Another thing that you’re forgetting is that the A’s have built a serious pen that will end up being like the M’s circa 2001. IMHO they have as much chance as the Angels in 2005.

But, Ir recall reading that Cameron volunteered to move to RF is the Mets signed Beltran. That strikes me as a really poor decision on the part of the Mets (if you’re going to put both Cammy and Beltran out there, why waste Cammy is right?), but if that’s what hey want to do then Cameron seems amenable.

As far as Cameron is concerened, I’m skeptical that he’d want to come back here, considering his long battles with SAFECO. And there’s that budget for salaries….

Being that it seems likely that Beltran will be signing with the Mets, where does that leave Cameron? I know they have Floyd in left, but who’s in right for them? I checked MLB.com and while Diaz might be a prospect, I don’t know much about him. I was wondering, based pretty much upon this Diaz guy, whether Cameron will merely slip into right (or Beltran perhaps?) or if Cammy is now on the trade block (maybe it would help them to clear payroll for the Beltran signing)?

And the natural and completely predictable follow-up question is: what are the chances of Cammy making a return to the M’s? I know there’s lots of angles to take on this – given the rising of Reed, our surplus of outfielders and the Met’s possible surplus of outfielders, our general need for power balanced against whether Cammy’s average would hurt us. Then there’s also the whole Pokey signing angle and wondering how much Cammy might have made known his desire to play for the M’s again. Anyway, I’ll leave it to you guys to play that out.

Kendall had a 47.5 VORP last year, while Miller had only a 16.8. It’s hard to argue against the suggestion that Kendall is a tremendous upgrade at catcher. At the same time, Hudson and Mulder had 48.6 and 37.2 VORP, respectively. Knowing that Hudson would be gone anyway after 2005, and perhaps knowing something about Mulder that the rest of us don’t, it’s easy to see that the huge upgrade at catcher might make up for the loss of Hudson, if not the loss of Mulder. Given the nutso salaries being doled out to #3 starters, getting some high-potential guys under club control for the next 4-5 years makes sense as well.

Although this is really simplistic, and much better analyses have been done on this site and elsewhere, I just hope to show that (1) I understand the Kendall/Hudson/Mulder deals, and (2) despite their seeming madness, they may actually turn out to represent an improvement to Beane’s record with larger (in terms of salaries and/or importance of the players involved) transactions/deals.

You’re confusing the cause and effect of the A’s payroll situation. You may or not like Beane but you cannot deny that he has made some very shrewd moves over the course of his tenure in Oakland. He did not go out and trade for Kendall without knowing what it was going to do to his payroll. Beane was anticiapting the Mulder and Hudson trades BEFORE he acquired Kendall. Skip Bayless wrote an article on Dec. 23 that states Beane was talking to GMs last August about how he was going to trade off two of his Big 3.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=bayless/041223

Now, I’m not a big Bayless fan but I hope he has the integrity to not make up his facts. Beane knew he’d be trading two of his ace pitchers and that it would free up the money necessary to acquire Kendall. The fact that Mulder and Hudson got traded after Kendall came to town is just a matter of timing, nothing more.

*I realize my methodology probably reveals my ignorance in a couple statistical areas, but this is the best data I have.