These days, whether reloading or rebuilding, overhauling your roster in MLB is as much about getting rid of talent as it is about finding it.
Add Executive of the Year to the list of Major League Baseball’s postseason awards that should be named after a particular individual. If each league’s best pitcher is worthy of recognition as the Cy Young Award winner, one could certainly make the case that in today’s game, the best general managers are akin to Harry Houdini.
Building a winner today is not just about the talent the Brian Cashmans and Jim Hendrys are able to assemble on the field. It’s every bit as much about the bad contracts and bad apples they’re able to make disappear and the rabbits they’re able to pull out of a hat in their place.
Cashman and Hendry in particular will be tested again this winter and asked to do what they’ve been somewhat adept at already – turning their problems into somebody else’s. While both clubs are certainly adequately bankrolled, Cashman has the ability to basically pay people to go away. With fiscal responsibility to shareholders a high priority at Tribune Company, Hendry does not readily enjoy the same luxury.
In Hendry’s case, he must figure out what to do with malcontent Sammy Sosa and the $17 million owed him in 2005 should he remain a Cub. Since every rival GM knows that Hendry would like to trade Sosa after he walked out on the team the last day of the season, Big Jim doesn’t have the greatest of leverage.
Add in Sammy’s shrinking stature in the game – both literally and figuratively – and it appears Hendry’s challenge is also to sell a car with a high sticker price despite its equally high mileage, considerable wear and tear, possible body damage, and Lord only knows what’s been going on under the hood all these years.
Turning this lemon into lemonade will be an even bigger trick than the wave of the hand and puff of smoke two years ago that made Todd Hundley disappear, leaving Eric Karros and Mark Grudzielanek in his place. As bad contracts and bad apples go, once Hendry finds a solution to Sosagate, the balance of the roster remains a collectively team-oriented bargain, relatively speaking.
Consider Cashman’s plight though, one that’s already linked he and Hendry as possible trading partners. As George Steinbrenner summons his minnions to Tampa in search of solutions for 2005, Kevin Brown, Javier Vazquez and Jason Giambi are just three of the overpaid, underproducing stars the Pinstripers are tied to for next year or beyond.
The Brown for Sosa idea has been floated, but it’s tough to see how that really does much for the Yankees in the long run. Assuming Hendry can trade Sosa, the option year in his contract automatically vests, tying him to the team that acquires him for another year and $18 million more than the Cubs would be on the hook for through 2005.
Why on Earth would the Yankees, with multi-year contracts already tied up on other underperforming ex-superstars, want to acquire another? Even if you buy the “our junk for your junk” idea, why would Hendry want the hand-breaking poison pill known as Kevin Brown? Do you really think the Tribune Company wants to tie up one of its corporate jets shuttling Brown’s brood hither and yon? Don’t they already have a chronic head-case on the staff known as Kyle Farnsworth?
Sosa to the Yanks for Brown ain’t happenin’.
But that doesn’t mean Hendry still can’t pull a rabbit out of his hat.
Sosa’s future at this point is undeniably simply as a drawing card, a sideshow, a former freak chasing a spotlight that’s long since stopped shining as brightly on him. He needs a ballpark and an environment that needs him as much as he needs it. He needs an Arizona or a Colorado, a hitter-friendly arena where his long flies carry out more because of the thin air than on the strength of Sosa’s mighty hack. Where the home team is battling declining attendance as the credibility of the team on the field slides further and further.
Arizona and Colorado have shown considerably more fiscal restraint in recent years than they had up until 2000 when they seemed to be among the bidders for nearly every big-name free agent on the market. Consequently, each club saddled itself with debilitating debt for years to come. So thinking they’ll revert to that form and take Sosa off the Cubs’ hands for a song is naive at best.
Here’s where Hendry’s wizardry comes in. Colorado has Preston Wilson. Arizona has Luis Gonzalez. Either would go a long way toward filling the outfield hole that would be created by Sosa’s departure – not to mention the hole in left already created by refusing Moises Alou’s $11 million option for 2005.
Sosa and his run at 600 homers would bring the Diamondbacks or the Rockies more star-studded appeal at the box office than brought by Wilson or Gonzalez.
Wilson, although hampered by injuries last season, would bring a much younger and yet still proven RBI man in return.
A trade for Gonzalez would reunite him with one of his former teams, and bring them a proven winner with a left-handed bat, something sorely lacking in the Cubs’ lineup.
With the Florida Marlins always looking to pare payroll, don’t count out a three-way trade that could land Sosa in Arizona or Colorado and perhaps with second baseman Luis Castillo or centerfielder Juan Pierre as a Cub.
It’s all dependent on how creative Hendry can get and how much magic he can work. Don’t forget, he was the architect of the four-team, deadline deal that landed Nomar Garciaparra with the Cubs and ultimately helped push Boston perhaps to its first World Series title since 1918.
Only with a similar trade sending Sosa elsewhere can Hendry begin the serious work of making the 2005 Cubs better than the 2004 version – in the clubhouse and on the field.
Poof.