Phillies Reveal Ben Revere Trade was Almost Asdrubal Cabrera Trade

By now, it’s okay to accept that Shane Victorino is not coming back.

“Darn it!” David Richard–USA TODAY Sport

It was hard to maintain hope when everyone was saying, “It’s not going to happen.”  It was even more difficult when I traveled to Dodgers Stadium and screamed a passionate anthem of Philly’s admiration from the left field bleachers and he didn’t turn around and wave like I’m pretty sure he might have before.

Harder still it became when he signed to play for another team and began tweeting about how excited he was to do so.

So now that we’ve signed a new center fielder to play Shane’s position for the next few years, it may be time to let go.

And in retrospect, this Ben Revere trade wasn’t so bad.  If Trevor May turns out to be a genius and Revere is nothing more than the fodder for assholes to dress up in Ben Franklin and Paul Revere outfits at Phillies games than yes, we are going to look like clowns.  But there’s no way to tell what this is or isn’t yet, and all we can do is say we’ve got a hyper-quick, body-chucking scamp in center whose excited to play.  And that’s fun.

What’s most interesting about the Ben Revere trade, however, was that it was almost the Asdrubal Cabrera trade.

The package would have remained similar–Vance Worley and some prospects.  But instead of a promising AL Central outfielder, we’d have picked up an AL Central infielder with a name far more difficult to make a Philadelphia-related pun out of.  Who is kind of an amazing fielder.

And kind of younger and decades more spry than the third baseman the Phillies recently hired.

The deal apparently fell apart when the Indians requested one more thing other than Vance Worley.  Ruben Amaro, insulted beyond human measure, hurled the phone against the wall, reconstructed it out of thousands of phone-bits, called the Indians back, and slammed the phone down.

This left the Indians still on the search for other teams’ Vance Worley’s, while the Phillies took another team’s Michael Young, Michael Young.

And now we have to watch Young play third for a year, which may be ‘cute’ at best, but the counter point is that we also get to watch Ben Revere play center for a few years, which is cool.