{"id":99,"date":"2008-01-29T18:32:38","date_gmt":"2008-01-29T23:32:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.broadstreetbelievers.com\/?p=99"},"modified":"2008-01-30T10:04:51","modified_gmt":"2008-01-30T15:04:51","slug":"mets-get-santana-become-nl-east-favorites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/?p=99","title":{"rendered":"Mets Get Santana; Become NL East Favorites"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’ s being widely reported tonight that the Twins and Mets have agreed to a trade<\/a> that would send All-World pitcher\"santana\" Johan Santana to New York in exchange for four prospects:\u00a0outfielder Carlos Gomez and pitchers Phil Humber, Kevin Mulvey, and Deolis Guerra.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The deal\u00a0will not be complete (and will\u00a0probably not be publicly announced) until the Mets reach an agreement with Santana on a\u00a0contract extension.\u00a0 It seems\u00a0very likely that that won’t be a problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The initial reaction if you’re a Phillies fan has to be: “Oh, Sh%#!”.\u00a0 Santana is probably the best pitcher on the planet right now and you have to think that this acquisition, without losing player of consequence from the major league roster, makes the Mets the NL East favorites heading\u00a0into\u00a0the 2008 season.\u00a0 To make matters worse,\u00a0it looks like they got Santana at a discounted price.\u00a0 The deal is probably not as good as\u00a0some offers the Twins received from the Yankees and Red Sox over the past couple of months.\u00a0 There are rumors that Santana\u00a0told the Twins front office,\u00a0some time in the last week, that if he was not traded before spring training, he would exercise his no-trade clause on any potential trade thereafter, and leave as a free agent after the season.\u00a0 So the team asked all the interested teams for a final “best offer”, but apparently the Yankees and Red Sox had lost some interest, and the Mets stepped up to make the deal.\u00a0 The Twins tried to get outfield prospect Fernando Martinez into the deal, but Mets GM Omar Minaya stood his ground and it appears to have paid off.<\/p>\n

It seems possible that the Red Sox and Yankees’ main interest was keeping Santana away from each other, but it still seems a little odd that they backed off from a chance to bring in one of the top pitchers of this generation.\u00a0 I’m especially surprised that the Yankees did not make a push, considering they appear to be slightly out-manned right now by the Red Sox and the Tigers.\u00a0 Also,\u00a0they let Santana go to their cross-town rivals, probably sacrificing the\u00a0baseball headlines in New York to the Mets for the foreseeable future.<\/p>\n

Gomez appears to be a pretty big-time prospect, but not on the level of Phil Hughes.\u00a0 Humber is a former first-round pick, but is not as good as any of the pitching prospects mention in previous deals, like Ian Kennedy, Jon Lester, or Clay Buchholz.\u00a0 He is not even as good as the Mets’ own Mike Pelfrey.\u00a0 The other two pitchers in the\u00a0deal are not major prospects.\u00a0 Mulvey is a Villanova product who was a second-round pick of the Mets in 2006.<\/p>\n

One\u00a0good thing to come out of this trade will be potential duels between Santana and Cole Hamels.\u00a0\u00a0They have the two best changeups in the game, by far, and it\u00a0should be\u00a0very interesting to see them going at it.\u00a0 I just wish I could have seen it happen in interleague play, not in a divisional game.\u00a0 Maybe\u00a0Santana won’t sign a deal with the Mets?\u00a0 Maybe?\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’ s being widely reported tonight that the Twins and Mets have agreed to a trade that would send All-World pitcher Johan Santana to New York in exchange for four prospects:\u00a0outfielder Carlos Gomez and pitchers Phil Humber, Kevin Mulvey, and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[197,72,68,18,22,67,62],"class_list":["post-99","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mlb","tag-carlos-gomez","tag-johan-santana","tag-mets","tag-red-sox","tag-trade","tag-twins","tag-yankees"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=99"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=99"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=99"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=99"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}