Holliday Season

TJ said:

And that my friends, is the business of baseball. If this were Football, Basketball, Hockey or even Major League Soccer, Holliday would have been signed to a long term deal years ago. But if the Rox are gonna compete in the NL West, pitching is vastly more important that the long ball. So IF the Rox actually picked up a decent starter and a decent closer, we are already miles ahead of last years poor first half.

What an interesting move for Oakland. This is the team that let Giambi and Tejada go years before steroids allegations surfaced. They let Barry Zito go to SF and promptly lay an egg. They let Tim Hudson go and they traded Dan Haren to Arizona. And yet, Holliday is the guy they actually go after. Kinda makes you wonder if the big fish got away. What really sucks is the fact that Oakland will be able to make the offer the Rockies had hoped to make: Take less money and we will build a core of young talent around you. But if the A’s picked him up just to shop him around, what a fantastic move on their part. The Yankees, Red Sox, and especially the Angels will get a much better look at him and his numbers should improve by playing in the pitching weak AL west.

Anyone remember Matt’s speech after being named NLCS mvp? It went along the lines of “Thanks to the Good lord and my teammates..”. That just doesn’t sound like someone who is going to spend his thirties dealing with the east coast media. So I am holding out hope that the A’s trade him, he wins a world series, and somehow decides to come back to Colorado. For those who subscribe, the lord has been known to work in mysterious ways….

I say:

I’ll take a little more cynical view of the situation… Over the last several years the Rockies front office kept saying “bear with us, we’re doing something here.” Many of us were skeptical, but when things came to fruition in 2007 it made O’Dowd and Monforts look, if only for three months, like they knew what they were doing. I think many Rox fans were more disappointed in how 2008 went than the players and management. That’s just the impression that I got from player reactions throughout the regular season and how the front office has handled the beginning to this off-season. Matt Holliday was a the face of this franchise. He’s in Nike ads with the likes of LaDanian Tomlinson and might be the most recognizable Denver celebrity other than Melo. That doesn’t necessarily win ballgames, but attention tends to attract more talent, TV stations, and butts in the seats (all that equals revenue, kids!).

More importantly, Holliday was the cornerstone of the rebuilding movement and proof that if we stayed the course, we could develop our own talent. A couple of years ago people were already worrying about the day that we would have to give up homegrown talent that exceeded our mid-market price range. The hope was that rather than see the players just take off for free agency, we could at least get some decent talent in return. My problem with the trade is that there isn’t anyone remotely close to the star power of Holliday coming from the A’s. True, pitching is more important than hitting, especially in the NL West, but mediocre pitching is more of a liability. I would like to have seen the Rox do a 2-for-1 or 1-for-1 trade for better pitching talent. The bottom line is that the Rockies lost their best player and replaced him with three middle-of-the-road players that might wind up doing more harm than good. I hope, as fans, we don’t give these guys (players and front office) a pass for 2007. Instead we should be holding them accountable for going back to practices that had this franchise in the crapper just a few years ago (The Jeromy Burnitz Era).

The line to say that trade sucked starts here.