Merry Christmas to all!

And to all a good night...

Hopefully the Giants will find a nice CF present from Brian Sabean and Peter Magowan before spring training.

OK, how about Plan M?

Well, plan A (Steve Finl-A) failed as well as plan D (Jermaine Dye) and plan P (Podsednic) and perhaps other trades plans, so now they've gone to plan M for Moises Alou. The leaked deal, which has not been confirmed by the Giants but has been by Moises, is for 2 years, $13.25M, with the second year at the player's option (I guess in case Felipe is not back as manager the following season). Apparently it only awaits a physical to be done on Monday, Dec. 27th to become an official deal.

This provides offense aplenty but defense appears to be taking a big hit with this move because Moises has played LF most of his career and RF in SBC is as difficult as playing CF from what I've read. However, his father Felipe says that Moises was "born" to play RF, only that he has deferred to other players who were better in RF, like Larry Walker and Sammy Sosa. But still, this IS his father speaking... Of course, this move goes against Sabean's stated goal at the start of the off-season of improving the defense as a unit.

Now he's the big bopper to hit behind Barry: Durham, Vizquel, Snow/Feliz, Bonds, Alou, Alfonzo/Feliz, Grissom/Tucker, Matheny. With Matheny around, Grissom won't have to worry about having to hit 8th anymore. That's still a pretty good offense, but now we're missing Pierzynski hitting against RHP, Snow is probably not going to find the fountain of youth again, Bonds should deteriorate (shouldn't he?), and Matheny is worse than any of our lousy 8th best hitter in the lineup in 2004, except for Neifi. However, Durham has changed his conditioning in order to be less injury prone in 2005 and Alfonzo supposedly has lost 20 pounds and is getting himself into good shape for the 2005 season (yeah, right...).

Sabean said that they will still be pursuing an upgrade in CF but that they are pretty set as is. Hopefully they will pursue a younger centerfielder still but our trading pieces took a big hit with the releases of Pierzynski and Mohr. And everybody wants our best pitching prospects. Sabean will probably have to wait them out and see if they will accept lesser prospects in return in a trade by the time spring training rolls around.

Giants cut Mohr, Ransom, Franklin, offer arb to Feliz and Torrealba

Holy freaking hell! Not only do the Giants not start Mohr in the outfield, but they cut him!!! The other two I saw coming but not Mohr, who played pretty well for us last season. I wish him well unless he ends up with an NL West club.

I guess the Giants are pretty close to obtaining an upgrade in the outfield or they really think Ellison or Linden are ready to play on the bench for us. But really, they couldn't have traded him to somebody? The Braves included someone like him in the trade for Hudson. We couldn't have gotten a good prospect or two for the pair of Pierzynski and Mohr?!?

I'm waiting for the big picture of all this. I thought I saw it - going strong defense to support a young pitching staff - but this move doesn't make sense to me. I wonder what the plans are...

What the A's are doing...

I got a few e-mails asking me what the A's are doing. I'm guessing that Beane figured the A's won't be competitive enough to go all the way in 2005 without Hudson so, since he already had gotten an idea of what the Cards were willing to give up for Hudson, he just went back to them and proposed something for Mulder that made him happy too.

I like the Hudson trade, the Mulder one not as much unless there is something physically wrong with him that caused him to fade so badly in the second half. With the new guys together as a team in 2005, they can then go into 2006 with a year's experience under their belt but still hopefully be competitive in 2005. Though probably not competitive enough to go all the way without another Beane special trade during the season (like when he picked up Jose Guillen for nothing).

So nothing immediate helpwise, though their bullpen is now pretty formidable with Cruz, Calero, Street and Dotel, and that's just the ones I know. Plus they have a nice bunch of young starters with potential but still learning so the great bullpen will be very necessary.

I think he looked at it this way: while he could adjust offensively pretty easily the past few years for the losses of Giambi and Tejada, there's no way you replace a Hudson or Mulder easily and thus it would have been another two years of adjusting downward the pitching rotation to account for the loss of Hudson and then Mulder. Plus perhaps he sees no starter coming up fast to replace them and so he needed to trade them to get their replacements.

Consequently, he decided to bite the bullet, really made the bullpen rock solid in the process - a neccessity with all the young starters, as noted above - got some nice offensive pieces too in Johnson and Barton, the former contributing now, the latter contributing maybe later.

Pretty good all the way around. I just thought that he could have gotten more for Mulder, it seemed like he got less from the Cards than he did for Hudson. Now if only he gives away Brynes to us for spare parts...