Last night and trades

Not much to say about last night's loss except for that an early season Banny performance would have brought home the win. Anderson 5, Royals 3. The offense had problems again, but this time they had problems continuing their hot hitting, scoring three by the time the fourth rolled around and then falling back into their coma. Garrett Anderson upped his season total of RBI's to 18 and 10 of those have been against the Royals. Awesome.

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What I really want to talk about is trades and trade possibilities. A lot of people have been clamoring for the Royals to bring in a big bat through a trade. I think people see the AL Central as wide open right now and that its possible to make a move because the first time, the Royals have a legitimate strength: pitching. Throw in a league average offense and the Royals are probably a couple games up in the Central and possibly on the verge of pulling away. So the question is how many bats away are the Royals from being a 1st place team (at least in this version of the AL Central)?

My guess is they are two big, legitimate 30 homerun bats away. They're sitting at about 3.5 runs per game now, so I'd say they need to get to 4.5 to make their pitching staff worth while, meaning they need to add two guys who create 81 runs per year more than the person they replace.

Anyway, the point of all this is that is difficult to trade for these kinds of players anyway, but especially difficult considering the state of the Royals talent in the organization.

There are three categories of tradeable players. Highly sought after, moderately sought after and throw-ins. Obviously, its not so cut and dry, but for the sake of this it is. Here's the Royals list of those players that other organizations would want.

Highly sought after:
Greinke
Soria
Hochevar
Cortes
Rosa
Butler
Gordon
Meche possibly
Moustakas
Berroa (I keed, I keed)

Moderately sought after:
Bannister
Meche possibly
Davies (everyone thinks they can fix pitchers)
Pimentel
Ramirez
Nunez
Mahay
Callaspo
DeJesus
Teahen
Gathright
Guillen
Blake Wood
Joseph Dickerson
Edward Cegerra
Daniel Gutierrez

Throw-ins:
Everyone else

Its tough to trade for top end talent when you don't have top end talent to trade. The Royals have a few pieces and will probably be pretty good and pretty soon, but they can't go trading off their few marketable players in order to get a quick fix in 2008. Two more drafts and hopefully the high end talent will be flowing in the mid-upper minors and the Royals can pull off a deal for a guy like Miguel Cabrera.

One last note: I have a new favorite trade target that might not take as much as it should to get. Matt LaPorta with the Brew Crew. He's blocked at every single position and might be available for a reliever. Mahay and Nunez for LaPorta? I'd do it in a heartbeat.