I mean ridiculously, fabulously amazing. The Phillies had Lee in house, and traded him to us in order to acquire Roy Halladay. No one will convince me that Brandon Morrow wasn't used to pry Halladay away. There is ZERO other reason for the Phillies to take the junk that we gave them and skip what would obviously have been far superior offers from other teams.
Morrow was our biggest trading chip, and we flipped him.
So:
Morrow+Gillies+Aumont+JCR = Cliff Lee + League + Chavez to us and the final major piece for Philly to get Halladay.
Then Lee turns into Smoak+Lueke+Beavan+Lawson 3 months into the season.
And now Lee is back where he wanted to be all the time, Philly. The fence-mender there did an outstanding job, and the Phillies have to be favorites.
It's great. Lee came to us to turn our best pitching prospect into our next MOTO hitter and give us something pretty to distract us from the first dismal half of the season in the meantime.
And then the clock struck midnight and Lee went back to Philly, leaving the Rangers with a couple of missing prospects and an AL Pennant to assuage the pain.
All we need now is for Smoak to be as good as we think he can be. I would trade a top-level pitching arm like Morrow for a fully-producing Smoak any day. The fact that we got back a 30 HR LF, two closers and the rest in addition just speaks volumes about Trader Jack's skills there.
And his willingness to bet that he could get back more than he gave up.
The Phillies...man, they just spent like wildmen trying to get a couple more titles on the shelf with this current all-star roster.
I hope sometime in the near future we've assembled talent like they have up and down the roster. At least they were kind enough to help us get started on that path.
Thanks to them and the Rangers, I guess. And the Mets, for helping us with our new SS and our CFer thanks to other trade pieces.
It's a group effort to turn this sorry team around.
~G
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