You ever decide you're going to love a movie before you even see it? I did that with Clive Owen's "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead." Decided I would love it. For three years I believed this lie, that it was a good movie, when it's a fried turd.
Richard Justice has already decided to hate this trade:
If Ed Wade ends up trading Roy Oswalt for a bunch of older prospects, he will have made a bad deal. Plenty of names are floating around, so let's take a deep breath and see how it plays out.
And then there's the money. Wade apparently agreed to pay at least $10 million of the remaining $23 million on Oswalt's contract. I don't get it. It smells like a salary dump with the baseball team getting only slightly better.
Maybe Oswalt will save Wade from himself and veto the deal. But there's no way to know if this is a good deal. Prospects are just that. Would the Astros be better to wait for the off-season and try to market him again? They decided they were going to trade Oswalt now, and by God, they were going to trade him.
The Astros will be down to about $30 million in 2011 salary commitments once Lance Berkman is off the books. So things could work out.
I'm not sure what more Justice wants. There was one team interested, because the trade with the Cardinals was never going to work, and the Dodgers put the "funk" in dysfunction. It's hard to get leverage when teams keep dropping out. Did the Astros put themselves in that place? Maybe, probably. But did you really think that, once the Phillies put their hat in the ring, it wasn't going to work out exactly as it has so far?
Nothing that happens now will satisfy Justice, but what is he pissed about? That the Phillies traded all their good players for Roy Halladay and Cliff Lee, and then let Cliff Lee walk? Get in line with all of Philadelphia. But it's hard to be pissed about how the negotiation is going when it comes down to "Trade this guy to me, or I walk away." So let's reserve judgment on this deal until it's finalized, yes?
We didn't come out here to play tiddlywinks, son.
-Hal Smith
