I like Marc a lot. He has a blog which lets us get a feel for him as a person, and is perfect for covering the ongoing, operatic baseball season. Today, he wrote that even with the Winter Meetings over, the Reds are still looking for pitching. Looking, but maybe not finding (my note).
First, he talks about how the Reds have positioned themselves to go after pitching.
By trading Sean Casey to Pittsburgh for Williams, they freed up about $5 million in spending money that could help them chase a free agent. By acquiring utilityman Tony Womack on Thursday, the Reds have given themselves flexibility to deal another regular position player (pick one: Austin Kearns, Wily Mo Pena or Ryan Freel) for a pitcher.
He then notes that this amount of $ is unlikely to buy much when Kenny Rogers just got $16M. Kenny Rogers. He concludes somewhat inconclusively.
The timetable for checking all these items off the list isn't prohibitively tight, so the Reds should be able to take a deep breath after the wall-to-wall scheduling of the winter meetings and figure out what comes next.And there will be something.
We'll see. Reds fans are feeling badly burned by the Milton and Ortiz signings, and you have to really watch who you invest $$ in for more than one year.
Where is the brain? That's what I want to know. Who's out tracking down the groundball pitcher who's undervalued but who would thrive in our ballpark.
Finally, I have long advocated a model of average pitching and a great O. If the Reds trade Kearns or Pena, they're going for an above average pitching and good O model. That's fine, too. Little more margin for error.
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