ALL IN

Oakland knows that dominate starting pitching wins playoff games.

It made another huge trade to acquire an ace.

The  A’s on acquired Boston Red Sox starter Jon Lester, the playoff-tough left-hander who can be a free agent at season’s end, in an all-in effort to win the AL West and make a deep October run, baseball sources told Yahoo Sports.

The addition of Lester comes 26 days after the A’s acquired ace right-hander Jeff Samardzija of the Cubs, and so they have remade the top of their rotation. They already had Sonny Gray and Scott Kazmir.

The agreed-upon trade will send Lester and outfielder Jonny Gomes to the A’s. In return, the Red Sox, embarking on their second roster makeover in two years, receive outfielder Yoenis Cespedes  and, critically, a competitive balance pick in the 2015 draft. Cespedes, 28, can become a free agent after the 2015 season. In his third major league season, Cespedes is batting .256 with 17 home runs and 67 RBI.

This deal shows the trigger of the A's. Jason Hammel, also acquired from the Cubs, has struggled in Oakland, going 0-4 with a plus 5 ERA and plus 2 WHIP. It appears Hammel is destined for bullpen duty or a DL stint to regain his form.

Boston came away with a fabulous return for Lester, who was going on the free agent market at the end of the year, probably looking towards a Kershaw megadeal.  The Red Sox get a legitimate starting outfielder with power in Cespedes.

And he is a critical point when looking at the Cubs trade with Oakland. It is now perfectly clear that the Cubs are purely focused on obtaining and stockpiling prospects than known major league talent. If the Cubs received Cespedes in the Samardzija-Hammel deal as well as a 2015 draft pick and either Addison Russell or Billy McKinney, it would have been a better deal since Cespedes instantly becomes the best outfielder on the major league roster by a mile. Cespesdes bat gives instant protection to both Rizzo and Castro in the line up. 

As Oakland is clearly "all in" for this season, it is also clear that the Cubs have folded their hand for 2014 by continuing acquiring prospects and not major league players. The danger is that the Cubs are hoping that these prospects, when the cards are dealt with the their major league promotions, will turn out to be aces.

There is just another concern about how the Cubs make trades. After the Lester trade, the Twins have acquired leftyTommy Milone from the A’s in exchange for outfielder and ex-Cub Sam Fuld. 


Milone lost his rotation spot with the Athletics earlier this month when the team acquired Samardzija and Hammel and any hope of him regaining that spot likely faded with Oakland’s morning acquisition of Lester.  The 27-year-old Milone had asked to be traded somewhere that he had a chance to start, and Minnesota certainly fits that bill.

Milone had pitched to a solid 3.55 ERA with 5.7 K/9, 2.4 BB/9 and a 38.4 percent fly-ball rate in 96 1/3 innings this season. He owns a 3.84 ERA with 6.5 K/9, 2.0 BB/9 and 36.8 percent ground-ball rate in 468 2/3 innings for the Nationals and Athletics. He is eligible for arbitration for the first time this off season and can be controlled through the 2017 campaign. 

And since Oakland has shown all its trade cards that would or should have been apparent when the Cubs were selling their pitchers, the Cubs passed on another major league ready arm in Millone, who fits a pressing need for Chicago: starting pitching. A controllable pitcher with a solid ERA and a good ground ball rate would be a good fit in Wrigley. It is clear the Cubs could have given Oakland a Fuld type outfielder (pick anyone: Sweeney, Schierholtz, Coghlan, Riggiano or Lake) to pick up Millone or someone like him. This another piece of evidence that the Cubs are holding back on rebuilding the major league roster with major league experience for the long haul.
 

Statistics and expectations are the trading blocks of prospects. But how they actually play under the pressure of ML games is another thing. Bill Madlock was on the radio and he said in his day the only stats that mattered were wins for pitchers and hits for hitters. He knows about the new sabermetrics and new stats like OBP, but he remarked that OBP is meaningless if you are station to station runner versus a person like Rickey Henderson who could turn a walk into a triple. The object of the game is to score more runs than one's opponent, not to have a better sabermetric spreadsheet.

BOSTON BEANS

The only way to stumble upon the Cubs game is to flip through Storm Terror Watch channels during the thunderstorms. Jake Arrieta was pitching a no-hitter in the sixth. He had a repeating, sweeping slider into the corner of the zone like a sniper using a semi-automatic.

Arrieta set a career high in pitches before he gave up his first hit in the 8th. He was pulled, and the Cubs hung on for a 2-0 victory over Boston. Note to Samardzija: this is how one pitches he way out of Chicago.

Besides the actual drama of the no-hitter in progress, what I took away from the game was the panoramic shots of Fenway Park. Then it hit me.

Everyone knows about the Green Monster. The Red Sox added rows of seats on top of it. The Cubs created their own mini-Green Monster in the RF corner, complete with rows of terraced seats.

Down the Fenway right field corner, there is a large old fashion, scripted Budweiser sign. The Cubs original renovation plans had a large scripted sign just like this one to be placed in the middle of the RF outfield.

Fenway has two electronic scoreboards: one in straight away center field and one in left-center, just to the right of the Green Monster. The Cubs have to keep the landmarked center field scoreboard at Wrigley, but ownership wants to put in a large video scoreboard in left field.

There are also other advertising signs on the upper decks at Fenway. The Cubs now want to squeeze in a total of seven (7) outfield signs, including it is believed two (2) electronic video boards.

Ricketts brought in Boston's former general manager, Theo Epstein, to run the baseball operations. Epstein had been the GM when Boston lifted its curse and won two championships. But Epstein was let go in a power scrape with the team president and ownership over credit for their franchise's success.

When adding up all of these elements last night, I came to the conclusion that Ricketts did not buy the Cubs, he was in a personal delusion, thinking that he was really trying to buy the Red Sox. By trying to transform Wrigley Field into Fenway Park, Ricketts thinks he will be the successful championship Red Sox owner - - - the model for all other league owners. But doing major cosmetic surgery on Wrigley Field will not transform the Cubs into a championship team. The Red Sox spent hundreds of millions of dollars to create winning teams. The Cubs continue to spend down their payroll like an elderly nursing home patient trying to qualify for public aid assistance. The Cubs actual payroll for actual players on their roster is falling to the $60 million level. Next year, dead money deals will fall away putting the payroll toward $31 million. This is opposite of the championship style Red Sox. Instead, the Chicago Beancounters are in charge of the baseball operations, turning it into a small market franchise selling hopes and dreams.

Perhaps this is why Epstein said he would stay with the Cubs as long as the owners wanted him. It left him an out not to extend his own contract term. Maybe he thought that the deep pocket Ricketts would run the Cubs like his former bosses did in Boston: spend to win. But when confronted with a business operation run by Crane Kenney and the stumbling grand real estate plans of Tommy Boy, there was no money for Theo. So what could he do? His only alternative to get talent for the team is through the minor league system. The original two year plan has crawled past the four year plan and is heading toward the ten year plan. Successful teams cannot win just by home grown talent because the odds of consistently finding and developing impact ball players is nearly impossible. So all Theo has is his repeated phrase that they have a plan, a process but no time table for success.

So Ricketts may have purchased his dream Red Sox franchise, but little did we realize that it was the 1906 Red Sox.