Epstein Trade Analysis + Tidbits

So the Epstein Trade Analysis was posted as previously mentioned, there were 17 trades analyzed and of those 17, according to my humble opinion:

• 5 were Player Acquisition deals meant to improve the team without giving up Major League talent. He added 155.8 runs more than he gave up while taking on approxamitely $16.5 million in first year salaries
  
• 5 were baseball deals were the players traded were pretty even except for positions
• 5 were Role Player Acquisitions meant to slighlty improve the team without giving up Major League talent where he added approxamitely $3 million added 17 runs
  
• 1 was a player dump (Kim)
• 1 was a role player dump (Mientkiewicz's $3.75 million, his VORP was only 4.8 that season)

Now what's interesting is comparing his "baseball deals" to the other GMs that have been researched. The five deals I qualified for this section werethe deals involving: Giambi, Hillenbrand, Garciaparra, Roberts/Payton and Payton/Bradford. Of the trades in these categories...Theo "lost" every one! He added $5 million to his first year salary base in the process while giving up an incredible 151 runs according to VORP. Hillenbrand and Roberts were both much better than the players received in production and Matt Murton has turned out to be a good player as of yet. The other GMs studied:

• Depodesta made 5 of these types of deals where he rid himself of over $6 million of first year salaries while adding 29 runs to his team above replacement level
• Beane made 9 trades of this type and he added 250 runs of VORP while adding only $8 million in payroll...and that's without adding the value of players received in trades for players originally received in these types of deals (Long, Lilly, 1st round picks)
• Ricciardi didn't fare as well...Of the 7 baseball deals made , Ricciardi added almost $3.5 in salaries and lost 23 VORP runs. But that's still better than Theo...

So what am I saying? Well nothing, I'm just pointing out the stats. But it seems for all the good pub that Epstein received for being a great general manager, he made several mistakes when making trades. However, he has a ring and none of the other three GMs studied do, so maybe stats don't tell the whole story! Again, if you want to read even more about Epstein's reign as Red Sox GM, pick up Feeding the Monster by Seth Mnookin. There's also an article over at ESPN Page 2 about how the Sox are the new "evil empire".

Little bit of news:
The Yanks are in talks to trade the Big Unit back to Arizona? Interesting, and most probably a shame for Jays fans, RJ is old and the Yankees would just get younger again. The New York Daily News reports that a trade to San Diego may be most likely. It seems that the Orioles are staying busy and are interested in Shannon Stewart.