Welcome to the first edition of "this week in dumb off season ideas."
Hopefully this will become a recurring piece throughout the off season, where I can shoot down ridiculous trade concepts, conceptual free agent signings, and general nonsense related to the fact that baseball doesn't start for 5 months or so, the hot stove won't really get fired up for two months, and everyone and their mother is interested in figuring out the future.
My intention is to hopefully have enough juicy content from the media to find something so blatantly dumb that it's super easy to say "ARE YOU INSANE??" Something that regardless of your opinion of the Phillies' future (rebuild/re-tool/trade 'em all and spend to win), this specific idea is so moronic and bad that anyone in any camp will agree.
But I don't want to limit the stupidity to just the media. No friends, you are all welcome to get Catz'd if you so choose.
Simply tweet you're stupid trade idea or free agent signing to @joecatz with the hashtag #PhilliesIdeas and one lucky winner will get the privilege each week of either being right (in the case that you wow me with something so impressively good that I wish I had thought of it myself) or being so wrong that you'll wish you hadn't tweeted me.
Up first:
THIS GEM from former Phillies beat writer and current New York Daily news scribe Andy Martino. Most of the article deals with the Yankees, but hidden near the bottom is this nugget of delicious, ridiculous hearsay.
Here’s another small tidbit: The Phillies re-hired franchise icon Larry Bowa as bench coach yesterday. Cano was extremely close with Bowa when both were with the Yankees. Ruben Amaro Jr. seems ready to be his swashbuckling offseason self again (and you have to figure Chase Utley would move somewhere for Robinson Freaking Cano). Does this add up to anything? Probably not, because it’s all about the money. But if the money is there, maybe Bowa becomes a secondary factor in a complicated decision.
Oh Andy...
Look, I know RUBEN SMUGGED YOU HARD A FEW WEEKS AGO and I myself agree that they're gonna do something extremely big and mildly stupid.
But Robinson Cano?
There are so many reasons why going after Cano is absurd, stupid, and not going to happen that it would take a month to list them all, so I'm going to break it down into ten easy reasons.
- He's LH and plays 2B, a postion the Phillies just re-signed a franchise icon to play.They need a C, a corner OF and pitching. Preferably of the RH hitting variety!!
- That guy you want to move to 3B for Cano CAN'T PLAY 3B!!
- He's gonna cost 25mm a year, minimum, for 8 billion years.
- Signing Cano would be the only move the team legitimately could make this off season that would cripple them for years.
- Even if you COULD move Utley to 3B, that's like THE ONE POSITION IN THE SYSTEM where you have decent depth!!
- He's repped by JAY Z, not Wil Smith. Wrong rapper, wrong city.
- If the Phillies had any desire to spend the money on Cano, they would not have inked Utley to an extention.
- If the Phillies really wanted to move Utley to 3B, and sign a 2B there are Better, Cheaper, and younger ways to do it
- Larry Bowa is the devil. I thought we cleared up that no one likes the old coot yesterday.
- To sign Robinson Cano, you have to do the following: A) find a taker for Ryan Howard B) get Utey to agree to move to 1B, which is really the only place to move him to, and if you can somehow manage that then the guy you sign isn't Cano, its THIS GUY.
Seriously Andy, you never had me at hello, but you lost me at Larry Bowa. No offense here, if you are actually reading this, but did you really just waste valuable space in the NY Daily News pontificating that there is a chance that Robinson Cano could decide who he plays for based on THEIR BENCH COACH???