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He might've been happy enough. As it turned out, though, it would have been Silva in the rotation from the second week of the season on and he barely would have seen action in the pen.

I actually think there's a decent chance McNutt would have been one of the injury replacement pitchers had he not gotten hurt 4 days after Wells and Cashner. But I agree the ideal plan was probably for McNutt to be ready around midseason or a little before to hit the majors if necessary.

You're right, he didn't quit but he asked to be released. They could have kept him, but given Silva's history as a clubhouse issue it probably wouldn't have been a good idea. They probably should have just stuck him in the bullpen and left Mateo in AAA to start the year as opposed to trying to get Silva to go to the minors in the first place. That said, releasing Silva wouldn't have been a problem - and trading Gorz, likewise - if both Wells and Cashner hadn't gotten hurt during their first start of the year and missed the first two moths of the season. Add to that, McNutt got hurt 4 days after Wells and Cashner did and that left us with only the Coleman/Lopez/Davis trio. If just one of those three pitchers (Wells, Cashner, McNutt) had been injured at the start of the year and the other two got hurt later on, the rotation would have been fine. If only two of those three had gotten hurt all at the start of the year even, we'd have been ok. Instead all three went down at the same time and we had two rotation black holes instead of none or one. Injuries should be expected, but not to the magnitude we were hit with them all at once. If we don't get an abnormal amount of injuries all at once, nobody is decrying the trading of Gorz right now.

I do think they overestimated what Coleman could do and that probably made them more comfortable with trading Gorz. He probably shouldn't have been, but he may have been the 7th option (behind Silva, ahead of McNutt) before Silva threw his fit. They were also hampered more than should have been expected when 2/5 of the starting rotation went down in their first start of the year. Even if you expected both to get hurt, you couldn't have predicted both would go down right at the start of the year and both for extended periods.

You're ignoring McNutt getting hurt multiple times in two months and Silva, who was better than Gorz in 2010, quitting well after the trade was made. So even if you completely discount Looper, Wellemeyer and Jay Jackson, the Coleman/Davis/Lopez trio was our 9th best option even after the Gorz trade. There are very few teams out there that are 9-10 quality starting pitchers deep. For the record, I wouldn't have been opposed to keeping Gorz around if that's what they had decided to do. However, it wasn't poor planning to trade an average starter for three prospects when you had a veteran who was nearly as good an option and your best pitching prospect ready for the majors.

I've never argued that Gorz isn't a better option than the rest of the guys, but that the other guys (especially Silva) are better options than Coleman/Lopez/Davis and may not necessarily be significantly worse options than Gorz, especially since we got pretty good value for Gorz. If you want to go by ERA, Gorz is just one season removed from a 5.55 ERA. He had a horrid FIP and xFIP in 2008, they improved greatly in 2009 and regressed some in 2010. He's regressed back to 2008 level in FIP this year and his ERA has regressed as well, though his xFIP is better than 2010. Is Gorz a better option than Silva/Looper/Welly? Of course, but he's not a sure thing to post significantly better numbers than those three (again, especially Silva) and if you can get 3 prospects you like for him, you pull the trigger.

Much like the overall injuries to the team, some should have been expected, sure. But not all of them all at the same time. And that's my view of the pitching depth. The chances of Wells, Cashner and McNutt all getting hurt, Jay Jackson struggling a ton, Looper and Welly retiring and Silva forcing his way out were pretty unlikely to all happen. Chances were some of the guys would have stayed healthy, one of the two pitchers wouldn't have retired, Jackson would have gone back to pitching like he's capable or Silva would have taken the AAA demotion gracefully. It took all of that happening for the Gorz trade to look really bad.

Now you're changing the rules of the debate. First you looked at all relievers across MLB and, by those standards, Wood was paid below average money and is producing average-below average stats. That's a fair deal for the Cubs by those guidelines. Then you change the guidelines to what certain relievers are making in the NL Central. What guidelines are we going by here? Is Wood's contract bad if he's higher paid than a few random relievers in the NL Central or if he's in line with the rest of the relievers in the league?

Looper and Welly struggling recently are reasons why they were the 7th and 8th pitchers in the depth chart at best. And they may have been lower than that internally at the start of the year before McNutt got hurt and Jay Jackson imploded. We've had a huge number of pitchers - both young and old - drop off the depth chart in a short period of time. And remember, Gorz wasn't a sure thing. He was a pretty big question mark before coming to the Cubs and hadn't had a great deal of success. If he continued his recent success then he was a better option than all of our other guys, but that wasn't a sure thing.

That was the incentive for shopping him. It's possible Hendry would have given him away for nothing, but he got an interesting deal and took it. I remember what you said as the reason for shopping him, but I don't recall it being a trade him at all cost thing - or at least not publically that.

Silva wasn't pouting at the time. He started pouting when it became clear that Cashner was going to win the fifth starter's job, but that was much later than the Gorz trade. Lots of people at the time, I believe, were panicking that we'd keep Silva in the rotation and force Cash into the pen again, not whether Silva would be on the team or not. And Silva barely pitched in the second half because of the heart condition. His July ERA was really high (6.86), but his FIP and xFIP were fine: 3.89/3.81. His peripherals were up and he was walking more, but his BABIP was sky high (.413) in July. The minor league gurus can comment on the prospects we got back better than I could, but reiterating what I recall them saying, Burgess was a once really good prospect with some power potential and still some intrigue and I believe Morris had some intrigue for them as well. Hicks, I think, was just a bonus toss-in.

As has been mentioned, Gorz was only 1 of 4 different options we had after the starting 5 before you ever got to the Coleman/Lopez/Davis trio. At the time of the Gorz trade, Silva, Looper and Wellemeyer were still in the organization and all had similar career numbers to Gorz: ERA/FIP/xFIP Gorz: career - 4.64/4.60/4.70 2010 - 4.09/3.42/4.31 Silva: career - 4.68/4.49/4.41 2010 - 4.22/3.75/3.75 Looper: career - 4.15/4.48/4.36 2009 - 5.22/5.74/4.80 Wellemeyer: career - 4.83/5.03/4.88 was terrible in 58 innings in 2010 Gorz was the best option we had at the time, but he wasn't a significantly better option than any of the other three. When you then consider that we got three interesting prospects for Gorz, it's hard to say Hendry got rid of the only depth we had. Silva refusing a AAA assignment and Looper and Welly retiring was what killed our depth - not trading Gorz.

Was it to save cash or to get a pretty solid deal in return for a pretty average pitcher? Gorz's a nice pitcher and I was happy when he was here, but he's not so good that you pass up a deal where you get three intriguing prospects - especially when you consider that, at the time, we had Silva still around and he was similar to Gorz last year.

Moves like what? This has been a very inflexible roster for at least the past couple of seasons with few spots available to upgrade and even fewer actual possible upgrades out there. I'm not opposing letting Hendry go, however it's very unrealistic to think a new GM could have made any really impactful moves. That was two years before the sale and before negotiations began. That was probably a low estimate anyway and then the bidding vaulted the price up that much more. Anyone who bought the team/field/Comcast share would have paid in the same area the Ricketts did, so any owner would have overpaid - and I don't think the Ricketts outbid everybody else by all that much, so numerous smart businessmen (including Cuban) were willing to nearly reach $1 billion. And looking at what the Red Sox sold for 7 years before the Cubs sold isn't very productive. I could easily see them getting into the $900 mil to $1 bil range from 02-09. If the team is losing at the pace it is, it doesn't matter what price tickets are - they won't sell. You're not going to see the stands packed full when the team is awful whether we have the highest prices or the lowest. The likelihood is that if ticket prices dropped, you'd see a minimal increase in tickets sold and likely a decrease in overall revenue because the increase in tickets sold wouldn't offset the drop in price for every ticket sold the entire season. I doubt fans have quit coming to games because the Ricketts tried to get the state to pay for some of the Wrigley renovations. You could probably argue that an extremely tiny number of people stopped going because of it, but it'd be incredibly hard to prove a link between the state funding request and a significant drop in ticket sales. The only people who have said this is an issue is a couple of Chicago beat reporters. Selig came out and said the Cubs being on this list is meaningless, it was expected and the Cubs aren't in any financial distress over it. If the Ricketts didn't have the ability to finance that much money and if the debt had a chance to overwhelm them, I doubt MLB would have approved the sale. MLB wants the Cubs to be good and profitable, not bad and stuck in a quagmire. Search Scotti's posts and find the one he made on the Ricketts' financial situation and their upcoming plans - it was an excellent read and much better put than I just did.

Ah, was going off perception rather than facts on that comment. It just seemed like I had seen a bunch of really cheap guys or guys signing for $3-4 million/yr. I'm just going off perception as well, it just seems every LCS team has a $1.2m reliever coming back from something or other and getting ready to cash-in on a stupid contract. That may be what I'm ignoring is the rehabbing guys.

Ah, was going off perception rather than facts on that comment. It just seemed like I had seen a bunch of really cheap guys or guys signing for $3-4 million/yr.

That's really the average reliever salary? What's the median? I don't know the median either. There are some really high end contracts (Rivera, Cordero for example), but a ton of guys making next to nothing too. As a complete and utter guess, I'd say Kerry is probably on the lower end salary for veteran relievers though. Relievers seem to be either incredibly cheap or way too expensive. It's hard to find guys in the middle ground like Kerry is in.

Without all the injuries, there's a chance those three players plus Reed and Barney could have kept us around .500 and a .500 record has us within 4-6 games of first place. Not ideal and not what you build for, but it's contention. And I understand injuries will occur, but not generally to this degree, this often, this early. That'd be fine with me. Built the late 90s/early 2000s Mariners and the current Phillies.

Let's see..pretty easy...I expect a middle reliever to not put men on base and not give up runs. As of today, Wood 'the thrower': WHIP 1.38 192 for all relievers .336 OBA 195 for all relievers .419 SLG 244 for all relievers .250 WPCT 168 of 174 relievers with a record It's just the middle of June and time for him to go on the DL. What a warrior. So in everything but slugging against (and winning percentage, but that isn't a very meaningful stat, especially for relievers) that you listed, Wood is right around average out of 363 total relievers. And yet, his $1.5 million is more than half a million cheaper than the average reliever's salary ($2.11) as of the end of the 2010 season (most recent data I could find). So he's being paid below average money to give us average-below average production - seems like a good deal. And if you want to discuss reliever's winning percentage, keep in mind it's very heavily influenced by team record, so Kerry's will be weighted against him no matter how he's pitching because the Cubs are bad - it's the same for any pitcher who pitches for the Cubs this year.

From 1998-2001, the As had an average record of 88-74. After Ricciardi and Fuson left (02-09, Fuson returned in 2010) the As posted an average 87-75 record. I'm not seeing that huge a difference between Ricciardi and Fuson vs Beane. Alderson left the As in 98 when Beane took over and they were winning 88 and 93 games in 2005 and 2006.

I agree with you to a degree with Hendry signing stopgaps instead of giving young guys a shot, though he's been better at that recently. The exact example of Pena over Colvin isn't a good one, though, because there's pretty much no projection I've seen or, likely, that anybody could point to where Colvin is at all likely to produce at the level of a first baseman - especially when you factor in that his defense is likely to be pretty weak there. Whether you think the Cubs can contend or not, with Hendry's job on the line, fans getting really antsy and a really bad division, you have to make some effort to contend. Passing on all FA first basemen and simply going with Colvin would not have been a move in line with making an effort to compete, so I have no problem with giving a one-year deal to a guy who could very well give us 2-3 wins - which Colvin just barely missed while hitting an unreal amount of flyballs for home runs.

My concern with Cashman is that because of the huge amounts of money he's been able to play with, we haven't really seen a "type" of player he likes. We don't know what his philosophy is on what makes a player good, basically. With the Yankees, he's simply able to (and more often than not, I'd guess, instructed to by the Steinbrenners) simply outbid everybody for the stars who are good at everything (Sabathia, ARod, Jeter, etc). Should he come to Chicago and he has a big payroll but not unlimited, what type of player does he target and look to develop? Is he an OBP/more progessive stats guy or is he more of a traditionalist?

Escobar's most similar comparison, according to B-R: Ronny Cedeno.

No. People keep talking about these "immovable" contracts, but can never list them. Soriano is one obviously, but there's really no reason to want to move Z unless the return is really good and there's no other contracts that need to be moved. All the big money guys besides those two are off the books after the season, but people just seem to assume the Cubs have all these huge, long term, immovable deals weighing them down when in reality, they don't.

Even in the waiver process, Aramis will have his NTC/10-5 rights available to him. If someone on waivers claims him, he still has the option to reject the claim. So basically, if he'll agree to waive his 10-5 rights anyway, we'll be able to get something for him in trade.