Sources: Dodgers trade Matt Kemp, Yasiel Puig in blockbuster

[Benjamin Grimm]

Sources: Dodgers trade Matt Kemp, Yasiel Puig in blockbuster deal with Reds

[Edgy MD]

Ooooh, lookit the Reds!

That's got to be the third blockbuster Kemp has been a part of.

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

Yes and every time Kemp is traded it's because his employer thinks he's paid too highly.

Reds have too many corner outfielders, perhaps another deal is coming

Trading Homer Bailey is pretty amazing considering he's worse than Matt Harvey and paid twice as much.

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

Speculation is Dodgers will release Bailey, use the $$ freed up by the departures to get Harper

[smg58]

The Reds take on $18M in payroll, but get three viable players.

The Dodgers get a contract they are likely to simply eat, plus the Reds' #7 and #20 prospects. They save $18M this year, but Bailey is under contract in 2020 and the three players the Reds got are not.

At face value it looks like the Reds got away with highway robbery, but if this helps the Dodgers get one of the top two free agents they will take it.

[smg58]

And the prospect Josiah Gray gets traded on his 21st birthday. He'll drink to that.

[Frayed Knot]

Looks like it's Puig + Kemp + Alex Wood + Kyle Farmer (28 y/o, PH/3B/C w/<100 ML ABs) + cash for Bailey plus the two prospects.

I guess for the Reds it gives them some 'name' players to sell some tickets (they were 13th in the NL in 2018 attendance) and maybe a short term bump in the standings for not a lot in return. The Dodgers get payroll relief as mentioned and maybe a less chaotic lineup out of this all. Roberts (or the folks upstairs from him) was so platoon happy that they wound up sitting their top four HR hitters for both game 1 & game 2 of the WS!! And who knows where anyone would wind up in the field on a given day on that team or even from inning to inning.

every time Kemp is traded it's because his employer thinks he's paid too highly.

Yup. This will be the third time he's been dealt just during this current contract (signed in Nov 2011) and the third time that the trading team paid part of the freight to make him go away. During various seasons of this deal he was being paid by three teams simultaneously (Dodgers, Padres, Braves). It also won't be the first deal where a team dealing Kemp acquired a player w/a big contract for the sole purpose of dumping him. The Padres dealt Kemp to the Braves in July '16 straight up for Cuban disaster Hector Olivera only to release Olivera 10 days later. But the Dodgers, who paid Olivera a stunning $67 million contract following his defection, paid almost all of that despite him never getting a ML AB with them.

[Edgy MD]

Well, coming to the end of the Mesaraco and Bailey deals, the Reds can breathe for the first time in years.

For a while, those two and Votto were some ridiculously outsized portion of their payroll.

[Guest LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr]

Obviously, the Homer Bailey deal must have looked a little better at the time, but... it doesn't seem THAT much better in context, does it? Two above-average seasons, only one with more than 22 starts... and THAT gets 6 years/100M-plus?

[smg58]

They paid for upside that never really materialized.

Of course now they can sign him back, which would make the trade even more interesting.

[Frayed Knot]

Yeah, Bailey was at one time an across the board top-10 prospect in all of baseball [looks like in both the pre-2007 and pre-'08 lists] and he and the Yanx' Philip Hughes were #1 & 1A (in either order) among pitching prospects just as both were on the eve of their ML careers. Just goes to show how tough it is to pick future stars sometimes, particularly with hurlers.

And I guess it was a case where believing in that kind of potential dies hard -- the old adage about how the low draft pick has to prove that he can play (Jeff McNeil) while the top pick (Bailey was drafted #7 overall) is given multiple chances to prove he can't -- because by February of '14 they were still willing to buy out his back years of arbitration and several FA years as well even though he had only been intermittently good by the time they took that plunge. That he needed to have TJS later that same year, which in turn limited him to just 8 starts over 2015-16 and just 46 over the last four seasons now, was just bad luck piled on top of the already questionable contract.