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In today's edition of his BAR, The Enquirer's C. Trent Rosecrans made the case for the Cincinnati Reds to have a moderate sell-off by Thursday's trade deadline, and I'm pretty sure I agree with that course of action. There's not a bat available that fits the current team needs, they have a pile of pitching that's about to get really expensive before disappearing, and they've effectively played their way out of contending in 2014. That's a sell scenario to me.
In case you were wondering, FanGraphs now has the Reds with a 2.5% chance of winning the NL Central and just a 4.5% chance of grabbing one of the Wild Card spots. Promising it is not. Somewhat relevant is that the Boston Red Sox, who have been given a 0.8% chance at winning the AL East and just a 1.1% chance of finishing with a Wild Card spot, have decided to shop their top two pitchers (Jon Lester and John Lackey) in an attempt to fix some of the glaring holes in their current (and future) offense. That sounds like a novel idea, doesn't it?
Mo Egger was in the stands for last night's epic 4.5 hour sorta-kinda-interesting-fest, and he summed up the frustration succinctly in his blog today by saying, "Thank God for the beer, the hot dogs, and the company." Oh, Steve Smith. Stevie, Stevie, Stevie.
It's behind the pay-wall, but Buster Olney's latest post details how the Florida Marlins are interested in acquiring a starting pitcher who can help them beyond 2014. The Marlins, who now have the same record as the Reds (52-53), sit the same number of games back from their division leaders as the Reds (6), and have one fewer team in front of them in the division (2) than the Reds (3), appear to have found a nice, young core of players, and despite how godawful Jeff Loria is as an owner, that franchise has managed to build up to a pair of World Series winners in the past before breaking things down and returning them to whence they came. They're cheap...maybe they'd want Alfredo Simon? Mike Leake in that cavernous park would probably look pretty nice, too. Johnny Cueto would...no, nevermind. I'm not going to imagine giving Loria the privilege of having Cueto on his team for a year and change.
It's not exactly trade deadline related, but in a way I suppose it's still relevant: Alex Skillin dug deeper into what happens when hyped prospects don't exactly pan out in their first foray into Major League Baseball for The Hardball Times. Considering the amount of prospect chatter that's lobbed around with every team in trade mode, I suppose it's close enough to being on-topic.
Craig Calcaterra posted this over 3 hours ago for NBC's HardballTalk, and it still says 'Arolids' instead of 'Aroldis.'