While some bloggers might claim that a little birdie told them, oh no, not this blogger, no little birdie the size of my weewee here talking, nope, it was an ostrich-sized mockingbird telling me the dirt on what was happening in the Angels organization.
The Angels front office is a tight lipped organization. The Times, The OCR, Jim Hill at Channel 2, Rob Fukuzaki, et cetera, none of these guys has "a little bird" talking to them. Mark Gubicza on Wednesday's telecast pointed out that mere hours before the Mark Texeira deal went down Tony Reagins was shrugging that he was not in the middle of anything.
So you can believe the bullshit about "little birds talking" that con artists lay in their CON-crete websites in order to attract internet search traffic... or you can analytically look at what the team is most likely to do. There is no minor league coach out there with a clue that the Angels might snatch his best player. There is no reporter with an "in" beyond a coveted locker room press pass. Big whoop.
Following here are some deals that make sense. Fell free to rip them apart. I run the largest Angels blog on earth with the most traffic and the largest community, have been blogging about the team daily since 2003 and I don't claim to have any connection other than my own hunches based on a deep familiarity with the organization. And that is as good as anyone else. The best (and only) place to find an Angels rumor is with a beat reporter for another team with a leaky front office that the Angels are close to a deal with.
So the logic here is that the position the Angels will most likely upgrade will be Starting Pitching, First Base and/or Third Base (prospects as defined here are two minor leaguers, at least one a pitcher, not in the Halos Heaven Top Ten prospects)
- Hank Conger and Scott Kazmir (+salary relief) for Cliff Lee
- Peter Bourjos and Mike Napoli for Lance Berkman
- Brandon Wood and prospects for Jorge Cantu (can you find anything approximating a decent 3B on a non-contending team?)
Remember when you cried yourself to sleep about Orlando Cabrera, Casey Kotchman and Sean Rodriguez leaving you so soon? Well, someone you love and are attached to on this team is going out of town soon.
So little frickin' birdies might be talking to egomaniac jackasses in their dreams, but real trades are going to require the Angels giving up something and the Angels (in the person of GM Tony Reagins) are not going to be talking about it to anyone outside of Scioscia, Ken Forsch and Arte... so unless you have had a dentist implant a wireless transmitter in the filling of a molar in the mouth of any of those four, please save your little birdy bullshit for the softball field with your fat friends (who laugh behind your back at your bird-brained delusions anyway).