Running Red Sox thread

The Marlins got one of the top 5 prospects in all of baseball along with one of the top pitching prospects. Maybin is more highly thought of than Ellsbury, and they gave up Miller too. Lester isn't anywhere close to that group.

You want to believe that, but it's not true. Some trades look lopsided in retrospect because the prospects just didn't work out, but the Lester offer is awful right from the beginning. As noted, the Yankees already offered better, while both the Dodgers and Angels could do a lot better if they get interested.

 

whatever. fact is, no team will return equal value to the twinkies on this one. that's all I'm saying. now go ahead and prove me wrong.

 

No, it isn't. The value that Santana has to the teams that would receive him goes down with each passing day.

With Manny's contract coming off the books, no, I don't know this. The Sox are already going to be able to bid in the neighborhood of what the Yankee's would offer, and when you throw in the money that the Sox would have to spend in order to replace the trade pieces, then it starts to add up.

I agree that the Yankees have a bigger need for a pitcher, but they aren't making the trade, so they may be content to wait as well.

I already clarified what I meant.

That kind of ruins your theory about them never outbidding the Yankees, doesn’t it?

Just like you did in the Daiske deal, you are misreading the situation. The Sox have all of the leverage here, and they’re using it. I’d love to have Santana, but I wouldn’t want to clear out the farm system to get him.

 

you've already been proven wrong. you're just making yuorself look silly.

 

The situation is pretty similar to the Schilling trade - age being the most dramatic difference.

 

which trade?

 

When the Sox got him from Arizona - yes, he was 7 years older, which is obvioulsy a lot of years - but the contract terms and his performance were not that different from Santana in the few years before the trade, I don't think.

 

very true. But even if you say that Santana is twice as good now as Schilling was then (which is, of course, an outrageous assessment), the Sox still bilked the shit out of Arizona. All they gave up was Casey Fossum, Brandon Lyon and a couple of other bums.

I think we can all agree that Jon Lester, Coco Crisp, Jed Lowrie, Justin Masterson and some other to-be-named player are far away better than the package the Sox gave for schilling. That's the point I was making — which Collin either can't grasp or refuses to in order to be argumentative: that small market teams, like AZ and Minnesota, won't ever get equal value in return for a superstar, especially if said superstar is close to free agency.

 

Olney said on Mike and Mike this morning that they are still in negotiations and the package that the Twins want is the Ellsbury one.

 

I never said anything about Minnesota getting equal value. Of course they won't, because as I said, the entire Boston farm system (taking out Buchholz and Ellsbury) isn't equal value for Santana. Neither is anyone on the major league squad aside from Ortiz or a resurgent Manny. What I'm saying is that the Lester deal is an awful one, which is presumably why reports have the Twins focused on an Ellsbury package.

That's more retarded logic. Even grid says that you're way off base on this one, as does seemingly every other human on the planet. Santana's value to a team won't decline until the start of the regular season, and even then not much. Plus, desperation could mean he'd actually fetch a better package at the trading deadline than now. In any case, you're clearly off-base in pretending that the opportunity to secure Santana to a long-term contract means nothing, as well as the idea that you can just sit back and sign him in free agency. You won't be able to.

At this point you're clearly just being stubborn. New York will outbid Boston regardless, but if the Red Sox do let Manny walk, they'll need to replace him with another slugger anyway. Their lineup is already heavily dependent upon those two, and while guys like Ellsbury and Pedroia have obvious value, they aren't RBI types.

Where?

Not at all. That was closed bidding, where no one had any idea that the Red Sox would go that high. Plus the Yankees naively felt like their aging staff at that time was sufficient. Now they're much more desperate. But you cannot deny that Boston paid $51.1 million just for the right to negotiate a long-term deal with Matsuzaka. That obviously proves beyond any doubt whatsoever that having that window to negotiate is extremely valuable, and thus it is well worth the prospects to have that same opportunity with Santana.

Of course you feel that way, both because you're an occasionally naive fan, and because your team just won the World Series without him. But as you already posted, Santana has no pitching peers. He's exceptional, and barring injury, well worth any cost in minor leaguers. Given that not even the Twins expect Ellsbury and Buchholz, anything else would obviously be well worth the cost. Holding out over a solid but unspectacular prospect like Lester when he might not have a rotation spot anyway after adding Santana is just silly. Why not offer Ellsbury and Lester? That would mean a rotation of Santana-Beckett-Matsuzaka-Buchholz-Wakefield. Given that the first four would be under contract for a number of years, that means at most Lester would only be the fifth wheel. That is what Boston is holding out over? A fifth starter?