“Strange things are afoot at the Circle K”. I am writing this while also watching Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure on Netflix. While the last couple days may not involve time travel or historical figures interacting with San Dimas in 1988 but there have been strange things afoot for people such as myself who are Brewers fans over the last couple days. Below is my Carlos Gomez trade reaction along with some commentary regarding the non-trade fiasco from the other day.
While it’s not exactly shocking that the Brewers have been in sell mode lately and there had been some discussions of possible trades involving Carlos Gomez, the conventional wisdom seemed to indicate that players such as Adam Lind & Gerardo Parra would be the first ones to be traded.
It all started when I came home from work on Wednesday night. I made a quick check of Twitter to see if any trades occurred and that’s when I found out that Carlos Gomez had been traded to the Mets for Wilmer Flores and Zack Wheeler (well at least for the next hour anyways).
Over the next 24 hours, the Mets would reveal themselves as a highly dysfunctional team that has disguised themselves as a playoff contender. Usually, when a trade is imminent and involving a player on the field, the manager will immediately pull the player from the game, say their good byes in the dugout and we see them a day or two later with their new team.
Instead, Flores was left in the game despite the fact that he was visibly emotional. Regardless of the reason for this, a good or even competent manager would have pulled Flores from the game. However, the Mets are currently managed by Terry Collins who was either oblivious or indifferent to what was going on with the team. This resulted in a chain of events so bizarre that even though Lucas Duda hit three home runs, it was barely even noticed.
As it turned out, the length of the trade was very short lived as the Mets backed out on the deal initially citing a concern over Gomez’s health even though he has only missed one game in July. Eventually, it turned out that this was merely a cover story for the fact that the Mets wanted the Brewers to pay for part of the rest of Gomez’s contract. Needless to say, my respect for the Mets organization is not very high right now and if they struggle down the stretch and end up going 75-87, I’m not going to feel very bad for their organization.
For the time being, it appeared that Gomez would be a Brewer for the time being which turned out to be less than 24 Hours.
The Brewers ended up trading both Gomez and Mike Fiers to the Astros. As I came home from work last night, I again went through the process of seeing Gomez get traded only this time the Astros didn’t change their mind an hour later.
When the Brewers traded J.J. Hardy to the Twins for Gomez, I initially did not like the deal (ironically these are the only two players that I have bobble-head dolls of. Over the last several years, it was fun seeing Gomez develop from someone with raw talent to one of the best players in the game. In addition to being good, he obviously enjoyed playing which even endeared him to people who were fans of other teams. For example, my wife is a Giants fan yet she cites Carlos Gomez as one of her favorite players and she was quite disappointed of hearing that Gomez got traded.
Obviously, this improves the Astros and shifts the balance of power in the AL West as they received one of the best hitters in the game. While all of the attention is currently fixed on Gomez, the Astros made a sneaky good upgrade in acquiring Fiers. Even at a worst case scenario, Fiers is a substantial upgrade over Roberto Hernandez and Scott Feldman at the back of the Astros rotation and gives them a solid #4 starter behind Dallas Keuchel, Scott Kazmir & Lance McCullers.
The best case scenario is that getting Fiers could be remembered for a long-time. While his 2015 numbers have been respectable but not spectacular (3.89 ERA/3.79 FIP & 9.23 K/9), if he gets on a hot streak, watch out.
One needs to only look to last year to see what his numbers would look like during an extended hot streak. After spending the majority of the season in the minors, he was added to the Brewers rotation towards the end of the season and was one of the few Brewers who was actually playing like they were in a pennant race. Last year, in 14 games (10 starts) he had a 2.13 ERA/2.99 FIP and had a 9.54 K/9. If he puts up similar numbers down the stretch with the Astros, we may be talking about them winning their first title in their history in a few months from now.
For those of you people who are superstitious out there, my one year-old son Zeplen (yes I named my son after Led Zeppelin and no that is not a typo, his name is shortened because he already has a long last name) may be their good luck charm (even though neither of his parents are Astros fans). My wife’s boss gave us some clothes not too long ago which also included some Astros shorts. Yesterday, he wore these shorts to daycare and the Astros get Gomez and Fiers. The last time he wore the same shorts was the same day that the Astros picked up Scott Kazmir.
Time will tell if my son actually has good luck shorts for a time that neither of his parents are a fan off but it should be interesting to see how things develop during the stretch. Until then, I hope that Gomez and Fiers have a most excellent adventure with the Astros.
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