that they constantly show (will the world end in 2012???!?! did Nostradamus predict the internet???!?!?!!? was the titanic sinking a consiracy??!?!?!?! check out this haunted house!!!!11) is embarrassing.

There is a chance that Tony was actually right about Wallace, in you know, letting him get his bearings at AAA before calling him up. As much as I wanted Wallace at 3b instead of Thursty, it probably was best not to rush him. All in all, I think the only thing this trade proves is that the Cards really, really wanted Holliday.

I just hope this trade gets us into the playoffs, on to the WS, it ends up with another flag flying, and Tony decides it is time to ride off into the sunset.

Wallace who?

have never been uttered in these quarters. Unless you count someone saying “I’m a little bit wet over the prospect of Joe Thurston impaling himself on the dugout steps.”

he made the defense argument in the second paragraph. his “analysis” had links and numbers to back up his argument. i don’t see your retort having any.

and saying that people are “aching for joe thurston to be the starting 2B” is just ridiculous. show me a quote where people are “aching” for that and i’ll take it back. however, i can show you a thread where several people thought trading colby + some for peavy was a good idea. how would that have worked out for the people without “prospect man crushes”?

I think both the Derosa and Holliday trades are a good thing. Especially if we resign them

Why are those things considered dependent on eachother?

if Wallace can’t play 3rd does that mean he automatically has no value to the organization?

he could be traded for another player in a similar scenario (i.e. blocked by a super-star) that would be under team control for 6 tears rather than 2 months. or he could (maybe) be transferred to LF.

just ‘cos he (maybe) can’t stick at 3B doesn’t mean he’s worthless.

and then we signed them both this offseason, or we did trade for them both and resigned them both this offseason. What exactly does trading for them have to do with that (except the fact that they’ve actually played here for a partial season and their signing elsewhere nets us picks)?

saying that “no one thought Wallace could play 3B” apart from your own wishful thinking. If Wallace had been stuck in AAA for 2 years there might be some foundation for it, but he was there only a few months, after rising to that level extremely quickly. I think this was a LaRussa-forced trade (which is actually an indictment of DeWitt, for not allowing his GM to say no to Tony) that might yield wonderful things in 2009 but will likely handicap this time for several years to come.

is no one? He was playing 3B in AAA and, considering the A’s have recently traded their 3B, I suspect they’re going to give him a chance.

You realize that the trade happened yesterday, right? Of course there is going to be a front page post on it and I thank chuckb for his incisive analysis. Furthermore it’s a fallacy to assume that people criticizing the trade aren’t enjoying the season. Despite his analysis, I’m sure chuckb had as
much fun as any cards fan
last night watching us
put up an 8 spot on the champs

Brett Wallace can.

its amazing how 16 weeks can make someone proven and untouchable. before the season rasmus was trade fodder for peavy and now he’s an everyday major leaguer and too much to pay for halladay.

I don’t think albert is worried about Brett Wallace’s cost savings. He’s more worried about commitment from management and that commitment could save us some cash as well when we go to resign albert.

he talks about the value of the draft picks according to Victor Wang’s research.

he did consider the potential value, its 7.8mil. plus the chances of us getting a prospect as good as wallace after the 15th pick in this draft is slim.

I will admit with Pujols being a once in a lifetime player, there is a little bit of urgency.

It may not be fair, but fuck, it’d be really tough to show his face around town.

Although I do like that OPS.

Unless you want to see Rasmus completely bolted to the bench vs. all lefties and see some wacky OF with Holliday/Ludwick/Murton (LF→RF).

from the phone.

HOWEVER, we are blind not to see that the last decade, which was arguably the cardinals BEST decade ever, was built by throwing prospects away for proven major leaguers, several of whom were traded for right before they became free agents and were then sugned to long term deals (mcguire, token, maybe Edmonds). I don’t know about you, but I enjoyed the last decade TREMENDOUSLY!

This is true. However, we are also in an era of more sophisticated methods of evaluating prospects. As such, teams have both a better understanding of where their prospects sit and who the other teams’ best young guys are. As such, teams are less likely to be duped into taking crappy players who are shielded by the term “prospect.” Also, with the rapid escalation in FA salaries, teams NEED to know which prospects are likely to become legitimate players and NEED to hang on to them.

Here’s my point, which I’ve admittadly reached in something of a roundabout way…Walt Jocketty was able to pull off those trades b/c baseball was a different market at the time. Now, things have changed. If you want a top-flight player in trade, you have to give away really good young talent b/c the other teams KNOW who those guys are and they are more likely to be valued correctly than in years past.

If you look at some of the better trades of WJ’s tenure, he was able to toss overvalued prospects in big piles at players who often were in tenuous situations with their current teams. His big trades were for Big Mac, Edmonds, Rolen, Renteria (who I maintain is sort of overrated), and Chuck Finley. Only a small number of the prospects from those deals amounted to anything (the best probably being Braden Looper, Coco Crisp, and Placido Polanco), and interestingly two of them boomeranged back (Kennedy and Looper).

In short, as fun as those trades were and as much as they helped this team, they wouldn’t likely work anymore. Do you think we could sling off Todd Wellemeyer (of last season) and Daniel Descalso for Grady Sizemore? B/c that is sort of the Edmonds for Bottenfield/Kennedy deal.

…which I find a little creepy, personally. Does he talk with his teeth clenched?

We have now likely reached accord in the Competitive Lineup Act of 2009. May the LaRussas and Pujolses now be appeased.

But I still worry about 2010 and 2011. One could argue those are more critical years in the re-signing of Pujols. Perhaps though Mo will now sit Albert down immediately after a (fingers-crossed) stellar 2009 run and knock this thing out before he has a chance to realize we could be strapped to replicate said competitive lineups in 2010 and beyond AND sign him.

when we tell him that we can’t afford the $28 M the Red Sox and Yanks are willing to pay but we can go only as high as $23 M b/c we just signed Matt Holliday to a 6 year $100M contract?

of the various trades we’ve had with Oakland. The Mulder trade was much worse than this one because there were red flags all over the place with regard to Mulder, and there was clear evidence that Haren would perform at a roughly equivalent level in 2005.

Holliday, while struggling earlier this year, appears to be firing on all cylinders, and no one we shipped to Oakland could do what he’s likely to do from here on out

I think the expectation would be that Wallace’s value would be the same next year. Look at Colby as a proxy. I feel like he has lived up to Colbyish rookie season expectations and his trade value is similar to what it was last year.

Wallace struggling in ST is a guess and is irrelevant anyways, because it is unlikely we would’ve been making a move in March 2010 involving Wallace.

as many people here are asserting, why couldn’t we have gotten something worth Wallace’s value? Say, a young pitcher or an outfielder who’ll be with the team longer than 2 months? How about a young 2B or…

There’s no reason we HAD to use Wallace to obtain Holliday.

of becoming Joe Morgan’s mirror image. This is why Ken Tremendous hung up his spikes. He saw the errors of his extremism.

But I’ll give it rec number 8 anyways.

Where are the spelling errors? The thoughts are disjointed, but are they Joe Morgan disjointed? You also miss points for the mention Wallace’s first name, which Joe Morgan wouldn’t know if he had a media guide 10 inches from his face turned to the appropriate page.

See me after class.

It’s an off-point, rambling, vague load of incomprehensibly nonsense. That’s basically everything you need to know about Joe Morgan’s broadcasting style. A lot of off-point generalities, cliches, and “get off my lawn” arguments.

Well said, HL! If I didn’t know any better I would think you were the real Joe Morgan!

you know that Joe Morgan has no idea what a dirge is!

Hilarious post, btw.

Considering that they are in the hunt for the wc…

that could happen anytime in August though.

this was the exact name i was thinking about earlier we could swap glaus for sanchez though i fear they would reference his near perfect game and ask for more. bet he is a larussa type of guy the secret weapon picked him to start in the wbc over pinero. (hems been tooo good to call him pinata any more.

But isn’t there a rule that you cannot offer arbitration to someone and cut their salary by more than 20%? If this is true, I can’t see the Cards offering arbitration to Glaus…especially if they plan to offer arbitration to DeRosa. I also cannot see a team forking over a first or second round pick for a 33 year old player who cannot throw the ball.

They certainly shouldn’t off arb to Wellemeyer who has been in top five worst pitchers (if not the actual worst) in all of MLB. It might be possible for Pineiro to move up to a B if he keeps his string of stellar performances going. They would certainly offer arb to him I think.

if he isn’t traded, I don’t believe we’ll offer him arbitration. He’d likely accept and end up making $13-15 M. We may resign him for something like $5 M for 1 year but his value has fallen dramatically so it’s in his interest to accept arbitration if offered.

he only increases those odds by 15%. So it’s 15% of $25M, which is about $4M. But yeah, if Holliday =’s playoffs, then I guess you can call it moot.

Their only endgame is a ring. Maybe a record or two if they’re a vet or a rookie. I suspect most fans who are aghast by all this VEB “negativity” are on board with that. The champagne is sweet.

I expect a little more from our front office.

That said, there are two critical time-delay pieces here: Carpenter’s arm and Pujols’ elbow. Maybe we do need to win now. And we totally trust the medical staff, right?

hoped to get not just equal talent value, but equal cost value. Or, at the very least, more than two months of talent.

Wallace for Holliday should have been enough to get the deal done.

and cry.

thinks this is a good deal. Therefore it isn’t.

End analysis.

I think it’d be pretty dope.

was kidding.

They can take a train after the following series…

August 5, New York to Pittsburgh (there’s an off-day, as well)
9:15

August 16, Los Angeles to San Diego
2:50

September 9, Milwaukee to St. Louis (also an off-day)
7:18

• A St. Louis – Pittsburgh route, which happens twice, takes 15 hours and 21 minutes on the rails.
• The route to Houston is way too long. Just going to Longview, which is east of Dallas, is a 13 hour trip.
• Shockingly, there is no direct route from Houston to Colorado. I guess the cattle cars all went northeast and nowhere else. They wouldn’t make it even with the off-day.
• No direct route from St. Louis to Cincinnati either. They probably sensibly used the river.
• If they’re willing to go 28 hours on a train, they can make it from Denver to Cincinnati during their off-day.

“I love old things” attitude a bit too far.

Although, the train is awesome. Especially if you are taking it with Eva Marie Saint.

It was awesome. I would definitely do it again.

The lineup is now the best it’s been since 2004, and the pitching can match up with any Cards collection this decade

That being said, this is still not a great team. The trade has merely moved them from “the division leader at the AS break most likely to fall way out of playoff contention by mid-August” to “potential playoff team”.

But get them into the mix of the playoffs, and they have proven playoff performers (including Holliday in 2007) and even plenty of realistic DH possibilities if they get to the WS and Glaus returns.

is actually the strongest one for this trade.

Saying Wallace is worth 25Mil cause that’s the average that prospects like him are worth is uh, sloppy. I mean if you want to base your entire argument on the math of the thing, anyway, which is what the anti-Holliday argument does.

Especially when that number is based off a study of……..90 prospects. To people who consider 650 PAs a small sample size that’s an odd number to put a lot of faith in.

I’d like to see the standard deviation, personally, I’d bet it’s pretty high.

I got up some gumption and click the link and read Wang’s research. It looks like he does adjust for PV.

The Cards gave up an awful lot and having a cost controlled Wallace at 3rd would have been nice, but I’m not totally upset with the trade. I like the Cards chances this year and I’m glad they are going for it. Damn the torpedoes!!!!!

I didn’t address it hoping that, for those who were interested, they’d go back and look at the methodology. But it’s there, yes.