If you like Baseball America, you'll love Jay Yencich's analyses of the M's minor leagues.

It sort of reminds us of Bill James, back in the late 80's, warning his most hardcore fans... hey, if you live in Cleveland, you're going to know more about the Indians than I do.  But I'll try to help you out on the other 29 teams.  (Bill often pointed out stuff we didn't know about the Mariners, too, of course.)

Baseball America has some crack analysts, but there is no way that any national analyst is going to keep up with Jay on the M's minor leaguers.  If you pay $6 for a copy of Baseball America off the newsstand, consider yourself extra fortunate for this read.

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Kibitz ...

I/O:  Prospect trades don’t generally hurt quite as much as we think they will, except in the cases of them being verifiable Bad Ideas such as trading two starting position players for a dysfunctional DH combo, as we did with Cleveland.

Yeah.  It's like they don't hurt at all, actually, unless one of them becomes Shin-Soo Choo.

At the time Choo and Cabrera were traded for Eduardo Perez and Ben Broussard -- Cleveland's .500 SLG platoon DH --  the popular thought was that we were trading two fringe ML players.  Not many criticized those trades at the time.  (Probably J and G did, LOL.)

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=== Dudes and Duds ===

We read that Sandy's Braves are notorious for trading highly-regarded prospects that turn out not to be much.  During the Bavasi era, it was the reverse.  Other teams seemed to have much better judgment about our prospects than we did.   That's one that I'll call a fair criticism of Bill.

It's v-e-r-y important for a GM to know which of his hot prospects have "IT" and which don't.  And to slyly push off the ones he isn't as enthused with.

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=== Going Once, Going Twice ===

If you've ever negotiated, you know it is a fiiiiiiiine art, to bait-and-switch without your opponent knowing that you're doing it.  If the other GM gets a sniff of the idea that Zduriencik doesn't like, say, Jeff Clement, he backs off real quick.

Because GM's aren't dummies about the fact that Billy Beane will identify a hot minor leaguer who is dogging it, and try and push that one at you.  Half the game is reading the poker face.

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So what negotiators will do, is bring up a list of players, and keep dickering, moving checkers around until his opponent hits on the idea he's hoping for.  And then he rides that option.   Okay, we're talking Bedard or Lee or Gonzalez?   Well, I've got Clement, Triunfel, Aumont, Tuiasosopo, Saunders, Halman ... who do you like?

The guy says, Triunfel's the key to the deal.  You talk some, okay, and it comes to an impasse... well, we're just a wee bit thin in the infield right now.  If Saunders or Halman interested you, I could probably sweeten it a bit...

Phillippe Aumont seems to be a case in point.   You got the firm idea, when Jeff Clement was here, that Capt Jack was quite lukewarm about him.  You get the same idea about Aumont.  I'm guessing that, behind the scenes, Zduriencik did a nice job of re-directing to a #8 overall that Z values less highly than Baseball does.

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As you know, I don't buy the idea that Bill Bavasi had a 91 IQ.  But I do buy the idea that some guys have a feel, a gift, for player evaluation, and for negotiation.  Zduriencik appears to have that.

Bavasi's trades often looked great on paper -- Jeremy Reed and Miguel Olivo for a lame-duck SP?  Everybody raved.  It just didn't work out.  I've got a hunch the White Sox knew that their players were overrated.  I've got a hunch that on every trade back then, other teams knew things we didn't.

These days, the Mariners are the ones the other teams have got to be careful with.

Cheers,

jemanji