How Michael Young Would Help and/or Ruin Everything

A talented player wants to be traded!  Michael Young, an offensively threatening right-handed hitter, feels unwanted by the Rangers.  Naturally, let’s pretend the Phillies are involved, because honestly, who doesn’t want to play for them right now.

The Phillies had a right-handed hitter, but he’s off making some other city develop a beard fetish.  If we were to pluck our fifth starting pitcher, Joe Blanton I mean, from his perch, and offer him in a trade for Young, we’d be filling the need we lost; a need that will remain a question mark for some time.

However, Young gets us only halfway to the promised land, in that his bat rests on the right side of the plate, but his glove prefers to dance around the infield.  Ideally, an outfielder is who we’d be scanning for in anything close to this situation.  So is this infield of hard-burners willing to fit around another guy for his offense?

Yes, Charlie made an effort–and then because of the sheer volume of bone cracks and muscle snaps echoing off the Phillies lineup–to rest the core players so they’d be fresh for a late season assault.  Problem is, there’s a difference between resting players because you want to, and resting players because if you don’t, Michael Young will get frustrated.

Jimmy-Last contractual year

Chase-Would play with a Saw trap around his neck.

Placido-Suddenly reduced playing time is part of the equation?  wtf

To answer your first question, yes, my personal notes are often written in clever enough fashion that I can just publish them on the internet without any modifications.  I mean, there was a picture of a robot with a chainsaw on his arm.

Secondly, yes; it might be a tough sell to the three starting infielders in particular, but this is a great right-handed bat we’re talking about.  Just like the one we don’t have anymore, but who is still getting unanimous votes for the FanSided NL East All-Division team.

On offense, the idea fits comfortably:  Insert, with measured frequency, a powerful, proven right-handed bat into the lineup, to fill a role we assumed was lost.  But with our biggest position player-hole being in right field, which I’m being told is not in the infield, it also thickens us where we’re already fat.  Yet with our rotation… how many balls are going to reach these guys in the outfield?

Then there’s Joe.  As anyone with a Phillies blog will tell you, he’s a great fifth starter, but if we were to make a radical trade, then the rich rotation is where we’d pick from to feed the spots where we’re poor.

Michael would love it.  He’s being slowly pushed off the Texas bench, as they swear they still want him around, yet stifle him.  He’s skilled enough, and he’s “hungry in the mouth” enough to only want to be on a contender.  If one comes calling, he’ll listen tentatively to their offer, and if the Rangers want to be as “accomodating” as they say, they’ll help.

Sure, it would be dressing up the corpse of the five-hole to look like Jayson’s still in it.  But that’s the whole point (Though Young could bat in a number of spots).  The guy’s a five-time All-Star.

During that time, however, he’s become 34 years old.  For a club with their arms flailing as they try to inject youth into their own spine, adding a thirty-four-year-old superfluous infielder is like accidentally sticking the needle in the wall.

Is the solid fifth starter on baseball’s deepest rotation worth giving up to fill an offensive need and a defensive option?  Would that be so different from the situation Young wants to get out of already?

Instead of Michael Young settling for less amidst an otherwise satisfied team, we’d have an otherwise put-out team settling around a satisfied Michael Young, and I don’t think it would be worth the tension–especially if Benny Fresh and Dom Brown collide in Clearwater or some other madcap right-fielded disaster happens.