Nady & Marte Traded: What Are Reasonable People Saying?

Getting out from under the weight of New York garbage, er tabloids, some people put some rational thought into the Nady/Marte deal:

• Perhaps the guru on the Bucs minor league system, Wilbur Miller likes the way things are looking for the Bucs, if not this deal in particular:

The farm system, after six years of neglect, was almost completely barren. The structure of the team was similar to a franchise that has decided to expend all its resources on one or two shots at winning it all. The difference, of course, was that the Pirates weren't built to win it all, they were built to make a low-cost run at .500, and even then the talent level was so low that everything would have to go right for the McClatchy/Littlefield aim-low strategy to succeed. And, with many of their key players set to leave after 2009, they had only two years to do it...Whether Huntington made the right move remains to be seen. What we can say for sure now, though, is that he’s broken from the failed Dave Littlefield strategy of clinging to a losing roster as if it was the 1927 Yankees and trying to tweak it around the edges with penny ante moves. This is the first time in this millennium that the Pirates have made a difficult decision that was aimed at improving the team on the field. By itself, that shows things are different now.

• John Perrotto at the Beaver County Times counters the thought that the Bucs got fleeced, noting that we shouldn't have to endure any more disasters like Luis Munoz and Bryan Bullington getting called up and not pitching at all.

• Joe Sheehan at Baseball Prospectus thinks:

This is the type of deal Neal Huntington needed to make. Considering that he flipped an impending free agent (Marte) and a player having a career half, this is a very good deal for the Pirates’ first-year GM.

• Before this somewhat lost 2008 for Tabata, John Sickels compared Tabata to Fernando Martinez, the Mets untouchable prospect who they wouldn't trade for anyone:

I think Martinez has a slight edge in background/intangibles and in current performance, while they rate even in projection and tools. So overall I think Martinez comes out just a little bit ahead. But it's close, very close, so close that I ranked Martinez at #17 and Tabata at #18 on my Top 50 hitting prospects list.