Transactions: DeRosa Dealt

Pretty sure Drubal wasn’t a PTBNL

We have yet to sign White, right?

I mean, look, nobody wants to give away a vet presence and a guy who was leading us in homers and rbi’s at different points in the season. But we all knew this was going to happen. The fact of the matter is that the Mets have traded away any prospects that they had, Atlanta wasn’t dropping any of their pitchers for 3months of Dero, not to mention signing McClouth already. St. Louis has had a great pen this year and we needed an upside fireballer out of the pen.

…

I understand the argument that we need to hold onto proven guys, and we do….but Dero wasn’t going to resign with us.

Who’s said we shouldn’t trade DeRosa?

It sounds like an indictment of the coaching staff. I am a little more optimistic about Perez being a good arm for us, but am aware of the risks that surround him. We still need to see who the PTBNL is before we can fully evaluate the trade

Jon Paul Morosi reports in Rosenthal’s piece:

One official with knowledge of the transaction said minor league right-handers Jess Todd and Francisco Samuel are on the list of possibilities.
It’s not known if other players are on the list agreed upon by the clubs. But Todd and Samuel are hard throwers who could fit into Cleveland’s bullpen next year. And anyone who has watched the Indians play recently is aware that they have an immediate need for power arms at the end of the game.
Todd has appeared in one big-league game this season and has a 2.73 ERA in 28 appearances at Class AAA Memphis.
Samuel is 3-3 with a 4.55 ERA in 32 games at Class AA Springfield.
The Indians will receive the second player on or before Sept. 1. Until then, the box scores of Cardinals minor league games will be of great interest to Indians fans.

I’ll let him grow it to his knees if he brings stability. I’ll even braid it for him.

I actually really like the idea of beefing up the pen, even if it means chasing some high risk/high reward type players. This guy’s slider has been rated very highly, and if he could harness his control, I could see him as a Mike Jackson type. The if of course is the harnessing of control

Shapiro has spoken before about how the acquisition of prospects is a numbers game. He hopes to bring in a bunch and several will become stars. We won’t know if Perez is one of the stars until it plays out. But most of these prospects will frustrate us and Shapiro believes that’s a given.

One of my favorite lessons in college came in supply chain management. It was about quality control: If you need 100 widgets within tolerance per day, and your current process is only churning out 90, you can either (A) take measures to reduce errors within the process, or (B) make more widgets.

You’re basically accusing the Indians of taking only option B, evidently at the expense of other priorities. But the fact that relievers are volatile talents doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re fungible talents. I don’t know whether the stats bear this out — maybe nobody does — but the facts that the Indians used their top-pick on a near-ready reliever, and that they flipped their best chip for at least one very well-regarded reliever? They suggest to me that there’s some option A action happening here as well. Given the fact that we currently have an entire system that is more or less devoid of healthy, effective relief pitching, I’m disinclined to complain if the Indians are trying something new.

I don’t really think there is anything else to do. We cannot credibly expect ANY of our relievers to be good next year. Not to say that some won’t be, but everyone has been so awful we can’t expect it. We have to get some new arms, and they have to be good arms, or at as good a shot at being good as a reliever will give you. If this trade nets two working bullpen arms for next year, Shap ought to be lauded.

I don’t know about the draft, but it does seem like we could use more reliever depth in the minors. If another couple of years generated some “exciting” relief talent, the draft could be good too.

I find castro’s argument unpersuasive. As he himself points out, there was a non-trivial risk of asdrubal regression. Even if not, there was no way to be sure Valbuena was going to be ready to be the everyday second baseman. We simply had a temporary middle infield problem, in a year we were trying to contend, and DeRosa fixed it. Moreover, his argument about DeRosa playing different positions is self-refuting—isn’t this the beauty of the super-ute? I have to think that line-up flexibility has something to do with us having a league leading offense despite only three guys OPSing over 800 (one of whom was…Mark DeRosa).

In retrospect, I think you were probably right about trying to do the Jhonny to 3B shift at the start of the season. But nonetheless, this is how I break it down:

What we got: a productive bat, line-up flexibility, at least one good ML ready reliever, possibly two.

What it cost us: about two million dollars and three “interesting” but nowhere near ML-ready arms, who might well have already been replaced in the system by this year’s draft.

Archer’s numbers look pretty good in A ball, but he is still a ways from contributing. It will be difficult to evaluate for another 5 years probably. Gaub appears to be hurt