I remember back in July arguing how much better Braden was than Meyer. Good times

Meyer was projected to be #2 type starter with Haren in 2005. Joe Blanton being just a 5th starter.

Just goes to show how injuries can derail a career, hopefully a change of scenery and health can get his promising career back on track.

Also the “other” rumor was Edwin Jackson & Antonio Perez for Huddy so neither trade would have netted the returns Mulder got.

But I do argue the premise that Juan Cruz and Two Buck Chuck were worthless. Cruz was supposed to be a Kiko Calero, a solid set up man (which he has now become with AZ) while Thomas was supposed to be a great defensive, OK bat CFer (like a mix of Raj Davis and Ryan Sweeney). Meyer was of course the key to the deal.

One of Beane’s biggest weaknesses is that he tries to quickly to either recover from his mistakes or try too quickly to repeat his successes. The Billy Taylor trade was a great trade, as it got us Izzy. The Hinske trade got us Koch (who was very, very lucky with us). Beane now believed these successes were easy to accomplish and that closers were fungible. He traded Koch for Foulke. This of course merely reinforced his belief. Beane tried to sign Foulke (as one of the top 5 best in the game is valuable at any position) after ‘03. But, Rhodes, while not the best alternative (Gordon had already signed), was an OK alternative in Beane’s POV and a 3 year deal was a great value. But we all knew how that worked out. Beane had relied too much on past success and committed too much risk to it.

2004 the bullpen failed us. Beane basically had to acquire Dotel out of necessity. And so, Beane went from the relief pitchers can be acquired from anywhere and any good arm could be a closer to a need to find bullpen pitchers. It was his insistence on one bullpen arm and one young starter that gave us both the Hudson and Mulder deals. Obviously the Mulder deal worked perfectly. But the Huddy deal was not as good. Juan Cruz was not a shut-down arm. And in needing two solid pitchers one SP and one relief, Beane eliminated possible competition in the bidding, such as the O’s and Mets. Remarkably, the Phillies and Dodgers both had the bullpen pieces to get a deal done (and LA had the young pitching as well). Beane hurt the possible deals he could have gotten for Huddy/Mulder by trying too hard to fix past failures.

A couple other examples of Beane trying to replicate successes or over-fix past failures were the Piazza signing (following Thomas’ success) and the Stewart/Brown signings (following Payton’s success). Now obviously Beane’s strengths (great ability to find/trade for cheap players who play above averagely- Durazo, Cust, Ellis; good trade record) outweigh his weaknesses (the issue above, signing large contracts, sticking with a player too long) but I wanted to get that off my chest.

Dan Meyer was the piece of those two deals that I was excited about.

HAHAHAHAHA.