Today, two extremely puzzling trades occurred.
The first was the Royals shipping two minor league pitchers (including their best one, Daniel Cortes) to Seattle for shortstop Yuniesky Betancourt.
As I put it on Twitter, the Royals just took on $10 million of a no-hit, no-field, no-character guy and lost their best pitching prospect.
For all of GM Dayton Moore’s blathering of understanding the value of on-base percentage, he clearly isn’t making moves with that in mind. Now the Royals are stuck with one of, if not the, worst shortstops in baseball through 2012. (And yes, the Royals certainly will pick up his option.)
The Mets’ Omar Minaya must have been put under a Confundus Charm in his decision to acquire Jeff Francoeur for Ryan Church.
In Francouer’s last 2,000-plus at-bats, he has an OPS+ of 88. That’s… bad. Very bad. He deserves to be non-tendered this year and sign a minor league deal. Instead, he becomes the Mets’ starting right fielder. The Mets need power, and Francouer used to give that power, but he’s nothing short of a disaster at this point.
The Mets gave up Church, who can play across the entire outfield and can hit. He’s slumping this year too, but not to the extent of Francouer.
It’s times like these I realize just how lucky we are as the Red Sox: we have the best, most envied and most copied player development system in the bigs. We have a GM that rarely whiffs on player transactions. (The Gagne, Mirabelli and Arroyo trades and Renteria/Lugo signings in seven seasons… that’s it. And Theo even turned Renteria into Marte, which turned into Crisp, which turned into Ramon Ramirez, so I’ll exclude this from his ‘bad’ list.)
Today, just be happy you’re not a Royals or Mets fan.
