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to cover weakness.
While I agree that now is not the time to be giving up on the season.  I also agree with you (as you wrote in the What to do at Catcher piece) that we can NOT go into a serious pennet fight with three pitchers in the bottome of our rotation.
Our strength right now is starting picthing.  We actually have seven (7) competent big league pitchers.  Felix, Bedard, Morrow, Wash, Olson, Vargas, and RRS.  If you want to throw Jaku in there then we have 8.  So the question isn;t, should we deal one of our aces and therfore forfiet the pennet race, it is does the improvement else where give us more than the drop from Wash to Vargas?
Unless I was BLOWN away Felix, Morrow and Bedard are untouchable, that is our playoff big three, but Washburn is not only a sel HIGH candidate, but he is gone next, he has a lot of volitility, and he, IMHO, is not leaps and bounds better than Vargas, Olson or RRS.  Better yes, but not many wins better.  So I would be looking around for the biggest brights shortstop that could be had for Washburn plus.  For instance I would be calling Tampa bay to see if they want a proven Yankee killer (washburn) a stud up and coming power hitting catcher (Clement) and a young CFer (Saunders) for Reid Brignac, a lefthanded, slick fielding SS would could slide into our starting short stop role, move Lopez to third (until Beltre comes back) and Yuni goes in at 2nd.  I beleive that Yuni and Lopez would be at least average defensivly at 3rd and 2nd, and Reid is supposedly pretty good at short with offensive upside.
Btw, with the aquisision of Langerhans and the soon to be very quick arrival of Ackley (no later than 2011 would be might guess, probably late next year), and Gutz and Ichiro handling center and right for the next couple oif years Saunders is totally expendable.
So would Wash+Clement+Saunders get Brignac?  Am I to ohigh on Reid and overpaying?  Or is there another SS we should be targeting?