Trades are beginning to go down

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Last night, the Cubs dealt Jeff Samardzija and Jason Hammel to the Oakland Athletics for highly touted minor-league prospect Addison Russell. The Cubs are entirely loaded, flush with top prospects and youth heading into the future.

One Cubs fan over at World Series Dreaming breaks it down this morning for us more eloquently than we could. It’s a great post. Read it.

The reactions that have been flying around FaceBook and Twitter have been quite amusing, and have flown across the entire spectrum from “Theo is an idiot” to “greatest trade ever made”. With this deal standing alone, I am not sure I can give either one of those comments any more merit than simply mentioning that they were made. This trade does not make Theo Epstein an idiot, and this is so far from the greatest trade ever made that I cannot imagine how this was said with a straight face.

For the ‘right now’ this trade immediately shifts the balance of power in the American League West heavily to the Athletics. So what do the Angels do to combat this?

They trade for a little pinch-runner and lefty bullpen help. On Campana (BBREF page here), one of our friends coached him one summer in college and wondered ‘how the Hell did this guy make it to the big leagues’ when it came up in conversation.

If you follow @Ken_Rosenthal, you can see that the trade market is really heating up all around baseball with the Blue Jays sizing up Martin Prado and the Cardinals are in the market for a bat.

You have to love this time of year when everyone is on the lookout for a hired gun and spare pieces are changing teams quicker than you can keep track of.