By trading Sano, we received another player that we hope can join that core in Gary Sanchez. Since the beginning of this franchise, when we drafted a young Ben Davis at a salary of $2 million, we have been searching for our "catcher of the future." That search has led us to the likes of Jeff Clement, Matt LeCroy, Kurt Suzuki, Jeremy Brown, Kenji Johjima, and countless others. Needless to say, our track record with catchers has been abysmal. We're hoping that Sanchez can finally break that trend.
As for Rosario, we had countless opportunities to trade him over the years. We've had numerous offers for him, and we have offered him in many offers ourselves. Thankfully, none of those offers materialized. We received many offers for Rosario this winter, and nearly traded him for an ace starting pitcher earlier this winter. We rejected that temptation, as we believe that Rosario will be an all-star MLB shortstop in the very near future. However, when the Washington Nationals traded their shortstop, Danny Espinoza, to the Angels, that meant Trea Turner would be moving back to shortstop. Suddenly, we had one too many "shortstops of the future."
The opportunity to acquire an MVP bat like Jose Altuve's was too tempting to dismiss. Although he will only play one year for us, we look forward to seeing him at the top of the Salem lineup this year. Trading Altuve also meant that we could fortify our bullpen by trading our second baseman, Neil Walker. We did just that, receiving lefty Mike Montgomery in return. We feel that Mike will have some future value that will offset the loss of the future value we traded in Rosario.
As it now stands, the Salem starting lineup looks very strong this season. In addition to Altuve, we recently acquired lefty masher Kyle Seager to play third base. This allows us to shift Jose Ramirez to shortstop against right-handers, which sends our expensive albatross, Starlin Castro, to the bench where he belongs.
As we head into the auction, our starting lineup looks very strong against both left-handed and right-handed pitching:
| vs. LH | vs. RH | |||
| CF Turner | .317/.338/.413 (65) | 2B Altuve | .348/.398/.544 (531) | |
| 2B Altuve | .306/.391/.494 (186) | LF Herrera* | .303/.374/.467 (494) | |
| LF Werth | .322/.411/.620 (141) | SS Ramirez | .312/.361/.457 (436) | |
| 1B Cabrera | .302/.409/.517 (176) | 3B Seager* | .307/.394/.538 (437) | |
| 3B Ramirez | .311/.368/.473 (182) | C Sanchez | .338/.404/.689 (166) | |
| C Ruiz | .271/.407/.386 (86) | 1B Cabrera | .321/.388/.578 (503) | |
| RF Soler | .267/.345/.467 (84) | RF Dickerson* | .254/.333/.477 (219) | |
| SS Sardinas | .302/.343/.492 (69) | CF Turner | .348/.378/.607 (259) | |
Obviously, we will need to frequently substitute for Turner, Sanchez, and some others, but we have some capable backups in place for those occasions. Our starting rotation looks strong as well:
| Strasburg | 148-119-15-44-183 (615/658) | ||
| Shoemaker | 160-166-18-30-143 (705/745) | ||
| Matz* | 132-129-14-31-129 (698/686) | ||
| Gray | 168-153-18-59-185 (694/712) | ||
| Guerra | 122-94-10-43-100 (618/645) | ||
| Norris* | 69-75-10-22-71 (648/800) | ||
And our bullpen is rounding into shape:
| Solis* | 41-31-1-21-47 (556/639) | ||
| Iglesias | 78-63-7-26-83 (777/483) | ||
| de la Rosa | 51-43-8-20-54 (656/725) | ||
| O'Rourke* | 25-18-3-10-24 (359/725) | ||
| Montgomery* | 100-79-8-38-92 (570/691) | ||
| Hunter | 34-35-1-8-23 (715/656) | ||
We have a little more than $15 million to play with in the auction and draft, and we've yet to decide what we will do with that. Our farm system (which we believe would have ranked #1 in this year's Farm Report if we hadn't made any trades this winter) has been depleted, so we still have a lot of work ahead of us.
Our goal isn't to merely compete this year, but to compete for the next several years. This past year, two franchises developed the blueprint that we would like to follow: the Chicago Cubs and the Los Altos Undertakers. If we can mimic even a fraction of the success those two franchises have experienced, then we will consider it a great success.
