If he was a politician...

Rob Neyer's opponents would be using today's blogging output against him in attack ads by now!

Not surprisingly, Rob blogged quite a bit about the Santana trade today (sadly, all links take you behind the Iron Curtain... sorry the Insider fence).

In his first post today, Rob said:

I like what Baron Von Awesome said about the (pending) trade sending Johan Santana to the Mets for a quartet of prospects ...

"The Twins just nailed their own coffin shut today. They're doomed to irrelevance for the next five years, at least. This is the worst baseball trade I've seen since... I don't know. Kearns and Lopez for a bunch of relievers, I guess, but even then, Kearns and Lopez turned out not to be much to worry about. The Astros trading Dan Wheeler for Ty Wigginton and then releasing Morgan Ensberg comes to mind, but there wasn't nearly as much at stake; the Astros were already doomed to suck for the rest of the decade.

This trade is horrible."

I agree.

So just to summarize... the trade is horrible, Rob agrees - seems fair, I happen to agree as well!

So it was a bit surprising to read later in the day...

Don't be too quick to judge Twins

Didn't we do the judging already?

If I had waited a day

So it only needed one more click of the refresh button - Johan Santana appears to be on his way out of the AL, with the Mets winning an elongated battle for his services.

Considering the initial reports were that the Mets had no chance unless they included Jose Reyes, it seems that the Mets have gotten Santana for a steal - four prospects headed by Carlos Gomez and Deolis Guerra - all of whom feature highly on John Sickels' listing of the Mets prospects, but none of whom fall into the surefire 'A' rating.

On the surface this seems like an insane trade by the Twins - in order (if the Twins had actually been committed to the asylum and made me GM instead of Bill Smith) I would have taken the Yankees package headed by Phil Hughes, the Red Sox package headed by Ellsbury, the Red Sox package headed by Jon Lester, then the Mets package - but then we don't really know if any of these packages were ever truly on the table, and we certainly don't know whether any of them were on the table today.

But as a Twins fan, I would have to be thinking - this is all you could get for the best pitcher in baseball - really?

From this Sox fans perspective, this really is the best of all worlds - Santana is no longer in the AL, he is most definitely not heading to the Bronx - but he does get to pitch in NY (so I will get more chances to watch him), and the NY media will tweak the Yankees every time Santana has a great game and Phil Hughes has a stinker (not that I actually expect that to happen too often - the stinker part anyway).

And equally, while I am sure that the Mets are very happy to have Santana in their rotation - the Mets rotation before this trade was a heck of a lot of question marks, now it is one true ace and a lot of question marks. I am sure I am under-rating Pedro, Perez, Maine and Hernandez, but if Santana does push the Mets into the World Series, I am not sure that I worry facing that rotation (again, not to under-estimate the impact Santana has, clearly I fear the rotation more than I did yesterday).

A Power Outage

So if the heart of the Red Sox order was on strike, what on earth has happened to the pens behind this blog?

And clicking on the links in our UK Baseball Links, we are not alone - what has happened to British baseball blogging?

Well Neil M has a good excuse - his work in the written world is being done on a far bigger scale... me - not so much. I will get back to writing, although it may stray from the Red Sox and Yankees at times.

How can I not have written up the 20,000 words that I have shared in various IM sessions and blog comment boxes on the Texas Con Man? How can I not have written up the 50,000,000 refresh buttons that I have hit searching for news on Johan's trade... to anywhere in the world outside Minnesota? How can I not have written about the 3,400 hours I have spent in the Virtual Waiting Room, wondering why tickets that the Red Sox supposedly haven't put on sale yet (those wonderful Green Monster seats) are available for every game on StubHub... and wondering why at the end of those hours I still don't have any Red Sox tickets?

So I will get back to this soon - first steps first, if there are any British baseball blogs out there that I should be reading, and that we can link to the on the right hand side, please let me know!