Baseball Prospectus author Will Carroll has opened up Will’s Mill for the weekend, and he’ll be burning up the phone lines fishing for all sorts of good trade rumors.
Today he mentions an offer Tim Purpura has given to the Orioles for Miguel Tejada: Adam Everett, Morgan Ensberg, and Fernando Nieve. According to Carroll, Tim Purpura is focused on Tejada and is being urged by Roger Clemens to go get him.
In Everett, the Orioles would be acquiring the game’s best defensive shortstop. His hitting, at .241/.300/.327 this year, lags far behind the average AL shortstop. The average AL shortstop is hitting .286/.342/.423, similar to the work of Eric Chavez or A.J. Pierzysnki this year.
On the 10th of June, Ensberg bruised his shoulder diving for a foul ball. He was hitting .256/.380/.562 at that point, though he hadn’t done much in May or June. In Ensberg’s 18 games after the shoulder bruise, he hit just .158/.422/.263. He drew plenty of walks but the power that resulted in 36 HR last year had vanished. Ensberg took live batting practice yesterday for the first time since being placed on the DL on July 10th.
Nieve, 24, has a mid-90s fastball and a hard slider. He was just sent down to Triple A a week ago because of Brandon Backe, but had been demoted to the bullpen upon Roger Clemens’s return in late June. It’s just a 15 inning sample, but Nieve did pretty well as a reliever: 8.2 K/9, 2.94 ERA, 1.17 WHIP. As a starter he had a 5.6 K/9, 4.67 ERA, and 1.28 WHIP. It is a fact that many pitchers add several miles per hour to their fastball by switching to relief, and Nieve’s two plus pitches make it easy to envision him as a future closer or top set-up man.
