bailey > street
sweeney 3.9 WAR destroys cargon’s 2.3 WAR
we my have never seen rajai’s breakout.
wallace is the 3b prospect they’ve been searching for the last 3 years
street had his chance and was proven to have durability issues, not receptive to adjustments from Young, and was getting expensive.
mortensen/peterson are wildcards.

Holliday- if Beane didnt make that move, I dont think there wouldve been following additional pursuit after furcal, rj, resigning giambi, etc. It gave a false hope of contending, but it seemed like a better plan of the last 2 seasons. Maybe high expectations, but i expected Holliday to have a manny ramirez type influence plus help take off pressure from buck, barton, etc. It didn’t work out, but at the time I had no issue giving up Street and Smith. Plus Sweeney/Cunningham seemed to be more mlb ready and polished players at the same age as Cargon.

Street- The A’s for the first time in awhile had assembled a power and depth bullpen. Devine, Ziegler, Casilla/Brown (great stuff, despite their issues), Blevins, etc. I dont think anyone expected most of those listed to get injured, demoted, etc. A completely new group replaced them and improved in 09. There’s a big difference compared to their end of 08 season’s value compared and now. A’s took a risk with fairly decent depth at those positions.

Assuming, contract status for all three players are the same now as from one year ago but using current performance numbers, I’d still have traded Street and Cargon for Holliday this offseason. Street has one good year in ’Rado; Cargon is still unproven; Holliday is one of the most dangerous righty bat in the entire league. It will be the easiest trade to make.

Here’s some AN reactions at the time.

Also their were various reports of rockies demanding smith, rockies even no sure thing to keep cargon (nats interest) and trading street, so they probably had some discussions of not keeping either player which obviously didnt happen.

http://www.athleticsnation.com/2008/11/10/658186/the-matt-holliday-deal-and

i’ll be curious to see where wallace is ranked especially with carter, smoak, etc

- Greg Smith

Basically a definition of a spare part from A’s perspective, highly unlikely to contribute in a significant manner in Colorado, and that’s before the injuries.

- Houston Street

Another guy we had really little use for, since he would be the third best reliever on the 2009 A’s (fourth best with Devine healthy) and he’s clearly overpayed. Unlike Smith he was useful in Colorado because he’s still a passable closer and they didn’t have anyone better to fill that role.

- Carlos Gonzalez

Yes, he’s a great player. National League pitching and Coors Field will help, but he’s still pretty much awesome. However, losing one player like him doesn’t make the trade historically bad. What would you say about the Haren trade from the Diamondbacks perspective then? They lost Gonzalez, Brett Anderson and Chris Carter in that trade, that’s three players with superstar potential plus Aaron Cunningham who will probably be a solid MLB regular too. Haren would basically have to win NL Cy Young every year to make that trade even remotely even.

And the bounty we got for Holliday from St. Louis was crazy-good when you consider that he was a three-month rental. Wallace will be good enough to significantly offset the loss of Gonzalez (there are even some knowledgeable people like Keith Law who actually prefer Wallace). Mortensen and Peterson are not cream-of-the-crop prospects, but they aren’t a pair of nobodies either.

just because a player is doing well in the NL does not translate into doing well in the AL. For god’s sake Padilla is 4-0 for the Dodgers, Hairston hit .320 in the NL. My only complaint is that BB still doesn’t get it, don’t trade for an NL player and expect him to succeed in the AL. He continually makes that mistake. By the way I was surprised the other day to find out that Ethier hit .197 against lefties this year, that is Sweeney like.

I get people are tired of talking about this trade, but I am sick and tired of people thinking their the next David Frost and his computer. WAR UZR…..whatever? This isn’t a fantasy baseball league on yahoo. The only question is can a player flat out play baseball like a freakin stud. And its hard to argue that Cargo looks like a future stud in the making and I would take 99.9% of the time over sweeney….the other 0.01% (sorry David Frost in his all) would be if Sweeney’s girl was included in the deal – smokin hot! Crap, what are we talking about again? Wallace will have some pressure on his shoulders when he hits the bigs and I hope he doesn’t turn into another J Brown from it. But it still pisses me off that we could have had Cargo in center and wallace at 3rd if we would have just drafted.

but the A’s lost $5 or $6 million during this whole exchange simply by paying most of Holliday’s salary (minus street’s…this figure is a guess btw, I would love to know the actual figure). Since HOlliday clearly didn’t generate much revenue for us based on our putrid attendance this year, it seems likely that $5-6 mil could have been used for something else of value. Also, I never liked Gonzalez when he was with the A’s but anyone who thinks Sweeney is a better player than CarGon needs to stop using WAR as an end-all-be-all for evaluating players. CarGon’s a dang good player.

  Street just choked in the aplayoffs so his value has gone down. Street can be good but also can be bad for stretches so no big loss. Cargon hurts because he is a hitter. Not sure about his defense. Takes bad angles on balls hit so he is average at best. Smith another eveland enough said. So its mainly comes down to Wallace vs Cargon. Wallace you better hit.

I love it that these threads criticizing the Holliday/Gonzalez trade point to CarGon’s stats as a reason why he’s so amazing and yet people last offseason were expecting Holliday to take a .200 hit to his OPS as he moved from Colorado to Oakland. I guess whatever spin suits the argument the best is going to be used, right?

Seriously guys, as the trade happened last season, we have to keep in mind that Gonzalez was coming off of a season in which his wOBA was .278 (league average is right around .330). He wasn’t hitting for contact (.242 BA), he wasn’t getting on base (.273 OBP), he wasn’t hitting for power (.119 ISO), and he was striking out at a rate like no other (26.8% of his ABs). He wasn’t even hitting well in AAA (.760 OPS).

Let’s put his 2008 performance in context—Jack Hannahan and Bobby Crosby were outhitting CarGon in 2008. Bobby Crosby, for as bad as he’s been, has only had one comparable season to CarGon’s rookie year—every other season has been better.

There was no doubt about the tools, but when was the production going to match? Five years down the road when he’s spent all of his cost-controlled seasons hitting like Bobby Crosby/Jack Hannahan? Instead of doing waiting on Gonzalez to learn how to hit a breaking ball, Beane traded him away while he still had value. And now Gonzalez is in a home environment where he doesn’t have to worry about breaking balls. With the thin air in the Rocky Mountains, breaking balls don’t bite, they hang. So CarGon is able to hit all the hanging breaking balls thanks to the thin air of Denver, Colorado while also feasting on the fast balls of the National League.

With only 317 PAs under his belt in an inferior league and in a hitters park, it is far too early to say that Carlos Gonzalez is a superstar right now.

And everyone loves a good performance in the playoffs. I know this thread was made as a result of Gonzalez’s hot postseason, but let’s keep in mind, his .588/.632/.882 line was in 19 PAs. Anyone can put up numbers like that in 20 PAs—just ask Emilio Bonifacio and his .583/.600/.833/1.433 line in the first 5 games of the season (if you weren’t aware, he ended up with a .606 OPS on the season).

Anybody could have told you we had no shot in keeping Holliday, seems like Billy sacrificed part of our future to compete this year, but how were we going to compete with a young unproven pitching staff? I liked what I saw from Gonzalez last year, his average and OBP sucked but when he got a hit it was usually a double or a line drive of some sort, I remember Tejada being like that too. Forget Street, Bailey is better then he ever was. We’ve seen Mortensen already, he’s nothing specil, we already got 10 guys as good as him, I’m not seeing much upside there. Unless Wallace becomes better then Gonzalez then we’ve already lost.

are learning something about what we want. We don’t want Holliday’s or Bradley’s or anybody that don’t want to be here or that we can’t afford. We want youth, real A’s, guys we watch come up, who are going to be here. A lineup of Ethier, CarGon, Suzuki, Sweeney, Rajai, Ellis, along with some of the guys we got in the minors, our promising young staff, personally that is what I want to see. A’s from the bottom up. Can’t wait ‘til next yer, I’m getting fired up over here.

Didn’t think it was worthy of a fANpost, but I thought I’d mention that it appears that Tim Hudson is going to become a free agent, according to Ken Rosenthal.

If the price is right, I say go for it.

The trade did not work out as planned and in retrospect we might have been better off going in another direction. However, Beane did state that it wasn’t just an “improve the team so we can win now” move.

He was trying to provide a psychologic boost to the rest of the team especially the young pitchers. Holliday was supposed to take pressure off of everyone while also showing everyone how to act like a pro and work hard. Could say the same for Giambi and Nomar.

I’m not entirely sure any of that panned out as Holliday seemed to keep to himself and his offense certainly wasn’t enough to keep our pitchers out of the “I need to throw a shutout mentality”.

My point is Billy did trade away some of our future in CarGon, but I think he thought he might be improving the future of the other young players by reducing the pressure on them. He wasn’t just sacrificing the future to win in 2009, at least he thought he wasn’t based on what he said.

Maybe thats what happened in the end, but it wasn’t his intent. Do we judge the trade differently because of this? I don’t know. I have trouble getting mad at Beane for leveraging the future to win now, when I know that what he was trying to do was more complicated than that. Its possible his premise is all wrong, and maybe that deserves criticism. Its also possible that Holliday, Giambi and Nomar played worse than most would have predicted and we just got unlucky.

But in the end it still probably didn’t work out even if you accept Beane’s premise. But things like this are hard to measure.

I will say that Wallace is a nice consolation prize and if he pans out, I don’t think any of us will lose sleep over how this all played out. I for one, do think Wallace will pan out and I am more excited by him now than I was about CarGon when we acquired him.

And Liriano would still be awesome had it not been for injuries. Nevertheless, considering Street has never been great, and CarGon has yet to show consistency (and Smith toils down in AAA somewhere, I suspect), I’m pretty sure Sabean gets the platinum sombrero for bad trades.