{"id":7945,"date":"2010-07-28T12:26:33","date_gmt":"2010-07-28T19:26:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/?p=7945"},"modified":"2010-07-28T12:26:34","modified_gmt":"2010-07-28T19:26:34","slug":"luke-warm-july-28-2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/?p=7945","title":{"rendered":"Luke Warm: July 28, 2010"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Landestoy Luke<\/p><\/div>\n

By Landestoy Luke<\/p>\n

Trades trades trades. Everyone loves talking about trades. Sometimes, LL thinks people are more interested in trades and transactions than they are in baseball itself. As such, this is Christmastime for many a baseball fan. After thousands of rumors, baseball\u2019s trading deadline\u00a0bears fruit, whether disappointingly or excitedly. Two of the biggest names have come off the board in\u00a0Dan Haren\u00a0and\u00a0Cliff Lee. There\u2019s still some stuff bound to happen though.<\/p>\n

Word is the Giants are going hard for Marlins 3B\u00a0Jorge Cantu. Of course they are. GM\u00a0Brian Sabean\u00a0is in love with counting stats that really don\u2019t amount to a hill of beans. Cantu drove in 100 runs last year. That\u2019s music to Sabean\u2019s ears. Never mind that RBIs don\u2019t mean a hill of beans when it comes to the value of a hitter. He\u2019s the type of player the Giants acquire, plug into the lineup, then wonder why they still aren\u2019t scoring enough runs. They picked up\u00a0Ryan Garko\u00a0last year. You know\u2026because he hit 21 homers two seasons ago. Sabean also picked up\u00a0Freddy Sanchez. You know\u2026because he\u2019s hit .300 a couple times. Dodger fans are thankful that Sabean is stupid enough to neutralize the Giants\u2019 great pitching staff.<\/p>\n

Speaking of the Blue, they\u2019re supposedly interested in Royals OF\u00a0Scott Podsednik. This has all the makings of a\u00a0Ned Colletti\u00a0acquisition. Podsednik is \u201cscrappy\u201d. He has 35 steals. He\u2019s \u201cbeen there\u201d as a member of the 2005\u00a0White Sox. Colletti collects players like this like nerds collect action figures. Guys like\u00a0Jamey Carroll\u00a0who \u201cplay the game the right way\u201d, but add no real value to a team other than siphoning\u00a0playing time\u00a0from better players. The harm in an acquisition like this isJoe Torre\u00a0gets enamored with little play things like Podesednik and tends to give them more\u00a0playing time\u00a0over the likes of guys like Matt Kemp and\u00a0Andre Ethier.\u00a0Reed Johnson\u00a0will be back from the DL soon and is more than capable of being that guy.\u00a0Xavier Paul\u00a0is extremely useful as a 5th<\/sup> OF. You don\u2019t need to trade pieces of the farm system to go get guys like Podesednik.<\/p>\n

As for the biggest name left out there,\u00a0Roy Oswalt, expect nothing to happen. It\u2019s basically between the\u00a0Dodgers\u00a0and Phillies and neither wants to break the bank for Oswalt. The Phillies can\u2019t afford to trade top prospect\u00a0Dominic Brown\u00a0now that\u00a0Shane Victorino\u00a0is on the DL. The Dodgers won\u2019t give up\u00a0James Loney\u00a0or Matt Kemp (nor should they). The Haren trade may have depressed the market value of Oswalt and effectively taken him off the board, so odds are nothing will happen.<\/p>\n

It will be fun waiting to see if it does though. Be prepared to be underwhelmed, though, as names like\u00a0Scott Downs\u00a0and\u00a0Javier Lopez\u00a0are the biggest ones moved\u00a0on Saturday.<\/p>\n

Landestoy Luke is a former semi-pro baseball player in the California-Nevada Independent League. Luke served as best man for the wedding of former Dodger hurler\u00a0Ray Searage. After spending some time as an advance scout in the Mexicali League, Luke now spends his time as a freelance writer.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Landestoy Luke Trades trades trades. Everyone loves talking about trades.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7945"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7947,"href":"http:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7945\/revisions\/7947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}