Okay, here is my “official” reaction to Manny Ramirez getting traded…
My first opinion on this was that this was the worst trade I ever would have expected from the Red Sox. I mean, LOSE Manny, PAY Manny for the rest of the season still, LOSE two MLB ready prospects and get ONLY Jason Bay. All those things amount to WAY OVERPRICED. But then I started to realize something – it wasn’t SO bad.
If Manny could have gotten his act together, nothing would have been better than keeping him, and probably picking up his two options. But look at it this way. If they released Manny at the end of the season they would have just straight out lost him. They might have lost him for the rest of the season this year as he would have mailed it in.
So this year would have been lost, and now we need to find a replacement for him for next year. Well, you couldn’t exactly trade Craig Hansen and Brandon Moss for Jason Bay straight up, so that would have required a bit more. So this is essentially a loan of Manny to the Dodgers, so Manny won’t implode the Sox clubhouse, and in return the Dodgers put up the other half of the prospects the Sox needed to pick up Bay for next year (plus he plays now, in place of Manny)!
So all in all it does seem a bit of a lot to pay to get Jason Bay, but he only gets payed $7.5 million next year, far less than the $20 million Manny was going to get paid, and they only lose two prospects to get close to Manny’s numbers for next year.
As far as still paying Manny for the rest of this year, that is water under the bridge – so long as the Sox are willing to take that as a hit and not raise the ticket prices I am fine with that. It is a lot to give up if you look at it straight up, but if you look at it as two trades, its easy to see that this is what needed to be done. Jason Bay is worth more now than Manny – crazy as it is to say that. It just works 