I don’t know why you expected a big haul for a guy you said is nowhere near as good as Trout and some others. LOL.
I think I would have preferred the Cards package also but some of that is bias about the organizations systems. My preference was to wait till the off-season to get more teams involved but the Nats thought differently. At least we get to watch a new SS and SP and maybe some others down the road. The team sale cannot happen soon enough.
Yesterday my b fest was largely about:
#1 My fear, realized, that we would bundle in Bell like a mark at the table, so we didnt have to do a stare down to get what we wanted. It's just my argument, but my fear was that he would be tossed in so the GM wouldn't have to do the work of staring down Preller to 6pm eastern time. He just wanted his guys w/o any fuss, and he threw in Bell to eliminate the fuss and fight (that's how I feel, could be wrong). I feared that would happen (the tossing in of Bell, have no proof of my theory on why), and it did.
#2 Taking on a crap ton of salary for no major additions to the deal.
That combined, to me, was basically worth 2-3 prospects that we didn't get which is why I was nagging and why I argued. that while the offer was good enough for Soto, it wasn't good enough for adding a bad contract and throwing Bell in to boot (who himself was worth a top 10, and a 15th-30th caliber prospect). You guys disabused me of that notion when you confirmed that we wouldn't take on all of the Hosmer contract, just a small portion so the irritation was mitigated to a degree and it became just about the Bell throw in.
#3 Listening too much to the Gore is totally ----ed, and a bust argument until I read Law's breakdown.
Law's breakdown plugs in the risk (a lot of issues in '20/'21, injurys and rebuilt mechanics, but it also takes into account the raw stuff, which is ridiculous, and it takes on the argument that sucked this year, when in fact, if you break things down, it is more than reasonable that a good portion of his bad pitching came in the lead up to his elbow putting him on the DL, and the excellent pitching was when he was healthy and suffering no issues with his arm. That makes a risk, no doubt, and a large one, but also a guy who still has what made him the #1 lefty prospect, and a top 2-3 overall prospect in the game 2 years ago before injuries and mechanics problems sidelined him.
If you take that into account, then the sunnier side of the argument really plays: when I've seen blockbusters, its typically been two top 10 guys, or top 5, and then speculative guys ranked 15th-30th in a system with high ceilings and low floors.
In this deal we basically peeled off four of the top 5 prospects from the Padres system in the '20-'22 era, plus their best, and the best, 18 year old pitcher in the very long range, early stages of a prospects career.
That's as big of a prospect scalping as I've seen, in the moment, rather than long term.
I don't see how the Cardinals offer comes close to that one, but it is worth noting that I'm a big swinger when it comes to this, I like upside, not floor, especially when you're system is trash. We're going to have back to back to back classes in '22-'23-'24 where we have top 3ish picks, and pick at the tops of rounds, and we can aim for high floors if we want to then (I do not, they did that in '21 and apparently that class is straight ---, other than House).
Anyway, I'd rather have pulled from the Dodgers system, but this haul, beyond the Bell angle, is definitely as good as I could have expected, all things considered (and it's also worth noting that at least some of the frustration was a product of anger at the initial rumored offer that didn't even include Gore, and only later did reports add him-people tend to focus on their initial feeling, so at least some, did not compensate at all for the fact that we also got a piece, initially not reported, that was one of the most valuable in all of baseball two years ago, and still ranked top 3-4 in Fangraphs and Law's rankings this spring and late winter respectively), is the biggest haul I've ever seen. Worth noting that both Passan and Law argued yesterday that if a team was going to trade away a player like this, this was a MASSIVE haul for such a trade, not a weak sauce offer, or a reasonable one.
I'm annoyed because of Bell, but beyond that, I tend to agree.
I suspect that we hit on 2 of 3 positional players, and have a 60/40 chance of getting a real useful pitcher between the two of them, the pitching angle may be a little bit too much of wishful thinking, just because of Gore's injury history and the kid's age.
