Sarcastic

I have two questions. 1) Why do you think the organization could have gotten more for Sosa than it did? 2) Why do you think that better deal went undone if it existed?

I don't think there is much solid ground for saying we would be better off having kept Sosa than doing what was done based on the numbers that have been posted here. As for the idea that the trade was bad because Sosa had more value than what we recieved in return, consider the following: 2002: G 150/BA .288/OBP .399/SLG .594 2003: G 137/BA .279/OBP .358/SLG .553 2004: G 126/BA .253/OBP .332/SLG .517 This player, though he is probably a future hall of famer, has declined significantly for the last over the last few seasons. He also happens to be in his mid thirties and have a $17,000,000 contract. Would you give up serious talent for this player? I know I wouldn't. Sure, Sammy has done well in the past, but as has been said many times on this board, you shouldn't value a player for what he has done in the past, but for what you think he will do in the future. For example, Maddux's contract has been said, quite reasonably, to be too high based on what we could actually expect him to produce. Maybe Hendry could have gotten some foolish GM to bite based on what Sosa did from 1998 to 2001, but I doubt that. If there is one thing you can say for Hendry, it is that he knows how to negotiate a trade. I think it is quite likely that the reason Hendry had to settle for a bag of balls when trading Sosa was low interest. I'm sure the wide publicizing of Sosa's problems with the club didn't help, but I doubt it hurt as much as his age, contract, and declining performance. One more thing: I fail to see how paying a big chunk of Sosa's contract is truly terrirble. For one thing it was pretty much necessary, unless we were going to trade Sosa by swapping bad contracts, and then we wouldn't have the extra money anyway. The money we saved allowed us to sign Burnitz without much of a raise in payroll, and Burnitz has definitely given us better production than Sosa has given the Orioles.