First week of December, baseball heads to Nashville for the annual winter meetings, and can't you already hear the Salvation Army bells ringing as we look to help the neediest this holiday season?
Such as, the New York Yankees.
No, really.
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| Johan Santana will command a contract bigger than the $126 million Barry Zito got from the Giants. (Getty Images) |
"We need a No. 1," Posada said upon re-signing, speaking specifically of Minnesota ace Johan Santana and the Twins' ongoing efforts to deal him. "It's a need in October. No question about it."
Later, Posada said, "I would love to have him."
Entertaining, isn't it, how there are strict tampering rules preventing executives from publicly poaching another club's players, yet it's open season for the players themselves to recruit to their hearts' content?
Meanwhile, farther down the AL East's yellow brick road -- forget, for a moment, the poor slobs in Minnesota and Florida, who can't (or won't) come up with the dough to keep Santana and third baseman Miguel Cabrera -- Baltimore is on its way to Nashville in a broken-down clunker.
An October need? How about, from the Orioles' perspective, just being able to fill some needs from April through September? It's now 10 consecutive losing seasons and counting for the Birds of Peter Angelos, though what makes this winter different is that new president Andy MacPhail is in charge in Baltimore, he's reputed to have full autonomy from Angelos to run the club and he's arriving ready to move.
"I'm going to try," MacPhail says. "You know how it is, the dominoes start to fall one way and things happen after that."
MacPhail will arrive at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel with at least two desirable chips that will stoke trade talks: shortstop Miguel Tejada and lefty starter Erik Bedard.
He's in the right place at the right time for a couple of reasons. Thanks to one of the weakest free-agent classes in memory, the trade market is simmering. And after years of inept and paralyzing management, the Orioles, thanks to the respect Angelos has for MacPhail, might at last do something.
"It's tougher," MacPhail says of the realities of his job as compared to what he expected to get into in Baltimore. "To the degree that I understood it intellectually, I didn't appreciate how good a division it really is. There's Boston and New York, but Toronto's really good and Tampa Bay is coming on."
