DANA POINT, Calif. – Jake Peavy is going to be a Brave or Cub in the next few weeks.
Padre GM Kevin Towers said yesterday, “The train has left the station.”
Translation: There is no doubt his ace will be traded.
Towers said he had moved far enough along in trade conversations during the just-completed GM meetings to be confident that Peavy will be dealt before the Dec. 8-11 Winter meetings in Las Vegas.
MORE: Joel Sherman’s Hardball Blog
The Braves remain the front-runner for Peavy. However, the Cubs are trying to obtain Peavy and re-sign Ryan Dempster. That would enable them to form a dynamic rotation, with that duo plus Rich Harden, Ted Lilly and Carlos Zambrano.
The Dodgers also have weighed in on Peavy. But the Padres would expect a greater return on Peavy from a division competitor, and the Dodgers seem more focused on either retaining Derek Lowe or chasing CC Sabathia than trading for Peavy.
Towers spoke to Peavy’s agent, Barry Axelrod, on Wednesday night to inform him of the progress and to ask Axelrod to get assurance from Peavy that it was OK to finalize a trade to one of these teams. Towers said, “We got the thumbs up.”
Despite reports to the contrary, the Yanks are not in the Peavy market. He has a no-trade clause and does not want to pitch in the AL.
Plus, one key element that makes Peavy so enticing is that he has a very reasonable four years at $68 million left on his pact. To go to the Yanks, Peavy almost certainly would have asked that his contract be extended to look more like the six-year, $137.5 million package signed last year by Johan Santana and the Mets.
The Yanks did not want to give up the prospects and pay the money for Santana, and he was more of a sure thing health-wise, plus more likely to succeed in the AL, and to thrive in New York.
Yankee GM Brian Cashman had dinner Wednesday night with Scott Boras (the agent picked up the tab), and discussed four clients in particular: Derek Lowe, Mark Teixeira, Oliver Perez and Manny Ramirez. It is probably in that order that the Yanks have interest.
For now, the Yanks’ baseball operations department has minimal interest in Ramirez. For the Yanks to get serious about the slugger, they would have to:
1) Strike out on a lot of pitching and decide to bulk up the offense further.
2) Have ownership decide off-the-field issues such as TV ratings (especially when Manny would play against Boston) were important enough to obtain Ramirez.
3) Either put Johnny Damon full-time in center field or find a trade for Damon, Hideki Matsui or Xavier Nady.
4) Have total amnesia about what a problem Ramirez was so often in Boston. Keep in mind that Cashman and Boston GM Theo Epstein are friendly, and Cashman almost certainly knows insider details about Ramirez’s bad acts in Boston that are not common knowledge.
An AL executive threw out one other potential problem in a Ramirez-Yankee marriage: “Could you imagine rigid Joe Girardi having to manage Manny being Manny?”
Met officials also continue to say that Manny is not on their agenda. The only glimmer provided by Met executives is that they began the 2004-2005 offseason without Carlos Beltran (another Boras client) on their radar, and enough dominos fell (mainly the Yanks’ non-interest) that they wound up with Beltran. So the Mets gave themselves the “you never know” wiggle room.
There continues to be buzz about Robinson Cano going to the Dodgers, with Russell Martin or Matt Kemp being players of interest for the Yankees. But Yankee officials say it is much more likely Cano will remain their second baseman next year.
Andy Pettitte has a relationship with Ranger president Nolan Ryan, so there was speculation at the GM meetings that, perhaps, Pettitte could wind up in Texas rather than New York. But a Ranger official said he sees almost no chance of that occurring.