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Q.  So you stash Smoak for a while?

A.  If you can't trade Smoak, right, (um, yeah, right ) you stash him.  You can spin the carousel for four months until Morales is orbited on July 31.  It's fluid and dynamic and I like it -- presuming you can't get Stanton or somebody, of course.

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You do waste Carp in this scenario.  But then again, Michael Morse is an absolutely pitch-perfect model of what Mike Carp would look like if he hit the triple cherries all the way across.

Get used to wasting young talent.  They're not playing Stars & Scrubs coherently enough to avoid the wastage.  It's going to get a lot worse, too.

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Q.  Can Morse play 1B?

A.  He's way too big to play the OF very well, but he used to be a SS, so I'd be surprised if he couldn't play 1B well. 

He says he doesn't want to DH.  Here's where that Billy Beane paradigm doubles back for love.  What would Billy tell him?

Still, Morse can play 1B.  Morales' splits are fine as a DH.

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Q.  How does the jobshare work?

A.  Jaso and Montero do the catching.  You get Fat Ichiro, Morse and the non-catcher to share 1B and DH. Ibanez and Morse play some RF (meaning you need gloves in CF and RF).

A Morse scenario eats into Rauuuul's AB's.  Otherwise it's pretty much a 5-to-make-4, and all of the older guys are 125-game types anyway.

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Q.  So Kendrys LH, Morse RH, one right and one left.

A.  Earl used to platoon three guys in LF, get 37 homers out of the trio, and boast that he'd created Reggie! out of thin air.  Well, Billy Beane gets 30 homers and 100 RBI's out of his cleanup platoon too -- but he platoons them a year apiece.  :- )  Beane's third-order thinking is highly amusing.  

You think Beane would hesitate to bring Kendrys Morales and Mike Morse in, to bat #3 and #4, with the certain knowledge that they're gone the next year?

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Q.  The idea of a band-aid is so ....  melancholy.  Who can root for a hired gun?

A.  The good townsfolk of El Lago?  Texas and Anaheim been doing a pretty fair Stacey Bridges impersonation.  I SAID GIMME ANOTHER BOTTLE!

You want to talk band-aids, let's talk Endy Chavez and Casey Kotchman.  Anyway, there are two happy endings here, happy endings for 2014, that is.

First ending, Morse gladly hits his 30 homers and gleefully knocks in his 95 runs ... only to glumly find that the market next winter is still only 2 years, $16M.  See Branyan, Russ.  Mike Morse ain't going to age well, and MLB is going to be very aware of that.  It says here, even a Mike Morse coming off a great 2013 is going to find himself high and dry.  So the M's could re-up Morse even after a great season.

Second happy ending, the M's could bring in Kendrys to hit #3, bring in Mike Morse to hit #5, and ... any suggestions about possible bats to form a cleanup hitter sandwich?  What would stop the M's from dealing five blue-chippers for Stanton, even after Morse were here?  Hey, we'll jump ship on Rauuuuul if it's onto an aircraft carrier like that bad boy.

As secondary adds, Kendrys Morales and Michael Morse would float anybody's boat.

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