[horseofcourse]

What’s amazing about seeing these guys at the top of the lineup (along with Choo and Santana…assuming Acta restores him TO the top of the lineup), is where they came from as Brantley was merely the PTBNL in the CC deal and – I don’t know if you’ve heard this at all recently – Asdrubal came to Cleveland for ½ of a season of Eduardo Perez. While it’s odd to see the national media finally catch on to this idea that the Indians have committed grand larceny in some of the “minor” deals they pulled off from 2006 to 2009, it doesn’t make it any less enjoyable to read about.

As much as the national media is now finding out about how Asdrubal and The BLC were netted for Benuardo, making these trades work isn’t as easy as the Indians have made it look just isn’t the norm. In a piece that my friend Al Ciammiachella pointed out my eyes to, the Pirates cleared the decks just as completely since 2008 and as this B-Pro piece shows, they just don’t have much of anything to show for it. As Al wrote to me, “sure they didn’t quite have a Victor or a Lee to deal, but they’ve gotten nothing out of the Jason Bay or Nate McLouth deals, while the Indians turned Austin Kearns, Ben Broussard and Eduardo Perez into more than the Pirates got for their entire team, to say nothing of the Blake/Vic/Lee deals.”

Think about that again and, though I realize that you know where these guys came from (though AC has a nice, clean synopsis), it does go back to those decisions made by the organization back in the summer of 2006 (Cabrera, Choo), 2008 (Santana, Brantley, LaPorta…or is it MaTola), and 2009 (Masterson, Carrasco, and C. Perez, most notably for now) when the Indians were obviously not going anywhere in their division, as they decided not to continue down the path of “what might be” with the group of players that they held in those particular years.

Rather, they ripped the band-aid (“one motion…RIGHT OFF”) and to watch these trades reveal themselves as prescient is a sight to behold and it’s not something that’s lost on the Indians. To wit, as Mark Shapiro told Mike Harrington of the Buffalo News, “Periods like this are an affirmation of why you go through those tough times…We know and accept the reality of building teams in a market like this. It’s about making tough decisions that are never popular and are challenging emotionally to both us and our fans. But when you win again with players you believe in, it is extremely gratifying.”

(your latest episode of "Building America's Team" !)