A Move I Like

The Mets were apparently eager to trade their back up catcher Ramon Castro, as the starter Brian Schneider was coming off the D.L.  Castro is a pretty good back-up to have around, at least in terms of his ability to hit.  He’s got a career .728 OPS and 51 dingers in 1167 ABs, which are fine numbers for a back-up catcher.  He’s 33 this year.

I suspect that Castro’s defense isn’t very good, though, because the Mets apparently preferred to keep 28 year old rookie Omir “Pito” Sanchez, who looking at his career minor league numbers, looks for all the world like a glove-tree catcher.  [The conventional wisdom is that good defensive players who can't hit are a dime a dozen.  Whenever a GM needs a back-up to play mainly late inning defense, he goes and shakes the glove tree, and an appropriate good-field-no-hit player falls out.]

Anyway, the Mets were eager to unload Castro and as much of his $2.5M 2009 salary as they could, and it appears they actually got a player in return.  The White Sox gave them former 1st round draft pick Lance Broadway (15th in the 2005 draft).  Broadway is 25 this year, and he’s been no great shakes as a professional so far.

Still, I think Broadway has a reasonable chance to be a good major pitcher some day.  The White Sox put him on the fast track, and he stalled at the AAA level (which obviously is the best place for a minor league player to stall — he only has to improve a little bit and suddenly he’s a major league player).  Broadway has a career 4.10 minor league ERA, but he has 399 K’s against 187 BB’s in 531.1 minor league innings, almost all of it in the high minors (AA & AAA).  He doesn’t appear to have had any major arm problems either.

Everybody needs pitching, and to get a player young enough and talented enough to still have at least some chance of developing into a star for a guy you were just looking to dump so you wouldn’t have to carry all of his not especially high salary is a good move.  Besides, shouldn’t player named Broadway being playing in New York?