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I have not weighed in on the Jaso for Morse trade till now but I have watched the team and bloggers underestimate Jaso's value by saying he was just a "role player" or "part time player." He may have been a role player but he played a role we could find no one else to do since who? John Olerud?
How long have we been wanting lefty bats that could play well at Safeco? Sure we have had many lefty bats but most have not been able to figure out Safeco better than most righties, or could not stay healthy (Branyan). Jaso had a .877 OPS at Safeco and a .927 OPS against right handers. His OBP, which is the more important component of OPS, in those situations was .408 and .419 respectively. And he did this while providing the capability to play catcher allowing us to plug in some one else at DH if Wedge would choose to do so. Despite the hype, Montero has not yet proven that he is anything but a platoon player. He has also not proven that he is any better at catching than Jaso.
LL showed how Jaso was quite competent against left handers in the minors. Beane will be laughing all the way to the post season if he turns out to be a competent catcher with a plus bat in his line up. Sure Zunino is on his way but if I were Eric Wedge I would have found a way to keep Jaso in the line up every game against right handed pitchers for the net three years.
Judging by what Oakland gave up, we could have traded with the Nats leaving out Oakland by giving up a comparable package of minor leaguers. That would also have played into the stars and scrubs philosophy without making a division rival better. Now we have a player instead who previously was caught using PED's (Morse).
And don't forget in your equation that we are also dumping Shawn Kelley to make room for Saunders. Bill James projects Kelley to have the best ERA of all our relievers.
Frankly I am a bit tired of Wedge giving veterans months of playing time to prove that they can no longer play, while classifying some younger less proven players based on a small sample size (Jaso, Kelley, Wells, etc.) Jack Z seems to go with Wedge's judgements to much in dumping players.
Despite all the seeming negativity I mostly like Jack Z's off season. Bringing Back Iwakuma for a reasonable price was big. i like bringing back Perez as well. The host of one year deals tells the young players that if the work hard this year they can be a starter next year if not later in the year. I am happy we kept our minor leaguers and draft picks. But the loss of Jaso still stings.
I hope we do not dump any more of our depth before spring training. The chances of some one on our 25 man roster getting injured during spring training are pretty good. Keep Wells, Carp, and our pitching depth until the end of spring training if at all possible. All we will get if we trade them are Luke French,Chih-Hsien Chiang type players back.