Analyzing Billy Beane's Trades

Billy Beane has already made two big trades and can make a few more before the non-waiver trade deadline this year. He has traded Rich Harden and Chad Gaudin to the Cubs for Eric Patterson, Sean Gallagher, Matt Murton and Josh Donaldson and has also traded Joe Blanton to the Phillies for Adrian Cardenas, Matt Spencer and Josh Outman. He still has a few more pieces to trade, his top level players that he wants to deal are Huston Street, Justin Duchscherer, Mark Ellis and Alan Embree. The less attractive options are Eric Chavez, Bobby Crosby and Emil Brown. Billy Beane is overhauling/rebuilding this team. If he does manage to trade Justin Duchscherer he'd have managed to trade away his hole starting rotation from last year in a 6 month span.

Billy Beane is the master at finding diamonds in the rough and future star players in waiver pickups and in blockbuster deals. So if teams get ripped off how come they keep coming back for more? There are three reasons: A) teams focusing on their present before their future, B) no one's perfect(meaning that Billy's bound to make a mistake sooner or later, like in the Tim Hudson trade), and C) baseball teams are stupid.

So what did the A's get from these trades? They got two future extremely athletic 2nd basemen, a major league ready starter and a minor league very talented lefty, a couple outfielders with power and a young interesting projectable catcher. Altogether he got
seven young talented ballplayers for three pitchers. Altogether the pitchers are average, injury prone and below average. Meanwhile Billy Beane got a quarter of a baseball team. I can guarantee you that all of them will make it to the majors and at least 4 of them will become solid players while two will probably become stars. These are the kind of trades Billy Beane makes he just rips every team off(except for the Braves).