World Series and Missing Out on Josh Hamilton

JH likes to be the one who is most favored by other GMs!

That is most important!

Besides we did it for a division rival. If you can’t help them, who can you help!

Jim Hendry is amazing! Other GMs agree!

Were you in on the Reds’ internal discussions? Or did you eavesdrop on the call between their people and Jim Hendry?

Because if you weren’t, there’s no way for you to say that. And Baseball America isn’t privy to those discussions, either.

And it paid off for the Reds and, ultimately, the Rangers. But hey, we got Fukudome so everything worked out!

he had fallen off the wagon before, after long sober periods. I think playing baseball went a long way towards cleaning him up.

How many drug addicts die alone on the streets each day? An overdoes, drug induced accident, victim of a violent drug related crime, or simply not taking care of himself could have killed him.

He had pretty much blown through his signing bonus and didn’t have much left.

He was his road trip roommate, even held his meal money for him, because Hamilton never carries more than a certain amount of cash on him, so it is much more difficult for him to buy drugs.

they also thought his limited professional playing time in the previous three years, and his even more limited playing time at AA or above would limit his ability. They didn’t think he would stick an entire season at the ML level, and figured the Reds would cut him at some point, and they could get him back.

But to think that a contending club would use one bench spot on an unproven Rule V guy is kind of silly.

Heck, look at all the clamoring over carrying David Patten… and he was the designated cannon fodder in the bullpen (really the most disposable position on a roster).

People are only bent because Hamilton worked out. Plenty of others do not.

Let’s drag up 1999. The Astros exposed Johan Santana… who was picked by the Marlins and immediately traded to the Twins for a minor leaguer. Why didn’t the Cubs know Santana would become dominant?? The Cubs should’ve traded for Santana… fire everyone! (Stated with tongue firmly planted in cheek.)

… but saying that this was just about money shows no comprehension of how the Rule 5 draft works. While there are other options, when a team drafts a player, they need to consider whether or not they’ll be able to keep him on the active roster for the entire season. I can’t imagine a team drafting a player without determining that this is a realistic possibility. While you can put him on the DL, and this happened with Hamilton, you can’t plan that this is a likelihood.

they turned nothing into two peoples salary in the front office

I think he might have found it a tad awkward to work for a team his brothers division and frankly it is highly unlikely any other team would have understood how important Johnny Narron would be. Obviously the Rangers did and one of their top guys was recenly quoted as saying having Narron as some kind of special assignment coach ( they have to give him some title) was very worthwhile investment. I think you have too simplistic a view of how hard it was to bring Hamilton back from the depths and keep him from sliding back.

I was posting in this very forum at the time the Cubs took him, and I was stoked.

Hamilton was traded immediately to the Reds… the Cubs never really had him. So you were not “stoked” that the Cubs had picked him… unless you failed to read the rest of the transaction.

But my pet peeve about this situation is the conventional wisdom on BCB that the Cubs never had the option to draft him.

True. BCBers do oversimplify this. But it still doesn’t matter. There was really no reason to expect Hamilton to perform the way he has, which makes this 20/20 hindsight. Why didn’t the Cubs trade for Johan Santana when he was in the Rule V draft???

… the Reds clearly had this in mind all along, regardless of what Baseball America said.

Do I always have to do this with you?

1. People sometimes use the word “Dallas” as shorthand for Dallas/Ft. Worth. I believe my exact words were “he’s done fine in Cincy and Arlington, and Dallas in particular had a nasty heroin problem in recent years.”

My apologies for using “Dallas” to denote the entire Dallas/Ft. Worth metro region. As someone who (I believe) either lives or lived in Texas, I’d assume that you’re familiar with the whole “suburban Dallas teen heroin” story, so I didn’t think it was necessary to identify the precise location. (Maybe Arlington is an oasis utopia where alcohol isn’t served and the kids are all “high on life”. If that’s the case, I’ll admit that I was totally wrong.)

2. Other posters are discussing bars and alcohol. I brought up hard drugs. I noted that you can find alcohol literally everywhere in America, including the very stadiums where Hamilton plays baseball, so I don’t think that “proximity to alcohol” is going to be a distinguishing factor. I then pivoted the discussion to hard drugs, noting that Hamilton has done well in a metro area that had a pretty serious “rich white kid” hard drug problem over the last 10 years. I’ll also note, to circumvent further discussion, that the Chicago burbs have had a pretty rough “rich white kid” heroin problem lately.

3. It’s incredibly unlikely that Hamilton would have chosen to live in the city proper. It’s not his scene, and he has school-age kids anyway. The idea that Hamilton was going to spend all his time partying at Hi-Tops or whatever back in 2007 just because it was close, whereas he woulda be able to stay clean and sober if only the bar was a little harder to get to, is, in my opinion, silly. I guarantee that Hamilton can, right now, go buy a beer (or, for that matter, crack) pretty easily if he chose to. He chooses not to.

Much as I’m not in the “we should have kept him” camp, Hamilton spent all three years that Lou managed in Tampa on the restricted list. I doubt the two of them ever met.

Hamilton’s minor league career here.

I also think Lou Piniella was the wrong choice for manager, but that’s a whole different discussion. Could a clean Hamilton have won Piniella over or would Piniella have forced him to rot on the bench, leading to a trade after the 2007 season? Butterflies, here we come.

I still go with the fact that this sort of thing did not weigh into the decision. Hendry saw a chance to get some money for a Rule V pick and he took it. He couldn’t have known that Hamilton would get cleaned up and do what he did. Hamilton proved everyone wrong. Just because Hendry couldn’t have known doesn’t mean he didn’t whiff on this.

I’m not blaming Lou for anything. I’m saying that it’s very reasonable for the Cubs to have written off the entire possibility, based on the fact that the guy had been a massive drug burnout in Lou’s organization, and we’d just hired Lou.

As for Tampa and KC….. I don’t think that Tampa could select their own guy in the Rule 5 draft. It would certainly be weird.

Also, KC was locked in on Soria – and for good reason. It’s possible that the Reds approached KC and asked if they were willing to sell their pick, and were rebuffed. Who knows.

Regardless, yes, the Reds could have tried to swing some kind of deal to move ahead of the Cubs. But it would have been tricky. And more to the point, they didn’t do so, and didn’t believe it was necessary to do so.

1) Saying someone is wrong is just that. You’re saying someone is wrong.

2) Saying someone is wrong isn’t the same as asking, “What if he made the right choice?” We’ll never know because that person was wrong.

You don’t have to play the “what if” game in this scenario. You can simply look at the case and say, “Yep. That was the wrong decision.” Going to the “what if” game is simply a leap beyond the initial situation.

Unlike you I have provided a link from the day he was drafted with the Reds GM saying he was impressed with a scouting report from Johnny Narron. WTF would the Reds ask a coach in the Rockies Rookie league to give them on a scouting report if neither Narron was involved in signing Hamilton?. You want to explain please.

either way, Cubs didn’t plan to pick Hamilton, and had not thought that Hamilton (without the Reds mentioning of him) would be a good choice coming off his 15 games of sub par play with a history of drug and alcohol addiction.