Mr. Shapiro, I'll take those Magic Beans

Good Lord, not 48 hours passed since my last post before Bavasi pulls the trigger on EXACTLY the kind of deal I warned against making.

Bill Bavasi, you suck.

We sent fringe prospect Asdrubal Cabrera to Cleveland for fringe major-leaguer Eduardo Perez, apparently to platoon him with Carl Everett at DH. Replacing Roberto Petagine. In Perez's half-season so far, he's doing quite well (the 12-year vet RH 1b is hitting 303/343/636 in all of 104 plate appearances as the platoon partner of Ben Broussard, playing mostly against lefties)...but somewhere between that and his well-established career line of 250/327/441 is closer to what we can expect in a Mariners uniform. He's 36 years old, doesn't help the M's get better for the future, and isn't the answer to any of our weaknesses in 2006.

But, you say, we didn't surrender much value to get him, right? Yes and no. I'm not high on Cabrera as a hitter (particularly with our current middle-infield tandem apparently set for several seasons to come), but his defensive skills do have value, including more trade value than an Eduardo Perez. Moreover, the M's lack a great deal of farm depth in the first place, so Cabrera was ranked by Baseball America (who knows a little something about prospects) as Seattle's 6th best prospect coming into this season. Sure, that says more about the inept building of our minor-league system than anything else, but it's what we have to work with. (Just by way of comparison, minor-league guru John Sickels saw Cabrera as the M's THIRD best prospect as recently as 26 February.)

This is EXACTLY the wrong kind of trade to make. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Now, as a fan, I hope that Mr. Perez joins the team, continues his lefty-mashing ways, and makes a difference in the 2006 AL West. But my irrational rooting interest doesn't leave me incapable of rational analysis, and on the purely rational level, this trade is a very minor disaster. It has limited downside, to be sure, but if it's any kind of indication of what the Bavastard is preparing to do for the rest of July, then we Mariners fans are in deep deep trouble.