I'm probably too subjective on this one. But when the M's acquired Randy, that was pretty much franchise-altering, yeah? Not sure it received its proper celebration, but that heralded the beginning of a real franchise for the area.
Weren't Sabathia and Burnett signed during the same 24 hour period? That's gotta rank up there, even though it doesn't appear to have involved historically great pitchers, just very good ones going to a team that more than desperately needed them.
But for your division rival to lose their Ace to their number one most hated enemy, and to lose out on their prime replacement target is pretty bad. That their intra-division rivals end up getting a 1a starter as a direct result of them losing out on their prime target...yeah, that's probably as much of a gutpunch as you can draw up.
Jayson Stark and Tim Kjurkian (sp) were marvelling, on ESPN, that 3 of the game's 10 best starting pitchers each left their teams in one 24-hour day. Has that ever happened before?
Not only is it thunderously rare (maybe unique) for 3 such prize horses to bolt their stables all at the same moment.... but it so happened that each of the 3 were direct knees to one single team's man region:
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1. John Lackey, genuinely the guts of their 6-year* division stranglehold, left.
1a. He went to perhaps their most heated rivals, Boston, who crushed them in the playoffs in 2007 and 2008. And who they'll face again if they make the playoffs.
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2. Roy Halladay, the one man they were desperately hoping to get to maintain the stranglehold, was traded out of the league and immediately signed a long-term contract.
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3. Cliff Lee signed with the Mariners -- division competitors who also had just signed the Angels' peoples-choice MVP, Chone Figgins.
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Lackey and Lee could be argued as a 10-game swing in the standings, right there. And that's just Strat-O-Matic, emotionless 1's and 0's. To say nothing of the intangibles.
I wonder if this was the worst starting-pitcher day a city's fans ever had :- )
Conversely, if the trade goes through, we may have just experienced THE best starting-pitcher day a city ever had. Nominations accepted.
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Am looking forward to seeing how they'd react if the M's landed Bay or Gonzalez. Naaaaah. We're the genteel types. Hate to pile on...
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the arrival of the Big Unit really did change the franchise. There were other things happening at that time, but he was kind of the biggest single step we'd taken towards relevance. We've been a better team ever since acquiring him, and he's got to receive at least part of the credit for that...
Can a negative event *actually* have a lasting impact on a franchise? I know that on-field events can have devastating impacts on the fan-base, and how they identify themselves (One worm-burner under the 1B glove into RF, for example), but can something like this really have a lasting negative impact on the way a franchise, and its fans, behaves for a long period of time?
The M's lost their Big Three in A-Rod, Griffey and RJ, and I'm not so sure it had a negative impact. 116 wins in 2001 certainly played a huge part in that, but the team didn't seem to break. I'm just trying to come up with examples of a departing player signalling a Dark Age for a franchise. I'm probably just too tired to come up with one right now.
were operating under a very different administration. The reason that they couldn't accomplish much was because of the disorganization around them...
Apples-to-Apples, give those three guys to Pat Gillick and see what happens...
But yeah. Lackey's departure doesn't necessarily doom the Angels. It's a bitter pill, but one player leaving doesn't have to be a pivot point.
1. Bids up on Bay, provoking the BoSox brain trust to go Lackey-Cammy (cool that Epstein-James had identified Cammy as the cheaper fallback, too) -- even if the Mets end up with Bay, that's a win (in that if they went with Bay and a cheaper pitcher, it would not have hurt the Angels)
2. Not only grabs Lee out of thin air, but does it by becoming the third player that denies Halladay to LAAA!
3. This after already snatching their versatile, althetic, top-of-the-order guy.
He's playing the AL West like it's Cowboys-Giants-Eagles-Skins where you don't just gotta win, you gotta knock the other guys down while you're at it.
Query: Z is older than Bill Bavasi and Jim Bowden, who both got two shots before Z got his first. Kevin Towers, a grizzled vet but also younger, says Z was his mentor way back when he was first starting out.
Doc, your point about dealmaking being about more than just knowing the value of what you got, but also how to get the other guy to give you the deal, is spot on. Z "gets it." How come Chuck Armstrong was the first to give this guy a shot 20-some years later? That's a real puzzle to me.
I would really like to know if Zduriencik's chess is that super-refined, that while adding Lee he intentionally messed up the Angels' bid for Halladay.
Remember a few years ago, when the Boston-New York rivalry got so that they were getting stuck with waiver claims trying to mess the other up? ;- )