What do you guys think of the prospects the Mets gave up/Twins received?
I wonder if the Twins wouldn't have been better off taking Jacoby Ellsbury from Boston instead of the four prospects they got from the Mets. With Ellsbury, at least they'd be assured of getting one impact player in return. I'm not sure they got a real impact player from the Mets.
Baseball wisdom usually says that whoever got the best individual player won the trade, but whenever the best player is a pitcher, his health relative to the length of his contract can matter more.
So what would worry me, if I were a Mets fan, is that Santana seemed to wear down in the second half last year. If they give a declining Santana a 7-year contract worth more than Zito's $126 million deal, they could be stuck paying a lot of money for a lot of years. Realistically, for this deal to work, the Mets need to get the Santana of 2004-06, or at worst the Santana of '07 frozen in time. That seems unlikely to me, just because he has a lot of mileage on his arm now, and has started giving up more home runs.
No matter how it works out, though, it's unlikely to be a disaster on the level of the Cardinals' trade for Mark Mulder for the '05 season. Mulder had worn down in the second half of '04 (much more dramatically than Santana declined late last summer), but the Cards still gave up their best hitting prospect (Daric Barton) and their best young pitcher (Dan Haren). And they didn't just get burned, they get branded.
|