A Different Take on Girardi

As for the ESPN/Cubs think with O'Brien, your memory fails you.  ESPN would not let him out of his contract.  http://web.archive.org/web/20041129165355/http://www.dailyherald.com/sports/col_rozner.asp?intid=383 10260

Let's take Todd Wellemeyer as an example here.  Todd had some pretty decent value back in 2003 and even in parts of 2004.  However, he began losing value pretty much the instant he started pitching for the big league team.  He was overmatched.  Hendry failed to adjust the value he thought he deserved to get out of him and in the end, he got nothing of value.

What Hendry didn't understand, and still doesn't, is that by trading him in 2004 for less value than he could have gotten in 2003 is still MORE value than he ended up getting out of him.  

Hendry has this idea that if a guy begins to lose value that he can fix it.  A little time to make some adjustment and the value is right back up there and he'll pull the trigger.  That's unlikely to happen because MOST players do not succeed.  

This is the reason why I continue to say that Rich Hill will be traded this offseason.  Hill is the first of numerous players Hendry has failed to get any value out of that has actually reached the point where his value was highest, and in Hill's case, perhaps even higher than it was back in 2005 before he made his MLB debut.  Hendry will trade Rich Hill this offseason.  

Unfortunately, Hill's improvements probably embolden Hendry's position with prospects and he'll continue to get no value out of almost all of them.

I suppose this is technically overvaluing of prospects, but I don't believe Hendry overvalues them from the start.  It's the decline in value that Hendry just can't accept.

This is also the same reason why I said that trading Mark Prior before the 2006 season was the best move Hendry could do.  Everybody said that Prior didn't have as much value as he once did and that you had to get it back up there.  Well, it would have been better to trade him last offseason than now.  It's now at the point where you can't trade the guy.  Nobody in their right mind would trade for him.  So you're stuck with him unless you want to release him.  

It would have been better to get some value than no value.  People all too often fail to realize when they argue about increasing a player's value that it's more likely that value will only be decreased.  It's more likely that the Cubs, as I said, would have been trading Mark Prior last offseason when his value was as high as it was ever going to be from that point forward.  

The Cubs had one thing going for them with regards to Prior and his value last offseason.  He had never had a serious arm injury.  Now he's had.  Rotator cuff and his labrum.  The guy now has slim to none odds of EVER even becoming the average pitcher he was in 2004 and 2005.  Good thing we hung onto him.

What needs to be done is exactly what the A's and Red Sox do.  If your scouts turn in a list of 6 outfielders (in real life it would be larger than this, but this is just for the sake of simplicity) in the organization they think have a bright future, that's great.  What you need to do is have a statistical analysis team on staff that also turns in 6 names.  More than likely, as Bill James notes in one of his books, 3 of the names are likely to appear on both lists.  THESE are the guys that you put most of your development time into.  

Let one compliment the other.  This minimizes the chances that some player like Ronny Cedeno makes it to the major leagues.  It doesn't eliminate those chances.  Stats and Scouting together are still fallible and in most cases of prospect, they're still going to fail--it's what prospects do.  But you should be able to increase the odds of success for some while eliminating others.