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My problems with this deal:
1) Both Morse and Morales are on 1-year deals. Perhaps we can re-sign Morse, but it would likely be to play 1B. If not, we traded 3 years of a contributor for 1. At least Vargas/Morales was a 1-for-1 deal that dealt from a position of strength to fill a position of weakness.
2) Jesus Montero needs to play 1B if we're gonna keep him. The writing's on the wall: Zunino is gonna catch by 2014, and probably by June 2013. We don't like Montero behind the plate, even though HE much prefers it. We could DH Montero, but he seems to want to play the field, which makes him a 1B/30-games-C type.
3) Just gave up our most productive LH hitter and best OBP guy, who also doesn't seem to suffer when DHing, for a RH masher who abhors DHing and doesn't walk. We could have traded minor league pieces and kept Jaso's 2-3 WAR while still adding Morse's to the mix.
4) This park hates right-handers. Moving the wall should fix that...right? Because right now we have Morse, Montero and Zunino all lined up as key bats. If the park still does what the park usually does in April and May to right-handers, we'll be 10 games out of first by Memorial Day - again. Jaso could have gotten his ABs easily on this team around some of these righties. Now we'll need someone else to do that (Raul, I guess).
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Reasons it could work out fine:
1) the one-year deal thing will ALLOW us to move Montero to 1B if we need to.
2) Mike Morse does not have platoon splits, nor Home/Road, nor did he suffer in Safeco when he was here. He's posted an OPS well over .800 in ALL those scenarios. He's the safest bet for a RH hitter we've seen in a while.
3) we kept all our trade bait for a huge future deal instead of spending some significant minor league capital here. Franklin, Maurer and the bullpenners all remain to back up our monster arms and slugging catcher.
4) OBP is only really useful if someone is around to drive in runs. Last year Jaso's ~.400 OBP only led him to cross the plate 41 times, and he did 10 of those himself. With Morse + Morales, and improvement from the kids, the hope is that we don't have our normal blizzard of random singles that net 1 run in a game that Felix loses in the 9th.
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I'm less annoyed than I was yesterday. We now have some sort of legit MOTO. Ackley, Seager, Morales, Morse, Saunders and Montero sounds pretty good for a top-6. If the Ms surprise me and bring Franklin up for his lefty awesomeness, then a pair of semi-platoons in Franklin/Ryan and Wells/Ibanez makes the back of the lineup more interesting as well. We'll see how much Guti plays, but that's a better lineup than we've seen in a while.
And Zunino should be knocking on the door soon, maybe Posey-style if we're reeeeeally lucky.
I'm still not sold that the Ms are gonna pull out the whuppin' stick with Zunino, Hultzen, Paxton etc all ready to go out of Spring Training (or in May, if we're worried about free agency). In fact, with this lineup it looks like they're trying to push Zunino back to save Super Two status, as he'd only really be able to come up if we fall out of it and trade Morse at the deadline (or there's an injury).
But I'm definitely intrigued to see how all these pieces fit together. It's about time to find some lightning and charge up this Frankenstein's monster.
~G