Beat writer Joe Strauss of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has a rumor for you if you're awake:
↵↵↵Hearing that Cards made bid approaching $5M on Oswalt weeks ago but not likely happening. Rangers probably win, at $2-3M more w/perks.
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That's. . . interesting. . .
↵$7-8 million for Roy Oswalt is not too much of a reach. Even old and injured, he's a man who's been worth that much on the mound for pretty much his whole career. That's a deal unlikely to screw the Rangers up in any meaningful way financially.
↵The problem is more how he fits in with the Rangers. In 2010 -- against a weaker league -- Roy Oswalt's Phillies performance would have been the worst starter in the Texas rotation by a good margin. And unlike most of that rotation, Oswalt is on the wrong side of 30, and just suffered a major bulging disk injury this past season. His odds of actually improving Texas pitching seem slim at best.
↵The idea could be just to add as much depth to the roster as possible, which is not a bad plan; but if it comes at the expense of a Matt Harrison or Neftali Feliz getting to start, it seems questionable. Or, the idea could be to deal a young pitcher. Adam Morris had a tremendous piece on this very idea earlier today at Lone Star Ball, and suggests the Rangers might see Harrison's most recent season as the best he has to offer, and could be trying to sell high. Given a good haul, it would make some sense to strengthen a franchise that has a glut of young pitching talent and put in a good-enough stop gap for the coming season.
↵The coming season is kind of important, though, and that would probably need to be one heck of a trade to be worth losing a young arm that's already had a Top of the Rotation-caliber performance in his mid-20s while also making the current roster weaker. This just does not seem to make a lick of sense.
↵Then again, who am I to question the Rangers' front office? They're the ones that have won every AL pennant in the 2010s while maintaining a tremendously deep franchise; if I doubt them, I'm probably the one that's wrong. There might be something here we get and they don't.
↵Or there might not be.
↵Or this might just be one beat writer's unsubstantiated rumor.
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