No looking back for A's GM Beane after breaking up 'Big Three'
The splitting of Oakland's Big Three -- willingly -- once would have been as unimaginable as the breakup of Ma Bell. But we know how that one ended.
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| Mark Mulder is due for a big salary increase following the '06 season, making him expendable. (Getty Images) |
Reduced to the Big One.
"Barry Zito will not be traded," Athletics general manager Billy Beane said unequivocally after a Nixonian Saturday Night Massacre, and it was a statement that probably needed to be made, too, because Baltimore zeroed in on Zito for a time during the winter meetings last weekend as the Oakland Traveling Lemonade Stand was up and purring.
As it is, the Athletics sent left-hander Mark Mulder to St. Louis on Saturday in a shocking encore to their shipping of Tim Hudson to Atlanta on Thursday.
The moves were precipitated by the emergence of Rich Harden last summer and with Beane's reading of the pitching market this winter and subsequent determination to strike preemptively before his marquee players commanded their own exorbitant prices.
"We evaluated where we were as a franchise and where we were headed, and it was probably riskier to not do anything," Beane said during a conference call with reporters Saturday night.
The entire scene in Oakland over the past three days is reminiscent of when the A's attempted to sell Vida Blue, Rollie Fingers and outfielder Joe Rudi as expensive parts in the mid-1970s before then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn stepped in and stopped the auction in the best interests of the game.
Difference now is, the shrewd Beane is no Charles O. Finley (Oakland's owner in the mid-1970s) and these moves aren't some sort of expensive bake sale -- they are a calculated attempt to keep the talent flowing into the organization despite the fact that the money isn't (and never has been).
While few in the industry ever expected Beane to move as dramatically as this, his trade talks at the winter meetings in Anaheim last weekend were a pretty good clue. Most focused on Hudson and, while nobody realized at the time just how close Beane was to cashing out the Big Three, a major-league executive with knowledge of Oakland's thinking said the A's plan was to "start with Harden and work backwards."
The Athletics are working so far backwards that their next move might be to hire a day-care center. The Hudson and Mulder trades have made their staff significantly younger -- and, in baseball's current climate, much more inexpensive.
The six players reaped for Hudson and Mulder (right-handed starter Danny Haren, righty reliever Kiko Calero and left-handed-hitting catching prospect Daric Barton from St. Louis; outfielder Charles Thomas and pitchers Juan Cruz and Danny Meyer from Atlanta) all have fewer than three years of major-league service time -- meaning none of them are eligible for salary arbitration in 2005.
And all except Barton, a 19-year-old big-swinging catcher whose path to the majors in St. Louis was blocked by Yadier Molina, are projected for the A's major-league roster next summer.
