Has the Brandon Webb Injury Made Ownership Jumpy?

Picked up a back-end starter, a potential back-end starter/swingman, an up-and-down reliever, and if they’re lucky, the PTBNL is a B prospect in Skaggs…

Arizona had no reason to trade Haren, yet.

But, Saunders is a winner says the lame-duck GM.

Agree with most of it, though to be picky I think it was the FO that yanked the deal away from Webb after the insurance companies had concerns (which have been proved right)

Sadly the fact the economy has gone south, coupled with falling interest in the team will mean payroll will be reduced. When payroll goes south you have to squeeze every penny and that’s why you go for quantity rather then outright quality.

The 2004 staff and to a lesser extent the 2003/2008 models both had quality high priced arms but failed to get over the line, or utterly fell a million miles short of the line. In my own opinion Dan Haren is not worth 1/5 of your payroll when you don’t have the pieces to be compete. But then I suppose that is the debate, is this group capable of competing? I personally don’t think they are and the FO obviously has privately come to the same conclusion.

The more I think about the Haren deal, the more I’m not appalled by it. If Haren had been a free agent at the end of this season, this is pretty much what we’d have got. 2 1st round draft picks and some money to spend on a FA starter. What’s more, we don’t have to spend the signing bonus money on these 3 players and save the difference between Saunders/Haren.

Also as others have been saying/hinting, perhaps Haren wasn’t as good as we all thought. He’s had a fairly mediocre last 12 months, and he also stuttered across the line during his first season here as well. How do we know Haren doesn’t go south in a hurry the same way as Barry Zito or Carlos Zambrano? I’m not saying he will, but there is a risk there and why should the FO be taking risks when the guy isn’t going to be the difference between playoffs and falling short.

I think the FO does have confidence in this team and that’s why Reynolds, Upton, Young are all on good long term deals. The only thing that’s changed is that they’ve decided that the pitching, both the rotation and the bullpen are not peaking right now and are going to withhold spending big dollars there until they have a bit more faith in the group.

There’s a lot of merit to your analysis. It’s true that the plan for the past two seasons was contingent on a healthy Webb, and results might have been quite different had he been healthy. Once the “ace” went down, the original plan was no longer viable.
But it does seem to me that the FO is scrambling without a coherent plan right now. Grab a bunch of ‘prospects’ in hopes that a ‘gem’ emerges while spending as little money as possible rarely works. I’m seeing a pattern that is ‘reactive’ rather than ‘proactive’, and I don’t feel very confident about it.
Anyway, great post AJ.

and I think that your theory that Webb’s injury influenced the Haren trade is the most cogent I’ve seen for why the Diamondbacks seemed to trade so low.

I also wonder if the combined effects of the Reynolds, Young and Upton contracts haven’t altered the mindset as well. The decision was taken to place long term faith in this particular group of players and it has failed dramatically.

in the sense that I think that they were projected to be the core of a successful team ,which they clearly aren’t.

I wonder if the FO would build the team arond those three if they were given a second chance?

The Brandon Webb signing and then catastrophic two year loss of him was a huge bullet dodged but it made the men at the top hesitant to jump back into combat. Since that single event the front office has forced Byrnes and now DiPoto to deal in the sense of a business world and not a baseball world. We must remember this is a business and now the owners are treating it like one.

way i see it, this group has been business first ever since the ouster of colangelo. that was the turning point. while not perfect, his group was 100% better than what these losers have put in place.