The Futility Infielder

Baseball's New Sad Lexicon

Barely three weeks after he was traded from the Florida Marlins to the Montreal Expos, Cliff Floyd was traded again, this time to the Boston Red Sox. Thus he's completed an unseemly journey between three teams linked by this past offseason's franchise-manipulating shenanigans.

Recall that current Red Sox owner John Henry is also the former owner of the Florida Marlins, and that current Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria is the former owner of the Montreal Expos. When Henry's group "won" the bid for the Sox, Loria was allowed to buy the Marlins and sell the Expos to Major League Baseball, semmingly a precursor towards contracting the poor Expos. This unholy triangle was of course aided and abetted by Commissioner Bud Selig. Selig managed to overlook the fact that Henry's group may not have been the highest bidder for the Sox (as the condition of the franchise sale mandated). One wonders if Selig hasn't served up another fat pitch for ol' John Henry here.

When the Expos acquired Floyd, it was on the heels of their acquisition of ace pitcher Bartolo Colon from the Cleveland Indians in exchange for two prospects. The Expos stood at 46-41, 9.5 games out of first place in the NL East and 5 games out of the Wild Card, but the deal made sense in a win-now kind of way. Three weeks later, the Expos have slumped with Floyd (7-12) but remain only 6 games out of the Wild Card, despite falling to 16 in back of the Braves in the East. Instead of hanging tough with their augmented lineup, they send Clifford packing in exchange for two middling Korean pitching prospects (including the wonderfully-named Seung Song, whom I saw pitch at the All-Star Futures Game) who aren't as good as what they gave up. If winning now is no longer the mandate, and contraction is still in the cards (cough, cough), what the hell good are prospects for the Expos?

Despite the rant and the presence of my favorite toupéed whipping boy, I'm not quite ready to call this one a conspiracy. Baseball Prospectus' Joe Sheehan (who, like me, is a Yankees fan) falls just short of uttering the C-word as he tries to make sense of the trade; his article is well worth a read, especially when it points out how much attendance increased during the short span when the Expos appeared to be in the race.

But unanswered by any conspiracy theory I've heard is why Selig/MLB/Montreal would do Henry a favor by gifting their newly acquired slugger when Bud already did an even bigger favor by fixing the Sox sale. One would think he's already got Henry's support for whatever nefarious scheme he blunders into. And so long as you're selling off the Expos for scrap, why stop at Floyd--why not trade Colon, Vladimir Guerrero and Jose Vidro in exchange for Quebec's independence or a fifty-foot statue of Tim Raines or something useful like that? I don't get it.

As a Yanks fan, I'm not going to sweat the Sox acquiring Floyd too much. Had they pried loose Jim Thome from the Indians, I might have worried a bit, because it's always Whacking Day for Thome when he faces the Yanks. He's got 3 HRs in 20 ABs against them this year, and 12 in 124 ABs over the past four seasons. No wonder he seems to hit one nearly every time I'm watching. My favorite Yankee opponent, hands down.

But just because I'm not worried about the ramifications for the Yanks and don't think it's truly a conspiracy doesn't mean I don't have a bad taste in my mouth about this. Anything involving players traded into or out of Montreal this year is highly questionable and deserving of further scrutiny. Anything involving Selig and the operations of an individual team, particularly the two teams he's so incestuously involved with (now there's a pleasant image) shouldn't pass unnoticed either.

So with apologies to Franklin P. Adams, who wrote the second-most famous baseball poem of all time (after Ernest Thayer's "Casey at the Bat"), and a nod to my late grandfather, who was given to composing bits of doggerel in his letters, I leave with you with this:

Baseball's New Sad Lexicon
These are the saddest of possible words:
"Loria to Selig to Henry."
Trio of bandits, reeking of turds,
Loria and Selig and Henry.
Ruthlessly wrecking our great old pastime,
Making a trade that ought to be crime.
Words that are heavy with nothing but slime:
"Loria to Selig to Henry."

Postscript: There's plenty more talk on the conspiracy front. The Boston Globe's Gordon Edes gives a bit of Beantown perspective, including a conversation with Sox CEO Larry Luccino. ESPN Insider's Jim Bake,r answering a letter from a reader, says the conspiracy theory could be plugged in if any one of a number of teams had acquired Floyd:

"Yankees: Selig doing favor for most influential owner in game
"Dodgers: Selig wants big market team to win western division for TV ratings
"Braves: Selig thinks a Braves world championship would be just the thing for baseball.

"And, on the end of the spectrum:

"Devil Rays: Selig thinks moribund team could use a shot in the arm so he can focus contraction hopes elsewhere.
"Brewers: No explanation necessary.

"Let's face it: The league owning a team is just plain bad mojo. Any move it makes, no matter how benign, is going to look like some kind of backdoor malfeasance. The conspiracy theory angle is much more fun, though."