Would You Do It?

Here's a wild idea for the Mets this offseason. It sounds crazy but it's actually plausible.

Trade Jose Reyes and Mike Pelfrey to the Twins for Johan Santana.
Sign Johan Santana for 6 years $150 million and sign Alex Rodriguez for 10 years $300 million.

You add roughly $55 million per year to the payroll, but if you get rid of Green ($9.5m in 2007), Alou ($7.5m), Glavine ($7.5m), Castillo ($5.75m) and LoDuca ($6.2m), plus Reyes ($2.5m in 2007, $4m in 2008), that's a savings of about $40 million. And you wouldn't need to spend much to replace those guys because you have Milledge, Gomez, Santana, A-Rod, Gotay and Castro (who could be resigned for about $2 million per) to fill those spots.

Also, when Delgado ($16m in 2008), Pedro ($11m in 2008) and El Duque ($6.5m) go after next year there would be money left over.

This would give you a line up of Gomez, Milledge, Beltran, A-Rod, Wright, Delgado, Castro and Gotay. The rotation would be Santana, Pedro, El Duque, Perez and Maine. That seems like a good team to me.

When answering this question please go by only the information contained herein not other eventualities such as if Humber were in the deal instead of Pelfrey or if the Mets could still keep Alou.

Also I know that the cost of the contracts of Green and Castillo were defrayed by other teams but I tried to keep it simple.



My answer is no, for a simple reason. Alex Rodriguez is not a winning player. Something about him is contrary to winning on every team he's played for. I wouldn't want to take the chance that his selfishness and lack of clutch hitting torpedoes what I still believe is a bright future for the next 10 years.