Report: Plan Is To Keep Headley In San Diego For 2014

Buried at the bottom of New York Post writer Joel Sherman's article on Cardinals' pitching surplus is a report about the Padres and Chase Headley.

The Padres recently completed organizational meetings in Arizona and came away believing they will retain Chase Headley in his walk year rather than trade him. San Diego will listen to offers for the switch-hitting third baseman, who has been on the Yankees’ radar.

The Padres will listen if teams are interested. But San Diego believes it is more in a win-now mode and will deal him only for cost-effective players ready for the majors now or close to the majors. Padres officials feel, because of that, the Yanks are not a match. This is one of the problems of having an unproductive farm system — not only are you not feeding the big league team useful parts, but those parts do not exist for trades.

It would seem that Sherman has a source feeding him information about some internal meetings the Padres had. This sort of decision making about certain players and whether the team will seek a trade in the offseason is not an unheard of process. Back in early 2012 I was privy to a conversation with Josh Byrnes during a team sponsored tweet up. When asked about the Latos trade he mentioned how that after getting a lot of interest the team sat down and discussed what sort of deal would be acceptable in order to consider a trade. They then narrowed the field down to a few teams that could make such a trade and made the price known. Given that it would make sense that the team had a thorough discussion about possible Headley trades after the season ended.

What Sherman says about what the Padres would seek for Headley also makes sense. While the team isn't on the verge of becoming a favorite for a championship (or even a division title), the team does have a good set of pieces in place to make a run with Headley if some things break right. So, they don't really want to give him up for a package that takes away that chance. In that regard it makes sense that the right deal is one that, like Sherman mentions, ready-now young players. Those are hard to come by and obviously the Padres do not see a trade partner that fits that need. And it certainly makes sense that the Yankees come no where close to being a good trade partner once all that is taken into account.