Fire Gardy

I don’t know how much stock to put into this (scroll most of the way down), but I thought it was interesting:

One of the most uttered sentences in baseball lately, once it became clear the Yankees preferred keeping Phil Hughes to trading for Santana, was: “Phil Hughes had better be good.” Yankees GM Brian Cashman has, essentially, staked his job and reputation on Hughes, since Principal Son Hank Steinbrenner obviously would have voted to deal for Santana. If the Yankees sputter and Hughes doesn’t make an impact (at age 21, remember), don’t expect Steinbrenner to show much patience — with Hughes or his GM.

If Hughes has a down year this year, could it be possible that Hank will lose patience with him and potentially deal him next year for considerably less than Johan Santana?

I realize that it’s just a little early to start talking about next year’s Hot Stove, but I’d like to get this out in the open now. Because I’ve repeatedly been irked by the trend I’ve noticed lately regarding the way teams treat the Twins in trade negotiations. The Nationals said they wanted Garza+Baker+Slowey for Soriano. The Red Sox said they wanted Garza+Baker for Wily Mo Pena — one week before trading him to the Nats for a PTBNL. The Rays wanted Garza+Bartlett for Delmon Young — one week before trading the equally talented Elijah Dukes to the Nats for a PTBNL. The Mets thought Lastings Milledge was too valuable to give up for Johan Santana — until they traded him to the Nats for scraps. The Yankees thought Hughes was too much to pay, the Red Sox thought Lester and Ellsbury were each too much to pay.

And now Jayson Stark is already fanning the flames under a possible dumping of Hughes, presumably to a team other than the Twins, and presumably for a player less talented than Johan Santana.

It can’t be something lacking in the Twins’ negotiating strategy that urges teams to demand so much — they’re demanding it and they walk away when we try to talk them down. It can’t be that our farm system is so good that they think it’ll be easy to pick from it — we have only three prospects in the top 100, and two of them were just acquired in the Santana trade.

Is it possible that teams are just gunshy about dealing with the Twins because of the reputation for getting good deals? Will that reputation start to go away now that a new GM has taken over and has made two trades that were each criticized by the media and the fans? (Certainly one was criticized more than the other.)

I don’t know. All I know is that when the Yankees trade Hughes for a fourth outfielder or something, I’m going to be really, really mad.

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