If I were trading with the Red Sox, I would not be offering a lot for Brad Penny. Not because he couldn’t help my team, he’s certainly better as a 5th starter then most teams have, but because they have a log-jam and have too many arms and not enough spots. Dice-K hasn’t pitched well, but he comes with a resume and an annual salary of $8,333,333 and they are not looking for reasons to move him to the bull pen. They are going to give him some more time to work this out. They aren’t doing anything with Beckett or Lester, Wakefield is going nowhere either, he always takes the ball, keeps them in games on pace to win 22. Smoltz will have his spot. That’s 5.
Then there is Penny, that’s 6. They have Clay Buchholz now pushing the issue that he should have a starting spot in the rotation. Frankly, the way I see it, he’s not making a fool of himself by chirping, he is just making the Red Sox look bad, because everyone knows that he’s right. That’s 7. They have Justin Masterson in the bullpen. Most MLB teams would have him in their rotation now; next year he’ll probably be there. That’s 8!
So other teams know that they have 6, 7, arguably 8 qualified candidates for 5 spots. Let them start arguing amongst themselves, it’s already started with Buchholz. When they declare that they are going with a 6 man rotation for a while you will hear more complaining from others. They will be forced to trade someone (most likely Penny) and not have much leverage.
The reason bring this up is that this situation is very analogous to rotisserie rosters. There is a guy in my league that drafted 4 quality closers thinking that he could then move two of them for other pieces he needed. He felt that it was cheaper to pay for the 2 extra closers then to get two stud bats.
That was in fact true, but it created other problems. As of today, he still has 4 closers and has been offering a closer for a big bat since we walked out of the draft room close to three months ago.
Everyone knows he has a roster problem and everyone will wait and force him to lower his asking price. We are getting to the point of no return and if he doesn’t start making an offensive move soon he will have no chance at finishing in the money; and he can’t do it without trading those two closers for 2 bats.
The moral of the story is to pay attention to your roster composition. Don’t be cute and try to stockpile in any one particular area until and unless you have all your positions filled with quality and also have a back-up or contingency plan if someone goes into a prolonged slump or goes down. – James Morrison
Jim (no relation to the dead Door’s guy) is a self proclaimed rotisserie expert. Jim has been participating in an serious Ultra-Rotisserie league (you can protect some minor leaguers too) at $2,600 per team instead of $260 (similar to Ultimate Franchise Baseball ™) for the past 17 years and has finished in the money 14 times with 8 First place finishes and over $260,000 in total winnings over the 17 year period. While the world is full of institutions and people that come with disclaimers on how past performance is no guarantee of future results, Jim is brazen enough to claim that it will be in your best interest to follow his advice going forward. He’ll write it, we’ll publish it and we shall see………
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