Dealing With The Devil

Some of the biggest news of the day (besides the always-inevitable Mike Hampton injury) is the news that the Cubs are actively looking to deal Mark Prior.

If you’ve been a (relatively) long-time reader, you’ll note that I discussed the Cardinals getting Prior back about a month ago. That scenario, though, assumed that the Cubs would non-tender Prior, making him a free agent and costing the Cardinals only cash.

If you start talking about trading, though, that brings in another set of issues. I mean, it’s the Cubs. A divisional rival at best, a hated enemy at worst. Do you really want to trade a player that might be useful to Chicago in exchange for the unreliability and potential disaster that Prior could be?

In my mind, it depends on what the Cubs want in exchange. If they are likely to non-tender and they are just looking for a warm body or someone a little cheaper, giving them a AA player or two for him wouldn’t bother me any. Sure, it’s possible they’d pan out, but the odds would be against them. Now, if the Cubs were holding out for MLB-ready talent, people like Bryan Anderson or Jamie Garcia, I’d say have a nice day.

I can’t see them doing that. Right now Prior’s value is about as low as it gets. He won’t be ready until mid-season at best, he’s a free agent at the end of the year, there’s just not much people would give for him, I don’t think. I understand that the Padres may be interested, so you don’t want to get into a bidding war, but if you were ever going to jump on a potential reclamation project, this is the time. You have to figure that ’08 will be a struggle anyway, but imagine the second half if a healthy Carpenter and Prior joined the rotation with Wainwright. If the team could stay close at the All-Star Break, they could make a run.

Something to keep an eye on, at any rate.  The ownership discussion will continue tomorrow.

The Ownership Question: Part II

In Part I, we looked at payroll in relation to other payrolls at the time and as a percentage of total MLB payrolls. Today, let’s take a look at payroll in relation to market size.

There are different ways to look at market size. Here’s a study that measures it by television households. As you can see, this way puts the Cardinals 26th, just after Colorado and right before Pittsburgh. There is also a listing at BaseballAlmanac.com with population that shows the Cardinals close to the bottom as well, this time ahead of Colorado but trailing San Diego.

Granted, the market size is probably neither of these, when you take into account how far-flung Cardinal Nation is. It probably looks more like this map. However, using the St. Louis area is probably the best for any kind of analysis. While some of us here in Arkansas are big Cardinal fans, we may not get to a game in two to three years and can’t be counted on a regular basis. Besides, we need numbers to do some of this, so the Baseball Almanac report will do.

While the population figures are for the year 2000, they’ll work for us on a general basis. Most likely all populations have grown somewhat, but I don’t think there have been many major shifts.