And Beane should be commended, he made what people considered a “home run swing” on a trade, and still came away with an improvement.

Taylor will probably be better than CarGo, and Huston Street, who cares?

Hitters follow a more linear development curve and get hurt less. So to me, all else being equal, it makes more sense to delay hitters that extra year in AAA than it does with pitchers.

That said, I wish Cahill had stayed down last year. I wonder if they consciously wanted to keep Cahill and Anderson up together, as if having the two highly touted 21-year-olds in the rotation developing and dealing with major league life together would be somehow better than separating them.

I also agree that it wouldn’t have happened if they had some semblance of decent alternatives last year. E-Gon doesn’t qualify.

But it would’ve been hard to predict beforehand how terrible O-Cab ended up being in his time with Oakland, both offensively and defensively. And yet still, another team found him useful and worth acquiring. To me, this illustrates the benefit of acquiring surplus players at scarce positions – SS and CF.

If the A’s had signed Cust and he had tanked in 2010, he would’ve been utterly worthless to all 30 teams. No team would’ve taken on any of his salary or traded even a “C” prospect for him if he were having a poor 2010 season.

But the Cabrera experiment, even as poorly as it ended, illustrates that the circumstances are different with a player who plays a plus defensive position that’s scarce on the open market. Even if Crisp underperforms, as Cabrera did, he or Rajai Davis will still be very tradeable chips, simply of the liklihood that a contender’s CFer goes down with an injury and the A’s have depth to part with one.

Didn’t the A’s give up a second round pick for signing Cabrera, and then send $500K along with him to the Twins for a C prospect? So they spent $2.75MM in salary, an extra $500K to move him, and a second round pick for half a season of Orlando Cabrera and a C prospect?

Someone with a much better idea of the value of a second round pick could say if that was a good move or not, but on the surface it doesn’t seem like a great one to me by any stretch.

Nice thought. If a player’s peak age is something like 27 to 31, why bring him up at 22? Why not let them prove they can dominate AAA and bring them up at 25 and give them 2 years to “learn the league” before they peak at 27?

“I always chuckle when I hear people suggest that teams are going to sign a free agent that no one really wants”

If nobody wants Mr. Crisp, why don’t the A’s sign him for the league minimum?

“The same people not signing Coco Crisp right now will still be running teams in July. ”

Are these same people going to have the same center fielders in July?

I see Crisp-Davis-Sweeney vs RHP and Hairston-Davis-Crisp vs LHP in 2010. Perhaps a Hairston trade to open up some time for Taylor. Davis for Callaspo might happen too. In that case both Sweeney or Crisp could slide back into CF.

Oakland really has so many tradeable players right now:

-Mark Ellis: About to lose his job to Cardenas. In a contract year.
-Travis Buck: Complaining about PT, maybe deserves a shot elsewhere before he’s too old.
-Daric Barton: Has too many giants behind him. 1B is where the big guys who hit HR play, and he hasnt done enough to show he’s locked 1B down.
-Aaron Cunningham: Just another solid prospect stuck behind too many ones with higher ceilings.
-Raj Davis: Flip him while he’s hot?
-Scott Hairston: Move him back to the NL where he belongs? Or at least move him so he’s not blocking Taylor anymore.

Although I don’t think trying to contend in ’09 made any sense whatsoever, and thus I think rushing Anderson and Cahill up was stupid.