Johann Santana promoted from AAAA to the Major Leagues

Johan Santana, arguably the most dominant pitcher over the last 6 years, was traded yesterday from the Minnesota Twins to the New York Mets for four prospects that may or may not pan out into anything worth a major league uniform. The Twins urge to trade Santana before the season started rather than have him certainly walk away from the organization as a free agent at the end of the season for deserved big money is understandable. I don’t really have a problem with the behavior of any parties involved, they participate within the system, it’s more the general notion this reinforces: the AAAA farm-system that is small market major league teams.

Teams like the Pirates, A’s, Twins and Royals have pretty much sucked for a good portion of the last 15 years because they cannot spend with the Yankees, Red Sox and Cubs of the league. As a result they scout like hell and develop young talent like maestro’s with the hopes they can hang onto to enough of them long enough to make one or two good runs. This results in the flash in the pan Twins of the last few years, A’s of the early 2000s and D-Backs and Rockies of last year. When their work pays off and they produce a star they trade him away for prospects to avoid getting nothing from his development and the cycle repeats. Teams like the Marlins spend like nuts for one or two years in conjunction with good young talent and produce a contender with a legitimate shot at the WS only to explode the team in a fire sale as soon as they are on the down slope. This style of management makes me want to vomit like that girl in that video with that cup. Ick.

You might say, “What about the Rockies and the D-Backs this past season? Two small market teams finding success.” The D-Backs being anything above .500 last season was a statistical “What-the-fuck?” First off, the NL sucked last year. The AL had 6 teams with better records than the Cubs so it didn't matter whether you were small market, no one wanted to win. Every good predictor of team W-L records had D-Backs as not being that good. Yeah, they beat the Cubs in the NLDS, but God hates the Cubs and will do anything to see them suffer, even have them lose three in a row to a team that can’t score. Same thing with the Rockies, they played strangely out of their gourds against a weak NL West schedule down the stretch and moved their way through an NL playoffs wherein they and the afore mentioned D-Backs were the league leaders with 90 wins. My point is they were not that good even though they found success. They and other small market teams will never find consistent good fortune as long as the Yankees and Red Sox of the league have their spending arms race.

Possible Solutions:
1) Contract both Florida franchises. Letting them play is basically just driving up the win percentage for everyone else in the league. Their attendance records are putrid. I’ve had deuces that look better than Tropicana Field and Joe Robbie. The state gets half of MLB there every year for spring training; let’s leave it at that.
2) Employ some form of revenue sharing. NY is so big it can actually accommodate 40,000 people attending 162 games over a summer (81 home games for both the Mets and Yankees). Places like Pittsburgh, Kansas City and Cleveland have less than 1/20th the population to work with and their residents are relatively less wealthy. It’s no wonder they aren’t able to generate enough revenue to keep good talent. Let the Yankees spend what they want but distribute some of their revenue to help small market teams retain talent and hopefully not suck so consistently for the greater benefit of the league.

I also would have accepted “kick Peter Angelos in the balls”. Watching Angelos let good talent that wanted to stay in Baltimore walk while signing underachievers and shitbags for too much money is certainly deserving of a pecker punch.