I’m thrilled with this trade. If you haven’t heard, my beloved Cardinals traded Mark Worrell and a PTBNL to the Padres for Khalil Greene, who looks exactly like Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. (Greene (w/ brand-spankin’ new photoshop job)| Spicoli. QEMFD.) I’m already thinking up Mr. Hand jokes to lay down all freakin’ season.
Greene has a reputation as an excellent defensive shortstop (although PMR, a defensive statistic that I find useful, didn’t like him in 2008 or 2007, to a lesser extent. I haven’t seen him play all that much, but I’ve liked him when the Cards play the Padres. He’s also got some sock in his bat—he hit 27 HR in 2007 while half his games in the league’s most HR-depressing stadium. Away from Petco, his career batting splits are .270/.318/.484, pretty damned good—although Busch III does suppress right handed batters to an extent. Last year was a very down year offensively for Greene and he still hit 10 balls out. The Cardinals haven’t had a double digit year for HR from the shortstop position since Renteria. He’s not as balanced of a hitter as Renteria was in his prime in the Lou, but he can hit the ball out like him.
I’m looking forward to seeing him gun to Pujols next year. If he can improve his walk rate a little bit, I think we’ll be greatly improved. Greene was the shortstop I thought would have fit us best: Furcal won’t be worth the contract he’ll eventually sign and Renteria’s career trajectory doesn’t look promising. I’m looking forward to seeing, at some point, a Khalil Greene-Tyler Greene double play turned next year.
(Temper that enthusiasm with a little Fungo, perhaps.)
To get Greene, we gave up Mark Worrell. Worrell’s a good pitcher with a funky delivery. He’s put up excellent peripherals throughout his minor league career. Added to the 40-man roster before the winter meetings last year, he made a few appearances for the Cardinals this year and didn’t have as much success as I expected he would—and I’m sure he expected better, too. Before last season, I thought he would have been a better pitcher for us than Ryan Franklin. That may have been a little bit of an exaggeration, but not much. He’ll do well for the Padres—they got a solid, major league-ready right-handed relief specialist. The Cardinals dealt a low chip from one of the few too-tall stacks of talent we have on the table. (The other being outfielders.) It would appear that Mark’s happy he’s part of this deal.
The PTBNL will be picked off a list of three players—two of them pitchers—some time around Spring Training. Players put on those lists are usually non-prospects—organizational filler types. Or Chris Lambert. As long as it’s not one of my favorite unheralded minor-leaguers (like Jameson Maj or Brian Broderick), I imagine this won’t be a big deal for anyone but that player and his family.
In unrelated news: there were 7,394,345 words written in game recaps by MLB.com beat writers over the past two seasons. The most common word, of course, is the, which occurred 467,078 times. Banana was written 10 times: six times in the plural, thrice in the singular, and once as banana-fueled. Pujols was written 1155 times. The most frequent personal name, aside from ambiguous terms like will, young, fielder, etc., was Ryan. The most frequent last name was Ramirez. The most common team name (aside from Sox, which refers to two teams) was the Cubs, at 4,177 uses. Going through the descending token frequency list, I had a… let’s call it a guffaw… when I noticed that wrong and hole occurred next to each other in frequency at 948 and 947 uses, respectively. Nobody ever mentioned Delino DeShields over the past two years. Stan Musial was referred to 13 times; Rogers Hornsby twice. Pickle was used ten times, versus 182 uses of rundown.
