Kelenic, Dunn and Bautista...what else could that package have bought for players on the market...?
Power, Patience, Speed -- He has the holy trinity of what you would want to see from a prospect offensively. Plus he has tremendous value defensively.
If he plays full season ball next season, these tools will be on full display - accumulating stats and getting positive scout write ups - He could easily be a top 30 prospect in baseball.
The way BVW and Dipoto trade there's at least a 25% chance that Kelenic ends up back here at some point.
Let's get Haniger back too!
Not that anyone asked or cares, but one thing that I keep coming back to with this Cano/Diaz deal is that I'm genuinely curious what the deal would or could have looked like if the Mets didn't have those bad contracts on the books that they had to dump. Whatever you think of Bruce and Swarzak as players, BVW feeling like he "had to" or even "should" get rid of their contracts led to the dealing of nice young talent. The Cano/Diaz deal is BVW's to own for sure, but he couldn't have done it unless the Mets hadn't just saddled the club with these two bad contracts.
In other words, do the Mets even trade for Cano/Diaz if they don't have Bruce/Swarzak's bad money on the books? How would they even pull it off?
I argued this on the twittah when people were freaking on the young talent too.
If BVW called up DiPoto and said "We will take on Cano, and his whole contract, if you give us Diaz. Nothing coming back" - do you think DiPoto does it? I don't.
I know that creates a real wonky valuation on Kelenic, but I think there gets to be a point of diminishing returns on "saving payroll." Their payroll isn't going to be 0 this year, despite not even pretending to try to win.
Brodie, for the record, claims that DiPoto initially refused to include Diaz and once Diaz got on the table, it had to be Kelenic involved from our side. Does Brodie do Kelenic for Diaz straight up? Probably not, is my guess.
So I think your hypothesis is correct. For this to really work, a lot of things had to be in place and the motivations had to be just right. I know most look at Cano as a net negative here, but I really believe they think he is an "add" in their plan.
Well ... Hopefully the next GM just allows the Cano contract run out instead of saddling us with another long term bad contract with a player past his prime.
Odds are they would have just gotten Seattle to kick in a little more money, although it wouldn't have quite been the equivalent value of Bruce and Swarzak's deals since in theory the M's could flip Bruce and Swarzak along the way too so they'd prefer that to just adding another $30 million in retained salary onto Cano's deal.
To be fair, Emaus was a JP guy.
Did someone say Jared Banner?
They were never just benching Frazier.
Still Mickey mentioned both SS, 1B and corner OF for McNeil. They've dropped Zobrist comps this week as to how they'll use him.
I'll bet McNeil winds up with 400 ABs this year. And a strong bench is something we haven't had since....uh ever?
And a week ago, I think it was BVW, mentioned a similar potential role for TDA.
Saying TDA could get a look as a 3B/1B/C and possibly corner OF.