Friday, January 14, 2005

motivated seller

if you're listening to the Mother Ship 720, you know the corporate public-relations assault on sammy is in full swing. snide bits regularly float over the airwaves to ingrain themselves into the minds of cub nation: the team is the good guy, sammy and the boombox are bad, keep buying tickets. while some of the more obvious literature tried to talk up sosa's value, 720 is more subtly changing the popular perception of sosa from marquee name to also-ran deadweight cancer.

this is a strategy the cubs inflicted on sammy via don baylor back in 2000 as well, but ended up keeping him (despite the oft-rumored yankee offer of alfonso soriano and jake westbrook... sigh...) but one can't help to think that it backs the cubs into a bit of a corner. if you run down the star attraction, you then have to build him back up (after the coffeeboy pays the price for failure, of course).

perhaps the anticipated difficulty of doing that again explains why the cubs appear to be a motivated seller. infirmary denizen clifford floyd, a back-of-the-rotation righthander -- and eat the salary too? oh boy.

more on this as it happens -- apparently the baltimore expos are in on it too, so you know the price is low -- endy chavez and sun-woo kim, and macfail eats the $17 million, i'll speculate -- so stay tuned....

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