Santana Snoozefest
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
Baseball suffers from a central flaw: at its heart, it’s boring as hell (so Steven A. doesn’t accuse me of violating journalistic ethics too, this fact has been triple-checked with my mom). Spinning it positively, though, anything that can cram 12 minutes of action into a three hour sitting, and endure as an organized sport for 131 years makes you wonder what it’s doing right. Perhaps it’s baseball’s ability to spawn folksy pseudo-wisdom explaining the myriad ways in which “baseball is like life” (by far the best of which, from Rabbi Marc Gellman, says that in both baseball and life, “most of the time, nothing happens”). Or that in the two hours and forty-eight minutes of inaction, there are countless ways to speculate about the other 12 minutes. Whatever it is, obviously the tradeoff works for millions of fans, myself sometimes included.
As a Red Sox fan, nothing will ever surpass October 17-28, 2004 (I think Game 4 of the World Series went past midnight on the 27th, or at least my phone calls to friends and family certainly did). On the other hand, October 2007 was…kind of nice. Or, as my wife put it to me sitting on the couch after Papelbon finished the
Yes, I suppose I should have been. But I’ve become the 8,972,354th person (plenty of whom are Red Sox or Yankees fans) to note that baseball is a heck of a lot less interesting when Johan Santana is on the trade market and the Red Yanx are the only teams in the talks, because Santana wants (and deserves, given last year’s Barry Zito, Gil Meche [ok, Meche was actually decent], Jeff Weaver, and Daisuke Matsuzaka contracts) more than $20 million a year. It’s almost as bad as America Held Hostage: The Randy Johnson to the Yankees Trade Talks of 2004-05.
The baseball winter has become as boring as the baseball summer, with fewer redeeming qualities. (The only promising development so far is Miguel Cabrera in the homeland of Domino’s and Little Caesar’s.)
I’m not asking for much. Here’s what I would like to see:
1. The Twins receive a second tier prospect from the Yankees in exchange for nothing more than a binding promise not to trade Santana to the Red Sox. Am I crazy or wouldn’t the Yankees do this to avoid facing Santana and Beckett at the top of the Red Sox rotation for the next seven years?
2. The Twins trade Santana to
3. Next, the A’s flip Santana to
4. Hank Steinbrenner fires Joe Girardi and hires the late Billy Martin.
Let’s liven this offseason up a little!
Labels: hot stove league, Johan Santana, Miguel Cabrera
posted by Jimmy Chitwood @ 09:23,
2 Comments:
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At December 5, 2007 at 2:12 PM,
Jarrett said...
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Why are the Orioles not involved in this, specifically when Erik Bedard clearly shares Aubrey Huff's sentiment about Charm City?
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At December 5, 2007 at 3:39 PM,
Crucifictorious said...
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Unlike the Twins or the A's, the Orioles haven't accepted their role as a AAAA feeder for the Red Sox and Yanks yet.
