[cknox0723]

Originally Posted by cknox0723

Is this really the same team that lost 193 (one hundred and ninety-three!!!) the last two years?

No, it is not. Here is how the ballclub has changed, since the Pale Hose first came to the dynasty forum.

Sometime after Boston defeated the Cubs 4-2 in the 2005 WORLD SERIES, the news wires began to report on the players granted free agency. The other team in Chicago, the club that had won just 62 games, let go of first baseman Paul Konerko and outfielder Carlos Lee, both big-time power hitters who had ended up splintering on the bench through a combination of injuries and mismanagement. The former blasted a career-high 34 long balls down by the San Francisco bay last season, though he is batting just .246/.293/.390 this season, and Lee smashed 23 home runs in just a half-year in Colorado, cashing in big this offseason with our friends in Minnesota, where he has basically been Magglio Ordonez's equal, and that really ain't much of a compliment.

All of the cash freed up by the departure of those gentlemen as well as various other shrubs and greenery led to the ill-fated fiasco that was one very old catcher named Mike Piazza, as well some smaller, less disastrous moves. Platoon outfielder Brian Buchanan hooked on for a year and pasted left-handed pitchers as he always had, to the tune of a .366 OBP and .496 slugging, and parlayed that into a decent wage from Texas this offseason, where he has done his usual thing but had it obscured a bit more by more noticeable struggles against right-handers, something he didn't have to worry about when playing for a lousy, last-place ballclub. Dmitri "D.Y." Young hooked up with the club on a one-year deal just before the spring, and absolutely beat the snot out of the ball all year long, bludgeoning 40 doubles and clubbing 12 big flies, providing a considerable on-base threat and power presence out of the #2 slot in the batting order and giving us more bang for the buck than we ever deserved. His .310/.360/.448 line doesn't do his contributions justice, even accounting for his creative-at-best left field defense. "D.Y." got the riches he so deserved this offseason from the Mets, and he has been a main cog in the offense while other offseason signings like catcher Matt LeCroy, the former Twin, have bombed. Dmitri is batting .335 with 26 doubles to pace the team in both categories, and he is quite a large reason why the ballclub is finally pacing the NL East as they were predicted to. At 33 years old, it is unclear that the Mississippi native will do this for much longer, but I'm sure he'll be stinging line drives somewhere at age 45.

First baseman Brad Fullmer was also an offseason pickup, but he had an off year with the bat, and so I like to keep that on the down-low.

A handful of pitchers who are currently on the staff were acquired during that first fateful offseason, but none of them through a conventional signing, which I suppose is a credit to my ingenuity or a debit to my stinginess, whichever you prefer.

"Mercurial Kiko" Calero was squeezed out of Saint Louis and ended up over here, surely something they regret as the Missouri-based ballclub is having significant trouble bridging the gap to the superb Jason Isringhausen this year. Calero was relatively indistinguishable from the rest of the mediocre 'pen last year, but was brilliant this April and has mostly had command of his frequent battles with command ever since. He has yet to allow a long ball in 42+ innings of work after allowing 9 in 67.1 frames last year, and arbitration may net him a nice payday at the age of 32 this offseason.

PJ Bevis was a Rule 5 pickup who was simply not going to crack a very deep Mets staff (that is improbably even deeper this year after someone was drinking the Kool-Aid this offseason; granting, they are in first now, so all is well, but I would hate to balance that budget); Bevis ended up with a 5.94 ERA inflated by an 11-run outing in a 23-run loss to Texas one fateful June night (shaddup), but he has been reasonably effective this year with a 3.53 mark in 36 frames. The 26 year old's command is probably a notch below average, but he compensates with a pair of hard sidearm offerings that can only be described as nasty and will apparently lead to an above-average K rate for years to come. I am not so sure I trust him against left-handed batters, or in the late innings of real close ones, but maybe that is just his inexperience, or perhaps mine, that is showing through.

The other two guys are less significant pieces of the pie (which is quite a tasty foodstuff), but Rick "Wild Thing" Ankiel and "Schizo Jorge" DePaula merit mention for all of the good times they've given us. Ankiel can't really throw consecutive strikes more than once a week, but he did give us one hell of a game when you voted him to make the start, and DePaula has managed a 6-23 record over his 200 innings in Pale Hose, making him in some ways the quintessential Pale Hose, uh, guy.

We'd add southpaw reliever Mike Gallo on waivers in May of last year, and he was extremely ordinary last season and has pitched the best 38 innings of his life this year, toting a 2.13 ERA as of this writing, though his record when entering games mid-inning is significantly worse, which I suppose means that he is less a specialist and more just a plain old pitcher. Fourth outfielder and my personal favoritest player Raul Gonzalez had been added a few weeks earlier, and the 32 year old pounded the ball for a while in triple-A before earning the call to the show in mid-July. He's been here ever since, hitting .283/.367/.434 in 173 AB's last year and parlaying that into...$350K in arbitration, as he fell 13 days of service time short of getting a chance on the open market. Predictably, "The Element" that charged Raul has been missing much of this year, as he lost his center field job to rookie Brian Anderson with a mediocre April notable only for three triples and an abonimable (.164/.225/.233) May. Since then, mostly free of pesky left-handers and everyday pressures, Gonzalez has quietly reasserted himself as a capable batsman and outfielder. His overall .237/.323/.377 line doesn't blow you away, but his numbers against right-handed pitchers are quite fine at .274/.353/.419, and he's going to be re-signed if I have any say in it.

But this ballclub has really been constructed through trades, and for the most part I am happy with them, both for what they have brung/brought/brang the team and for how they seemed to make sense at the time. Some might say they don't make any sense now, but **** the ********, I say. **** the *******.

Here is a rundown that I tried to balance between brevity and detail, much unlike this sentence. I fudged the ages a little, tho', 'cause I can be lazy like that. It's close enough.

2/28/2006: Traded 30 yr old LHRP Damaso Marte, 22 yr old RHSP Kris Honel, and 25 yr old minor league infielder Ruddy Yan to New York for 27 yr old RHSP Jorge DePaula, 21 yr old minor league infielder Hector Made, and cash.

The idea was to clear up some money, so free chips & beer on that front. The two youngest players in the deal are the most likely to end up making more than minimal impact, though the jury is definitely out on Honel, who has had success at lower levels but bombed in the bigs a few years ago and in triple-A this year. I probably made 35 posts with "DePaula" in there somewhere, but he is in triple-A now and the shine is definitely off the man who went 13-8 in the Bronx in 2004, in a swingman role. Made (.321/.374/.450 in his first taste of AA) looks like a nice prospect with a wide skillset, though his base-stealing skills have gone to hell this year (an atrocious 16 CS to 18 SB; he was 52-63 in steals last year), and maybe that will all translate to a boring .250/.300/.350 line in the bigs. Cash is probably the best player in the deal even without shooting the sheriff, and no, that is not a sexual euphemism, pervert.

5/1/2006: Traded 20 yr old LHSP Francis Beech to San Diego for 33 yr old RHRP Akinori Otsuka, 30 yr old IF Ramon Vazquez, and 26 yr old minor league RHSP Brian Whitaker.

This is one deal I wish I could ctrl+Z away, as the Friars were not a million games out at the time (in fact around .500) and so I don't think it makes any sense. Of course if Beech blossomed like their 24 yr old pheenom Sean Thompson has (10-4, 3.19), maybe my conscience wouldn't care so much. "Pokey" Vazquez was frivolously tossed on waivers at the time, so it is really the unnecessary dealing of Otsuka, a valuable bullpen arm, that keeps me awake at night. So, too, does the thought of Whitaker, an absolutely atrocious pitcher who probably **** his pants as a kid, the ratfink. The young southpaw Beech is nothing special and probably never will be. Hooray, the trade is a win for us, but I ain't doing no cartwheels. Mercifully, this is the only trade I can look back on and say, "Yes, this is definitely some flawed AI we are talking about here."

A month later (give or take), we sent inconsequential minor league infielder Pedro Lopez to the same club in the desperate hope that Jason "The Mime" LaRue would give us a real, live catcher. He smacked about a half-dozen hits in his first week and provided some interesting clubhouse chat, but that is about it, and the dispirited backstop eventually quit the game in disgust.

That ain't much there. So it is the moves we have made this year that have improved the club. Marshall & Uribe to Seattle for Hillenbrand has already been mentioned, and "Shea-Rod" is hacking away in double-A right now, so that ain't it. But adding 28 year old Yorvit Torrealba (one of them real, live catchers!) for what has amounted to peanuts was a spirited move, as he's provided more bang for the buck (.290/.337/.420 in a career-high 224 at-bats) than anyone (even ifspuds!) could have ever expected, and then professional hitter Frank Catalanotto was basically gifted on us from Los Angeles. At the plate, he is like a man in the produce section of the grocery store picking through the bananas for those that are just right, and essentially replacing a tragic fellow like former centerfielder Joe Borchard, who was prone to slipping and falling on a banana peel.

Speaking of bananas, we have our very own in Michael "" Nannini, who was hand-picked off one of Montreal's branches and has given us 5 or 6 quality starts out of seven so far. His success, along with the 10 and counting strong starts from oft-injured veteran Ryan Franklin, have been as much a reason for the club's improvement as any.

But we are going to be able to add another one to that list, and now creed will not be the only one loving Toronto. We should all give thanks to our friends up north, for they are human, too, and grow tired of jokes about the sub-zero temperatures and exchange rate. And those crazy Canadians...they grow tired of that, and all hell breaks loose. They decide they have to trade two-time All-Star centerfielder Vernon Wells, a superb gloveman and powerful hitter whose free agency and recent spate of errors are hanging overhead like one of those blizzards or whatever the hell they get up in Canada.

They just want to be rid of him, asking only for outfielder Jeremy Reed (remember him?) and mediocre pitching prospect Armando Deltoro in return. With three capable young outfielders named Nix, Rios, and Restovich covering the ground in Wells's shadow, there's no need for Reed (whose record is a calvcade of .230 batting averages anyway), and Deltoro ain't much but a soft-tossing strike-thrower, but I only pause for so long before saying, "Screw it, they made the offer, got to pounce and bounce." Their all-everything ace pitcher Roy Halladay is also facing free agency at year's end, so I guess the fourth-place ballclub had to prioritize. What the hell we did to deserve their charity, I'll never know.

Wells is finally in town after needing a few days to get to the South Side of the Second City, and he'll be in center field and batting fourth when we finally take on Tampa for our last set before the All-Star break. I didn't plan it -- I didn't plan it -- but it happened, and now I am finally, truly starting to believe.