rolen to brewers

I hope Mr. Twenty Dollar Bill is making it up.

• If we move Braun to left, where are we putting LaPorta?  I'm still clinging to the idea that they have a plan that looks beyond five minutes from now.
• I think Rolen has $36 million left on his contract over the next 3 years.  That's a lot of cash for a guy who best years were 10 years ago, and who has been getting hurt a lot the past few seasons.  There's no way he's going to live up to that.
• I'm leery as to what we're going to give the Cardinals for Rolen too.  Something tells me it'd be more along the lines of Sheets than Aquino.

What is the timeframe for LaPorta? isn't he still two. If the cardinals want to move him that bad maybe they'll eat some of the amount plus not expect much back. I'd just hate to see a deal and move braun to left. Then turn around and have Rolen get hurt and then who plays third. It's a gamble either way or either that or gammons had some ink left in the last pen in the box and he wanted to open the new box and needed something to write about.

While I rant about the idea of Rolen playing here, that is one thing you can give credit to Moustache for: we don't have a lot of backloaded, bloated contracts to aging veterans (like $36 million to Rolen).  Our worst offenders were the contracts for Sheets and Jinxie, and they were pretty tolerable compared to, say, Rolen's.  

Of course, I'd be singing a different tune if El Caballo or CoCo had accepted Moustache's offers, which were far higher than I was comfortable with, but as far as salary goes, we're pretty albatross-free.  

wouldn't mind having rolen, but at a very reduced cost, and i just feel this would have disaster written all over it. i think just too many things could go wrong here (who we give up, can rolen stay healthy, braun play in lf...)

Hey RogueJim great post on the stats. Hey did you see his first year errors when he came up with the phillies?  24 errors and then the second year it was down to 14. Interesting............

I'm leery of this trade, too, but it's less about his contract than his health. He can still hit if he's healthy (see 2006) and I doubt they'd make the trade if he's still hurt. I also can't imagine Melvin would make the deal without the Cardinals picking up a lot of the salary, though, so I'm sure he won't cost the $12 million per year he's still owed. I'd guess one of the longer-term cost-controlled pitchers (Bush? Vargas?) would be headed to St. Louis rather than Sheets.

As for blocking LaPorta, I say worry about that when he's ready to make the jump to the majors. There's still plenty of time until that day. It'd be nice if he wasn't blocked in 2009, but you can't not upgrade positions now for only that reason.

SWEET, give stevie ray braun a plaque for that one.

Also per the JS Blogs (of which I'm a big fan), Moustache doesn't seem to be playing the fool:

the brewers don't trust braun at third and would like to upgrade.  

that's assuming of course that the rumors are true.

According to Tom H:

Everyone knows unfounded rumors never happen, so someone must be lying. ;)

The Cardinal blog is all a-twitter (ha!) over a Rolen/Cappy trade.  They seem to be envisioning Rolen/Reyes for Cappy/Hall, which doesn't seem very likely, if you ask me.

It did get me thinking, though: if we're so concerned about Ryan's defense at third, then move Hall back to third.  I mean, if you hammer it long enough, you can eventually fit the square peg that is Bill Hall in the round hole of centerfield, but if you have a square hole at third base...

It sounds like the Crew is meeting with the Cards again today. Sure sounds to me like this deal is going to happen.

Maybe the real reason we want him is Yost is pushing for a Card insider that can give him all of La Russa's soft spots for that La Russa vs. Yost UFC 87 battle they are planning after last seasons incident.