Padres can't match Adrian Gonzalez's salary expectations; Mets GM Alderson will make DePodesta appealing offer

In some respects were in an untenable position. Deal your one established star for prospects that have an overwhelming chance of flaming out or eat the seed corn for a one-shot reload next season. The only thing for sure is that he won’t be here in 2012.

But whether or not Adrian stay’s or gets dealt won’t be just a baseball decision. It’s far and away a budgetary one. Given the reality that this will be a 40-50 million dollar ballclub for the next 4-5 years we have to make all the baseball decisions with that in mind. The only way in hell were going to be competitive over that time is if we successfully deal established stars for cheap, high value prospects. If we manage to snag someone’s Carlos Gonzalez then we’ll be golden. If we get someone’s Justin Smoak, were screwed. This season was great, but the odds of us replicating it are less than the odds of serious regression. No stars to deal, no money to sign free agents, depressamundo.

Naw, let’s get the best prospects we can for Adrian and Bell then fill out the roster with the Ty Wiggintons, Russ Branyans, or Adam Laroches of the world. Even if the prospects flop we should still at least be competitive and if we aren’t at least we can claim players on waivers to rebuild for the long, tough road ahead.

And proved to be mostly misleading about how much extra finances the team’s have. Team’s are run for a profit, they have to be. But, the Padres or Pirates or whatever still don’t have the resources to spend a lot of extra dollars without going into the red.

Carter hit .232/.290/.391 in his one year as a Padre. He was traded for Mcgriff, who was already an established star when he came to San Diego.

The Padres are in the 28th biggest television market.

http://www.stationindex.com/tv/tv-markets

Err…I mean…Uhh..yeah, they’re not going to like it in 4 years…

And Mauer makes $23M. Zito and Rowand combined for $30M of the Giants $97M and they turned out okay. The key, of course, will be to keep churning out prospects to replace the guys around Mauer as he gets older. The Twins seem to still be capable of that.

However, you might be referring to his ability to stay a catcher. That would be a worry if I were them.

I don’t think there is a way in hell they part with Bumgarner. With him they have to have the best rotation in baseball, right?

and I don’t know who they’d be. I don’t think Ellsbury makes much sense anymore.

There is zero incentive for the Red Sox to trade him. I don’t know why anyone would even consider him attainable. Especially given how Lackey, Matsuzaka and Beckett are exactly working out in Boston.

This sounds like you recycled a comment from 2 years ago.

Lowrie, Ellsbury, Bard, Kelly, Iglesias

A non-healthy DeRosa would not be something to trade for.

The closer you get to the season, the more teams will make commitments regarding their 1B/DH situations.

I was trying to remove a lot of the risk out of these deals.

You don’t want to be like the Phillies who basically ended up trading Cliff Lee for nothing since all the prospects they got in return flopped in less than a year.

For you cheap bastards here’s the Padres part

The San Diego Padres should sign Carl Crawford

Even with Petco Park squelching offense, the Padres managed to rank just 11th in the league in team True Average, suggesting they need to do Adrian Gonzalez the favor of bringing in better help than just renting Miguel Tejada or adding a year and two months of Ryan Ludwick before he reaches free agency. Perhaps just as importantly, they need to show Gonzalez that any effort to re-sign him will be sincere. And finally, with a payroll that was in the vicinity of $40 million in 2010, they figure to be on the union’s watch list for clubs possibly pocketing revenue-sharing cash.

So the easy fix is to pay top dollar for a player whose blend of skills and profile would give them an excellent answer to many of these problems. Because of his stolen-base tallies, it might seem obvious that Crawford would give the Pads a real leadoff man, someone who would give Gonzalez that many more RBI opportunities (when he isn’t being intentionally walked at a Pujolsian pace). He’d end up offering more than that, though: speed and tremendous defense, yes, but also the ability to make quality contact (.331 career BABIP), and enough power to play well in their home park, which becomes that much tougher in divisional matchups in the bandboxes in Arizona and Colorado. Add in the benefit of coming over from the toughest division in the tougher league, and the Petco effect shouldn’t deter the Padres from getting into the thick of what figures to be one of the biggest bidding wars of the winter. Since he’s only just heading into his age-29 season and speed players tend to age better, Crawford is the sort of big-ticket offensive help Padres GM Jed Hoyer should make a point of affording.