1. San Diego apparently covets Oliver Perez (according to ESPN.com). Josh Barfield anyone? I wonder what else we'd have to throw in, if anything.
2. The Phils want to move Pat Burrell and his fat contract (also according to espen). While he might not seems like a Soriano level guy, his OPS has been .880 the last couple of years, and he's been a 30 HR & 90-100 RBI guy. That's nothing to sneeze at, and a huge improvement over what we got from LF this year. I'm not saying we need to go get the guy now. Let the winter play out, see what else develops. But it's one possibility to keep warm on the back burner. Thanks to his contract, the Mets could probably get him for a bag of balls if Fred's willing to eat his salary.
3. What do we do with Glavine? When I think forward to '07, I'm guessing we're going to go with something similar to what the Tigers had this year: one vet and a bunch of live arms. Is Glavine the vet? Or do we shell out for Zito? Or go with Schmidt? Or trade for some other front line starter? But there's really only one spot for a vet. After that, you have Maine, Heilman, Pelfrey, Humber, Oliver Perez, Bannister and Mulvey competing for four slots in April. When Pedro comes back mid-season, one of the young guys would get bumped to the pen. The Mets would only need one of the young pitchers to turn into a legitimate #3 and the playoff rotation would be solid.
And if Maine, Pelfrey and Humber got a full season under their belt, would you really be shocked if the three of them were pitching on an equal--or even higher--level than Pedro and Zito/Schmidt/Glavine come October? I wouldn't. Sure they wouldn't be as crafty as the vets, but as they say in hoops, "you can't teach youth." Or is it, "you can't teach velocity?" I can't remember.
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1. The absolute best thing to come out of the LCS was perez's pitching performances, because it just drove his trade value WAY up and gave us another guy to throw into deals. That should help us a lot.
2. Can you imagine Wright's #s if you put Burrell behind him in lineup. Wow.
3. We absolutely must have two guys we can bank on in the staff, and a third solid option. Assume Glavine is one of the two you can bank on. The question is how confident are you that Pedro and/or one of the young guys will pan out? If we make that assumption and make no trades now and it works out, the upside is obviously that we didn't need to trade anyone. On the other hand, if we're halfway through next season and all the young guys look bad, now we're desperate to make a trade and since other teams can smell blood they'll extract a fortune. At this point I'm assuming we get nothing from Pedro. I think that's the only way you can play it. Even when "healthy" he's prone to injury - how will he fare coming off of rotator cuff surgery?? If he rebounds and is a solid starter, great. But at this point I'm assuming he's no better than a #3 when he comes back, although I'm hopeful he'll be a legit #1.
If the rookies get a full season under their belt, I agree with Fredo that there's no reason to think they won't be as good or better than our vets. The only exception is that sometimes young hard throwers wear themselves out too quickly over the season and don't have much in the tank in the fall. As long as peterson watches this and minimizes their # of innings we should be ok.
I also think with any position player trades we make, defense has to be considered. We kept ourselves alive in that series partially because of good defense, especially a LOT of DPs. More offense is not necessarily useful - just like the Yankees we had plenty of offensive weapons. It was our approach which limited us, and that won't change just because we add more bats. I think the Mets need to play a little smarter based on the situation - in a game with two solid starters, or close and late, switch to small ball mentality. Otherwise going for the big inning is fine. But for all the poor hitting of Valentin being one of the things that killed us, his defense definitely stopped a lot of big innings from mounting. I have to give him that. Bottom line, if Wright and Green hit like we expect them to, we don't need Valentin to do much on offense. But it would be key to get someone to replace Floyd in 6 spot, to back up wright.
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