Seo for Sanchez

[Guest Edgy DC]

Edgy said when he was just 38, you know there's nothing happening at all
"Every time I put on the TV set, you know there's nothing going down at all"
(Not at all)
Then one fine morning he puts on a New York Met station, he couldn't believe what he saw at all.
He started groovin' to those fine fine Metties, you know his life was saved by Locke and Schmoll
(Locke and Schmoll)
Despite all the complications, you can groove to that Locke and Schmoll station
And it was all right!
(It was all right!)

Here he goes now...

[Guest Johnny Dickshot]

That was pretty flugging hilamrius.

[Elster88]

Valadius wrote: I don't understand you, Omar. You've been making boneheaded deals of late. Something doesn't smell right.

Why the plurality? The Baez deal didn't happen, you know.

[Centerfield]

Maybe he meant the LoDuco trade which also sucked.

[Valadius]

That's the one I meant.

[smg58]

Hillbilly wrote: It looks to me based on the wedding pictures that I've seen that Jae is out of shape. This might have been a contributor to the Mets making him available.

Based on wedding pictures where the guy's mid-region is blocked from view by his wife. I don't see how anybody can seriously make an issue out of that.

Look, Seo has a 3.85 ERA over 397 innings (roughly two full seasons). I wouldn't count on 2.59 over a full year, but a 3.85 ERA (assuming, perhaps conservatively, that he couldn't do better) would still make him our third best pitcher. We added depth to our pen by making our starting rotation worse. We also reduced our options from the left side of the pen, where we were already too thin. I feel like I have to subtract a few wins from my projection for the team beacuse of this deal.

[Benjamin Grimm]

Next pronounciation question:

How do you say Duaner?

I want to pronounce it Dwaner, which would rhyme with gainer.

[Guest Edgy DC]

"DWAHN-uhr"

Rhymes with goner.

[Benjamin Grimm]

Thanks!

He will be, by the way, the first Duaner to play for the Mets.

So we'll be getting our first Chad, our first Duaner, but perhaps not our first Danys.

Still to be determined: Our fourth Manny? Or, hopefully, our fourth Barry.

[Elster88]

I voted dislike. Even though I'm not in love with Seo, I wouldn't have made this deal. A mediocre reliever and a prospect were the return for a decent starter and our own prospect.

[Benjamin Grimm]

I voted dislike, too.

Was Hamulack considered a prospect, though? I tended to think of him as a hanger-on who was lucky to be left handed.

[Willets Point]

Is there going to be anyone left on this team I actually recognize?

[Benjamin Grimm]

I think we have to start getting used to dramatic turnovers.

[seawolf17]

Yancy Street Gang wrote: I think we have to start getting used to dramatic turnovers.

I prefer apple myself.

[Willets Point]

I prefer popovers to turnovers.

[Guest Hillbilly]

="smg58"] ="Hillbilly"]It looks to me based on the wedding pictures that I've seen that Jae is out of shape. This might have been a contributor to the Mets making him available. Based on wedding pictures where the guy's mid-region is blocked from view by his wife. I don't see how anybody can seriously make an issue out of that. Look, Seo has a 3.85 ERA over 397 innings (roughly two full seasons). I wouldn't count on 2.59 over a full year, but a 3.85 ERA (assuming, perhaps conservatively, that he couldn't do better) would still make him our third best pitcher. We added depth to our pen by making our starting rotation worse. We also reduced our options from the left side of the pen, where we were already too thin. I feel like I have to subtract a few wins from my projection for the team beacuse of this deal.

I don't need to see this guys midsection to know he's out of shape. It looks to me like Jae has put on weight.

I can see not liking this trade, but Jae's been up and down from the minors and has a total of 20 career in wins to show for those 397 innings. There's no way he was our third best stater.

[Guest Bret Sabermetric]

He's a 20 game winner! He throws close to 400 innings! He looks like Mickey Lolich!

What's your fucking problem?

[Elster88]

Who are the four folks who like the trade? I haven't heard any pro-trade arguments yet.

[Frayed Knot]

'Hillbilly' & 'Heep' - both on page 2 - make cases for liking the deal.

[seawolf17]

I think "heep" is really Duaner Sanchez, and "hillbilly" is really Steve Schmoll.

[Elster88]

Hillbilly makes the best argument for the Seo trade, which is hopefully the reasoning Omar had. "Seo is nothing special and Sanchez will help the bullpen." I say hopefully because other proposed motivations are ethnic cleansing and personal animosity.

[Guest 86-Dreamer]

Do any others here regularly read Tim Marchman's column at the NY Sun? I think he is the best of the lot among NY baseball columnists and had a pretty good article about Seo trade today. It is a paid site, so can't provide link, but here is the full article with hopes that some may sign up to read him:

Seo Trade Reveals Crack In Minaya's Armor
Baseball
BY TIM MARCHMAN
January 6, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/25447

As I've often written in this space, the most important thing for the general manager of a baseball team as rich as the Mets to do is to get the big calls right. In baseball, as in life, the most important benefit of money is that it allows a margin of error. A plutocrat who loses $1,000 playing the horses quickly withdraws another $1,000 from the bank and gambles again; an everyman who does the same might not eat for a while. Much the same is true of rich and poor baseball teams. Carlos Delgado is a great player, but the Mets can afford to bet that he's not about to do a Mo Vaughn impression in a way the Cleveland Indians can't.

This being so, our plutocrat cannot afford to make a habit of wadding up cash and throwing it in the gutter for laughs. Soon enough, he'll regret the lack of cash, even if it only means that he can only afford gold hubcaps instead of platinum ones. And baseball teams cannot give away good players for no reason; they'll come to regret it.

Over the last two winters, Omar Minaya has become the idol of Mets fans because he has grasped the first principle here. But he has yet to demonstrate that he has grasped the second. He, and Mets fans, may come to regret it.

This week's trade of starter Jae Seo and a D-grade prospect for Dodgers reliever Duaner Sanchez and another D-grade prospect is just another in what is now a fairly lengthy list of minor stupid moves, none of which are enough in by themselves to get agitated about, but which are in their totality troubling.

Among these are last year's trade of useful backup catcher Jason Phillips for useless starter Kaz Ishii, as well as several deals Minaya has made this winter. Minaya sent the underrated Mike Cameron to San Diego for the redundant Xavier Nady, valuable pitching prospects to Florida (which was in the middle of a fire sale) for merely decent catcher Paul LoDuca, and probably paid too much for Delgado, who wasn't in extremely high demand. Again, each move was defensible. But Minaya has sacrificed a starting center fielder, a no. 3 starter, a top-10 pitching prospect, and several useful reserves like Phillips and Mike Jacobs, all needlessly.

What's most galling is that he's done so not out of necessity, but impatience. This winter, the most valuable properties on the market are outfielders and, especially, starting pitchers. Such mediocrities as Jacques Jones and Esteban Loaiza are pulling down big-money deals, while teams like the Red Sox and Yankees have been rabidly scrambling to fill yawning voids in center field. The likes of Jeremy Reed, Corey Patterson, and Joey Gathright are being bid on like oil futures; above-average starter Jarrod Washburn fetched a 4-year, $37.5 million deal.

So, you would think that a GM with a Gold Glove center fielder with 30-home run power and a cheap young starter coming off a season in which he rang up a 2.59 ERA would sit back, let the market come to him and fill some holes. That's not Minaya. It's clear that once he gets an idea in his head, whether it be, "I must trade Mike Cameron," or, "I must trade Jae Seo to improve the bullpen," he reaches a point at which he just wants to move on to the next order of business rather than wait until some minimal standard of acceptability is met.

This is the downside to the decisiveness everyone finds so appealing when it nets a player like Pedro Martinez, and it leads to thoughts like, "I must have Carlos Delgado, and I'm not waiting out the Marlins over some Triple-A pitcher, because another team might swoop in and grab him." Which is fine in the isolated instance - but when it leads to the team losing significant talent in every trade it makes, it becomes a problem.

Jae Seo isn't a great pitcher - the most likely outcome for this season is that he's going to pitch about as well as Steve Trachsel, throwing 180 innings with a 4.20 ERA or something similar. He might be better than that, though, and he's a far sight better than Duaner Sanchez, who isn't even good. (Over the last three years, he's allowed lefties a .302 batting average - he's essentially a crummier version of Braden Looper.)

You can say much the same of the other Minaya's given up, and when you can't, you can at least say that they didn't have to be given up. With the Marlins desperate to move salaries and the Mets offering to pay all of Delgado's huge contract, would they really have not made the deal had Minaya not budged on prospect Yusmeiro Petit? If the Mets really needed an older, worse version of Victor Diaz, did they really need to give up Mike Cameron? This kind of thing comes around to haunt even the richest teams eventually when it goes on regularly enough - just ask the Yankees.

[Guest Rotblatt]

Great article. That really sums it up for me.

[Guest Bret Sabermetric]

Come on, you Minaya-basher bashers--put THAT in your pipe and smoke it.

[smg58]

Wow, a sportswriter who talks sense.

[nymr83]

i'm signing up for the sun.

[MFS62]

He's the first sportswriter who I've noticed has used the term "impatient" when describing Omar. Looking at his moves, and the timing of those moves, it makes sense in many cases. It reminds me of the reputation of old GM Frank "Trader" Lane, who at times seemed to make a deal just to make a deal.

Later

[Elster88]

Taking a look at the contract that Washburn gives perspective. It makes me dislike the trade more.

[Guest Hillbilly]

So those of you that think this is a great article, what would you have done to improve the team?

I think trades are interesting, because overtime they can be evaluated. The author points to the Ishii trade as a bad one. I guess I can agree with that because Ishii pitched poorly for the Mets in 2005. On the other hand, I don’t think we missed Phillips one bit and all Jason could get this year was a minor league deal, so if we had held on to him, we won’t have retained any value. Really this trade hurt us the most because the team stuck with Ishii far too long.


So let’s make this easy. How would you add badly needed depth to the bullpen without trading Seo? Please keep in mind the current market that we’ve seen this year where set up men and middle guys are getting multiple year big money deals.

[Guest 86-Dreamer]

I would have re-signed Roberto Hernandez for the 1 year, $2.75 million deal he accepted with Pittsburgh. Failing that, I would have an open competition in ST and be more than willing to use Seo and/or Zambrano in the pen if I could not find a trade of equal value. I also would have kept Cameron as my RF, and not spent guaranteed money on Valentin & Franco.