Now it Really is Done

The world's longest trade is finally done. Officially it is Bedard for Adam Jones, George Sherrill, Chris Tillman, Tony Butler, and Kam Mickolio.

In general I am not as down on this trade as some in the blogosphere. I am disappointed that we are losing Adam Jones. The price also seems a little high, especially compared to the price the Mets paid for Santana.

If we were closer to a championship I would like the trade better. At this point in our success cycle, we should be holding on to prospects not dealing them away. We should be building our next good team around Adam Jones instead of trading him for two years of a great, but at least mildly injury prone pitcher.

But it does make us better than we were before in the short term. It puts us in position to make a run at the Angels should the season go horribly wrong for them. The wild card seems unlikely given that we'd have to beat both the loser of the Yankees/Red Sox and Indians/Tigers.

Still I can't totally blame Bavasi for going for it. I can see why, in the position he's in it makes sense. And since some early rumors had Clement and Morrow in the deal too, I guess I'm grateful that didn't happen.

The puzzling thing for me, is how little Bavasi did to fix the rest of the problems on the team, given the clear win-at-any-cost stance he has taken. He has made a huge gamble here that by trading away a major league ready stud in waiting like Jones for a truly top flight pitcher is going to make the Mariner's relevant this season.

But even if that deal works out short-term, he could be completely sunk by the fact that he failed to find an even league average first baseman to replace the corpse formerly known as Richie Sexson. He could lose it all because his DH can't replicate the 15 infield singles he got last year and puts up an OPS of 725. He could end up being fired because Raul Ibanez ages as quickly this off-season as he did last or because Brad Wilkerson can't come close to replacing Jose Guillen's production or Jose Lopez regresses even further.

In typical Bavasi fashion he decided that starting pitching was the problem and pursued that to the exclusion of all the myriad other problems on the team. Erik Bedard won 13 games for a pretty bad Orioles team. Bavasi seems convinced he can win 20 for an M's team that might not be a whole lot better.