When the Giants Come to Town, It's Bye-Bye Baby

07.29.2008
Agent Ned

For those unfamiliar with the term, “Agent Ned” is Giant fanspeak for Ned Colletti, who left Brian Sabean’s side to become Dodger GM a couple years ago. Just like Ramiro Mendoza was considered the “embedded Yankee” when he set aside his pinstripes to join the Red Sox in an ill-fated two year stint, we hope Ned is pulling double-agent duty with moves such as the Andruw Jones, Jason Schmidt and Juan Pierre signings and the dubious Casey Blake trade. He also failed to trade for C.C. Sabathia when, by certain accounts, he was there for the taking.

Colletti almost blew his cover by trading prospect Travis Denker to the Giants for Mark Sweeney last summer. In the midst of a 6–for-65 season, Sweeney has helped divert suspicion for the time being with his key pinch-hit double last night off Kevin Correia. Whew. That was a close one. Agent Ned must be allowed to finish the job. He is under orders from High Command to trade Matt Kemp for Jack Wilson just before the deadline, sign Blake to a contract extension this winter and trade 3B prospect Andy LaRoche, and turn Clayton Kershaw into a long reliever.

Of course, whatever he does cannot and will not match the magnitude of the Barry Zito contract, the blame for which, now that Peter Magowan is retiring, I’d love to lay on Magowan’s doorstep. Hmmm… P-Mags, Embedded Dodger?

* Good news for the Giants: Will Carroll reports the Rockies aren’t very interested in trading lefty reliever Brian Fuentes. That makes Jack Taschner a little more attractive. He might be the Giants’ best trade chip the next few days.



Also on the Network:



[July 29, 2008 5:45 PM]  |  link  |  reply
obsessivegiantscompulsive said

I was going to write on this on my blog, but since you brought him up, I thought I would mention here first.

Read this article: http://www.latimes.com/sports/baseball/mlb/dodgers/la-sp-simers25-2008jun25,0,6692891.column

The part I want to quote is this, about how deals are done in LA: "Some of those are minor league deals and I had nothing to do with them," Colletti protests when I mention his trading track record, and while I find it odd the Dodgers' GM doesn't have final approval of all deals, he adds, "The player development people made five or six of those."

The world, of course, revolves around the Giants, so how this pertains to the Giants is that this is one of the things Colletti used to extoll about the Giants, just before he joined the Axis of Evil, is that Sabean would allow his underlings to go and do a variety of duties, including duties that normally you would think a GM would/should be doing.

I think this is another piece of evidence supporting my assertion that it was Colletti who probably did the Pierzynski trade. Magawan long ago disavowed the trade, saying that he would have killed the deal if it had been brought to his attention. You would think that Sabean would know when to bring something to Magowan's attention or not; you wouldn't think that one of his underlings would.

And on the face of it, just from a talent basis, it was a steal, BP said as much in their annual, as relievers are fungible and the prospects were suspects, and for that you get an All-Star young catcher you control for another three years. That's a move a desk-bound fantasy baseball administrator like Ned would do, not a baseball trained scout like Sabean who knows the talents and personalities about most of the players in the majors, because he has watched most of them traverse from H.S. to maybe college to the lower minors, then upper minors, and finally the majors. He would have known from multiple reports from scouts that A.J. was a horse's behind and difficult to deal with, but Happy Ned didn't have that knowledge. He just saw "All-Star Catcher" and drooled.

And then to compound the problem, Ned, in the job he was suppose to do, horribly underbids A.J. in arbitration, all the media reports had the figure at high $2M to $3M, so even I knew that: Giants offer $2.25M so the arbitrator, had to go with the more fair one, A.J.'s $3.5M demand.

Of course, that was the one season that the Giants didn't really have much money in their budget for players, forcing them to do the Tucker draft pick move to save money, so not only was the trade made, but that took up a large portion of the money that was left in the budget, and then took up more because of his stupid mistake with the offer.

If people have evidence contrary to this, I would love to see it, but I really think this makes sense to me; and if someone can support it, all the better, I would really love to see that.