Rays Send Aki Iwamura to Pirates for Random Prospect

Initially I really liked this deal for the Pirates, who during this season earned the benefit of the doubt in my mind. After learning that Iwamura was only under contract through 2010 however, I was less excited. As often gets said with deals like this, "well, the Pirates will probably trade him later," however, as Royals fans, we know that sometimes that doesn't happen.


Looks like Charlie at Bucs Dugout picked a bad day to get sick.

What's your take? (Relevant links after the jump.)

• Rosenthal: Rays Will Receive Jesse Chavez in Return For Akinori Iwamura - DRaysBay
• Iwamura on his way to the Pirates? - Bucs Dugout
• The Value Of A Win To A Losing Team | FanGraphs Baseball

Cameron at Fangraphs takes a sorta anti-stathead position on this trade:

While rebuilding teams have to look towards the future, they also have to avoid the death spiral that can occur when a small revenue team fails to put a good product on the field, drives away the fan base, and in the process lowers future revenues. There is a financial cost to losing that is magnified when teams are uniformly awful, and that cost can inhibit a team’s growth potential in the long run. Developing a fan base is in many ways like developing a farm system – it requires a present term investment that theoretically returns greater future value.

[...]

The key is to be smart about what kinds of investments you make. Russ Branyan’s signing by the Mariners last year is a perfect example of the kind of short-term, low-cost, quality acquisition that rebuilding teams should be looking to make. What the Royals did in throwing money at Kyle Farnsworth, Mike Jacobs, and Willie Bloomquist is an example of this kind of thinking gone badly wrong.

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