The Red Sox have acquired right-hander Pedro Beato from the Mets as the player to be named later in the Kelly Shoppach trade, reports ESPN's Keith Law (on Twitter). New York acquired Shoppach earlier this week.
Beato, 25, has pitched to a 4.67 ERA with 5.6 K/9 and 3.7 BB/9 in 71 1/3 relief innings with the Mets over the last two seasons. They originally acquired him as a Rule 5 Draft pick from the Orioles prior to last season, then retained his rights by keeping him on the roster all summer. Beato has pitched to a 4.14 ERA in 37 Triple-A innings this season while also missing time with a shoulder problem.
So the Red Sox have traded Youkilis and Shoppach this year and have gotten virtually nothing in return. And they wonder how they continue to play bad….
Shoppach is a product of Fenway. Just look at his home-road splits this season. They weren’t going to get much back for him.
You forgot to mention the great haul we got for our 2 starting shortstops in the off season. The front office is just knocking it out of the park these days
Mortensen has actually been great when we actually have him on the roster. Too bad they send him down every other day.
Exactly. Mortenson and Tazawa with no room now for Carpenter. The BP is loaded and Atchinsin, Hill on the DL.
They do need to move some BP pieces who have done very well as Tazawa, Mortenson are under control and inexpensive for years to come.
In what world is the Scutaro deal looked at as bad? They got a useable piece back who’s provided value (Mortenson) and the money that was freed up allowed them to nab a starting RF (Ross), their Setup man (Padilla) and whatever value they’ve squeezed out of Cook. I’d say it’s been a huge win for them…
I fear the future of our fan base. Especially when there is anger for the return of a pending FA backup catcher.
Youkilis is still hitting in the ,230s and has had like 8 injuries over the last 2 years, Shoppach is a backup catcher… how do you expect anything more than “virtually nothing”?
Zach Stewart has looked pretty good in AAA so far, but yeah, I didn’t like the idea of trading Youkilis to begin with.
Shoppach though, they traded 6 weeks of a backup catcher who had no future with the team for 6 years of a relief pitcher. I fail to see how that is a bad thing.
Better than Jason Bay!
Maybe this will help the Red Sox actually beat-o an opponent for once. Doubt it though.
BP depth for a catcher who is a back up and was gone at seasons end any way? Fair deal for both sides.
I guess everyone posting rubbish without a clue here fails to realize that Shoppach was moved just so Lavarnway could get playing time and Boston was looking for AAA SP depth with options.. Nothing more.
Now Lavarnway (their C of the future) is playing behind the plate a couple games a week and he should have been on the roster to start the season had Shoppach not been blocking his path. Signing shoppach all along was a poor decision, just like signing Nick Punto to a 2/3m deal when Pedro Ciriaco does everything (and more) and makes MLB mininum.
You do realize Ciriaco never showed an ounce of talent until ST started.
backup/utility IF are not worth 2 year deals for 3m that have little talent and were 34 YO like Punto was.
A team can always dig up a retread to play couple dozen games per year,
or sign someone with actual talent if they want a utility guy and for 1
season, not 2.
That deal was horrid from the start. Nobody in their mind would take Punto off of their hands.
Agreed, was at the game tonight and when Punto came up to bat with guys on base all the Orioles fans were happy…the guy is horrible, hitting a solid .190 now. Ciriaco is good hustle type of guy though.
Wait, wait….. Punto is Cherington’s “signature” recruit for the 2012 season…
That seems fair. Too bad it couldn’t have happend at the trade deadline tho.
Damn I liked Beato.. If any of you don’t know who he is, he is pretty much a bullpen prospect with decent potential.
Beato’s nothing special, IMO Shoppach is much more useful to a club
he’s okay, I know he’s only 25 and still recovering from shoulder issues, but if he was any good he would have staked a claim in the mets atrocious pen this year. he had his shot with this club.
Ben Cherington is by far the worst GM in baseball. Let’s recall the decisions he’s made so far this year.
HORRIBLE in no particular order
1) Josh Reddick, Miles Head, Raul Alcantara for Andrew Bailey and Ryan Sweeney
2) Punto signing
3) Youkilis trade
4) Daniel Bard starter conversion mess
5) Shoppach signing
6) Shoppach trade
7) Kyle Weiland andJed Lowrie for Mark Melancon
8) Scutaro for Mortensen
9) Why the hell are we not trading players? This season was over a long time ago.
Good
1) Letting Papelbon go
2) Matt Alber for Craig Breslow
3) Signing Vicente Padilla for cheap, not saying he’s good
4) Signing Cody Ross (Not necessary if we kept Reddick)
He’s no Theo that’s pretty clear at this point
that’s for sure.
you have the benefit of hindsight, so your judgement is unfair.
1) Decent deal. No need for another left-handed outfielder, and plus, there’s Kalish. Bailey was expected to be a good closer
3) Agreed with this one.
4) Can’t blame him for this…had Bard worked out, you’d be singing a different tune right now. Hindsight is always 20/20
5) remind me how this is bad? you want lavarnway riding the pine up in the bigs?
7) lowrie was oft-injured, and Melancon was possibly a good set up man to take Bard’s place
i thought reddick was having a breakout year in 2011 and he’s controllable for a few years. if we had kept him, then we wouldn’t need cody ross and could spend on something else. bailey can be good but too injury prone.
regarding bard, if it aint broke don’t try to fix it. actually i think that relief conversion to starter is quite hard to do. you have to change a lot of things to go 6 to 8 innings.
lavarnway – thought would be good to give him some big league experience, maybe platoon with salty. shoppach signing was not really necessary. although i shouldn’t have put it in the horrible category. he was decent. im frustrated that they didnt get something better for him.
lowrie – we traded away 2 starting shortstops and didnt get much in return. relief pitchers are always flukey so i rather have a postion player that had break out potential like lowrie if healthy. even with the injuries, he has a higher WAR than aviles
hindsight is 20/20 but the end result is what matters and most of cherington’s moves or lack of really stink.
“regarding bard, if it aint broke don’t try to fix it.” Like Morales right? No way they should have given him a chance to start.
morales conversion is a low risk gamble. morales wasn’t an elite level closer like bard. Bard’s mechanics and head is all messed up now.
Right let’s call Benny boy the worst GM in baseball when he has almost ZERO input with what goes on. It is his first season as GM and he is Lucchino’s puppet. It’s hard to pull of deals when your hands are tied.
* How can signing Shoppach AND trading Shoppach both be horrible…?
* Scutaro traded I hated from day 1.
* Bard going to the starter role has ownership written all over it. They wanted to stay below the luxury tax and took the cheap way out.
* Did you honestly think trading Lowrie for Melancon was bad? It was a marginal trade that, at the time, was helpful to our bullpen.
* Agreed about trading players. They should have been more aggressive sellers. I also think this is ownerships’s fault though.
shoppach signing wasn’t a necessity when lavarnway was crushing it at AAA. this money should have been spent on better pitching. trading shoppach for nothing is bad.
kills me to see bard doing so poorly.
i’m really high on lowrie. even with his injuries this year, he’s been a better shortstop than aviles.
Reddick had major questions about his plate discipline, and whether he would be patient enough to actually get anything to hit and for his power to be able to play, so the trade, at the time, was a reasonable one, and even now it doesn’t look terrible; Reddick is playing over his head, and is already coming back down to earth. He’s never shown the ability to draw walks like he has this year, and there’s a good chance that pitchers will figure him out and his walk rate will fall back (it’s already falling like a rock – 14.5% in May, 13.4% in June, 7.8% in July, and 5.3% so far in August), and he’s never maintained a ISOp quite this high, so it’s possible that his power may regress a bit too (although he has always had good power, so he may be able to maintain it, but especially in that park it’s far from certain). Head is a 1B/DH who isn’t even hitting league average in AA. And Alcantara has a 5.00 ERA in A ball.
The Punto signing was whatever, he’s a backup utility player…
I didn’t like the Youkilis trade.
Trying Bard as a starter was a reasonable risk, and I advocated it at the time because if it worked out he would be several times more valuable as a starter than as a reliever – the fact that it didn’t work out well doesn’t change the soundness of the decision based on the information they had at the time.
You can’t say that signing Shoppach was bad and trading him was bad; either he’s been a waste of money and trading him was a good thing, or he’s been worth the money and signing him was good. And actually, he was worth the money and then they traded 6 weeks of a backup catcher for 6 years of a relief pitcher, so actually both were good.
Weiland was never going to be anything valuable (and had a >6.50 ERA before going down for the year with an injury), and Lowrie is good when he’s not injured, the problem is that is basically never. Getting Melancon wasn’t a spectacular return, but it wasn’t horrible either, and he’s mostly pitched exceptionally well since coming back up from the minors.
They turned out to be right about Scutaro, and the trade looks a lot better than most thought at the time (me included). Aviles has actually been a better player this year (playing in a tougher league – and a tougher park until Scutaro moved to SF), and they got six year of Mortensen for him. Trading Scutaro is also the only reason they were able to sign Ross (who you list as a good thing, and most consider one of the best free agent signings of the winter) and Padilla (again, a signing you said is a good thing).
It takes two teams to complete trade, and you have no idea what they are trying to do behind the scenes.
before the season began, even if reddick reverts some in 2012, his defense and outfield versatility made him an asset. even though ross has been good, we already had an in house option. what are the red sox doing holding onto ross now? he could have brought back a good prospect.
Agreed Alcantara isn’t worth much but miles head is still a legit prospect and good trade chip. he’s a dh/1b but he can hit. he’s only 21 adjusting to his AA promotion where the median AA player age is 24.
Converting Bard was too big of a risk unlike Morales. Bard was suppose to be our closer or 8th inning guy. His mechanics are all messed up now.
shoppach was not necessarily bad as much as it was not necessary and blocked the development of lavarnway
i think a lot of money was wasted on players that could have been spent
on a good pitcher like kuroda. think ross, punto, shoppach, cook.
When you can trade a guy who was (thought to be by almost everyone at the time) a borderline starter/probably 4th outfielder for a big league closer and another 4th outfielder it’s reasonable to make that trade. And the only time Head hit considerably better than league average (and hit enough to justify playing at 1B/DH) was for half a season in the California league, which inflates offensive stats significantly (second most hitter friendly league in all of the minors, only slightly behind the PCL).
Bard was never an elite level closer; he was an elite level set-up man, but he never topped 2.0 WAR and if he had been successfully converted to a starter (as well as people thought was possible) he could have been worth twice that, and he was not only willing to do it, but was the one pushing it, so the potential benefit was worth the risk.
Lavarnway came into the season with serious questions about his ability to stick behind the plate, so they were never going to make him the starter behind the plate, and even if they were going to give that to him it was Salty blocking him from that, not Shoppach. If he wasn’t going to be the starting catcher, playing in AAA was actually much better for his development than being the backup catcher in Boston and playing, at most, once or twice a week.
And going on the expectations of the starting rotation at the beginning of the season their money was better spent on those guys than it would have been on Kuroda. Obviously guys didn’t pitch up to their expectations, but if they had known they were going to pitch like this they wouldn’t have those expectations to begin with and they may have spent their money on someone like Kuroda, but you can’t say it was a bad decision now simply because you know how things turned out; they didn’t have the luxury of hindsight at the time, and given the information they did have, it was a legitimate decision to make.
Lets not forget how Cherington tried to hire Dale Sveum, who was signed to play right out of high school and had almost no management experience when they interviewed him….Sveum would have been a “yes, sir” guy…just like Francona was with Epstein.
I dont like this, giving a good pitcher, when we need more…
Aw damn…I liked Beato…Xaverian Alum.
Bay Ridge in the house!