The News out of Pittsburgh is that the Pirates may be willing to give up Damaso Marte, and that the Red Sox are very interested. I’m not sure how much they really need another lefty specialist given that Okajima has been so outstanding and Javier Lopez has essentially become the one-out lefty. Of course, as we all learned last year, there is no such thing as too much pitching and one more reliable arm (am I the only one who thinks that Romero and Pinero were ok?) gives the other team one less out to beat you with.

Marte, however, isn’t necessarily a big upgrade over whoever you would be pulling out. He has a career 3.15 ERA, which is quite good, and is pitching especially well this year with only only 5 earned runs given up all year in 29 innings. The catch, however, is that he is locked up through next year and the Pirates aren’t just going to give him up for a bag of baseballs. This is a solid reliever and one of the reasons that they dealt Mike Gonzalez before this season started to the Braves. They are probably going to ask for a pitcher in return, who is major league-ready. This is probably means Kason Gabbard.

I’m all for trading Gabbard - it would definitely be a sell-high time to deal him right now, especially if Lester can fill the role of the 5th starter for the rest of the year. But I’m not sure if I like trading a young starter for an old (Marte is 32, and from the Dominican so he could easily be even older) relief pitcher.

Bottom line is the asking price is probably going to stop this one, even though Marte would be a great acquisition. Plus, last time we traded with the Pirates, we gave up an already two-time All Star in Freddie Sanchez for a pitcher who didn’t even make the playoff roster in Jeff Suppan.

Share:

Hide Sites

Stumble it!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 12:11 pm and is filed under General Postings, Trade Rumors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.