I am the last one to defend private equity types or hedge fund founders or finance bros in general.
This is like one of those message board trades where a poster suggests giving up four nickels for a quarter. And yet it actually happened.
No one said the bolded, but good strawman.
To be clear, the bolded was my view and I wasn't representing anyone else's opinion of Cohen. I think he is slimy as hell.
The White Sox offer to Machado was $250M guaranteed with the potential to get to $350M with incentives and options, the Padres offer was $300M guaranteed.
I worked for stevie for years. He is not an activist type. He is not in this to boost revenues and sell off assets and make a couple hundred million in operating profit. He's a trader. He is in this purely to win a WS. Its partly personal redemption, partly vanity, partly because he's a huge sports fan and grew up a Mets fan. His box at MetLife is between the Johnson's and Mara's. If he could own the Jets he would, but baseball has always been his first love.
This is how the Rays survive. Pham is great but getting older and more expensive and not open to any kind of team-friendly extension, so swap him out for a younger OF power bat with more years of control who plays great defense AND a top prospect. Keep the line moving. Cronenworth was at AAA and blocked, so an easy give. Edwards is young enough that any positional logjams within the overflowing sea of talent on the farm will sort out over time through shifting positions or trades.
Pineda is suspended for the first quarter of the season, and even with him they are down a couple of SPs from last year (kept Odorizzi and Pineda, lost Gibson, Perez is still unsigned). Avila is fine to replace Castro at backup C, but the Twins need impact pitching, starters and relievers both, if they want to do anything in the postseason if they can get there again.
Blake Snell offers his analysis of the move.....
Especially because Pineda won’t be available for the postseason, right? Or is it just ineligible for the post-season in the year you’re initially suspended?
This is kind of interesting. I know that we're all very impressed by moves like this where a GM looks down the road and realizes that he probably won't be able to sign a potential free agent in the future, so he's swapped for a cost-controlled prospect (AKA a slapdick prospect). That's usually plays pretty well with us. But at what point does it erode confidence with the players on the MLB team? Like, if you're constantly taking "stars" and swapping them out year over year, at some point the players left have to be wondering who's next, right? And wouldn't that hurt team morale. Or do players really not give a shit about all this (though it seems Snell sorta does)?
I think the short answer is that when the Rays make moves, the players probably trust they will still have a good ball club next year but are disappointed to lose a friend. When the Orioles make moves, everyone knows it's only going to get worse.
They probably will be, but I doubt that Snell will be around to see it.
