I know that this is most likely a delusion caused by my deep-seated love and bias for all things Cowtipper, but it sure seems that whenever we enter into trade talks with another team, the asking price for our players is ten times that of any other team in the league. I have often thought that it's better to have a shitty farm system than a good one when it comes to trade talking. If you offer your "best" prospect, who happens to be the 60th-best prospect in baseball, it gives the illusion of being a better offer than if they same player were offered by a team that also owns the 6th-, 10th-, and 25th-best prospects.
Maybe it's just me.
In any case, after a shit-ton of begging, negotiating, arm-twisting, and heavy-drinking, we somehow managed to pull off two more trades this past chapter. Both trades should have been completely unnecessary. Hell, ANY trade that we have made over the past two chapters should have been unnecessary, given the quality of our team on paper compared to the competition. Yet, here we are.
In this Bizarro World of BDBL 2021, where black is white and up is down, we actually need to make a trade for a third baseman who can hit, despite the presence of Rafael Devers on our roster. To that end, we added David Freese from the Ravenswood Infidels. Freese's projected stats are nowhere near as good as Devers', and yet Freese is currently posting an OPS that is 100 points -- ONE-HUNDRED POINTS!! -- higher than Devers.
It's a very small sample, and Freese is severely restricted in usage, but every bat helps. If Devers' bat finally begins to heat up, we can move Freese to first base, where every batter we've used in that position has struggled all season.
In exchange for Freese, who only has 180 PA's left in usage this season, we had to give up TWO players with 2022 value. Like I said above, it seems like any other team would have had to give up half of what we did, but it is what it is. Josh Harrison was our best -- and only -- decent free agent acquisition last chapter. Codi Heuer was one of the rare middle relief fliers that actually panned out. Neither one will be contributing to our team in 2022 because Rafael Fucking Devers can't hit a baseball.
We acquired yet another ace-caliber starting pitcher, Mike Clevinger, in our second trade. That gives us an insanely-good starting rotation of Max Scherzer, Stephen Strasburg, Sonny Gray, Jon Gray, Mike Clevinger, and Framber Valdez. The fact that we're in second place, barely clinging to a .500 record, with that rotation is beyond stupid.
Even though Clevinger is a starter, we mostly acquired him to bolster our bullpen. The plan is to use those six pitchers as starters, but whichever two are not scheduled to start in any given series will be used out of the bullpen. In this year where quality relief pitching is completely non-existent, outside of Great Lakes' inexplicable success with no-name nobodies, it seems like this is our best/only option. There simply aren't any relief pitchers worth trading for in this market. Why not use our stellar starting rotation to its maximum benefit?
In exchange for Clevinger and two other guys, we made the very difficult decision to finally part ways with Spencer Howard. This past winter, we rejected one trade offer after another for Howard. He was ticketed to fill the void that will be left in our rotation when Strasburg and Sonny Gray become free agents at the end of this year. However, the more we watch him pitch, the less we're convinced that he will ever fill that void.
I absolutely HATE giving up someone like Howard for a three-chapter rental. We've made trades like this in the past, and they have always bitten us in the past. We get three chapters of use from the guy we acquired, we lose in the postseason, and in the end, we end up giving up years of production in exchange for nothing. But here we are again.
If not for our complete and utter lack of confidence in Howard, this trade wouldn't have happened. Increasingly, it was looking as though time were running out to get anything of value in exchange for him. Had we traded him last winter, or two years ago, we could have received much more in exchange. But we held on to him, hoping and praying for him to fulfill his ace potential. Now that we've finally traded him, he is practically guaranteed to become that ace in the very near future.
We won't worry about that future at this point. We have too much work to do in the present.
***
On that note, we've decided to shake up the lineup in the second half. Against left-handers, we will likely begin using Freese at third base. Against righties, we're moving Shohei Ohtani to right field, and use Freese and Aledmys Diaz at first. We're hoping that this not only boosts our offense, but improves our defense, as Ohtani's errors at first base have become a constant, nagging, issue.
With Suzuki behind the plate, and Kolten Wong at second, we should -- SHOULD -- score more runs in the second half than we did in the first. This game, however, seems to have a very stubborn mind of its own.
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