More on the Bradford Deal

Baseball Prospectus runs down the benefits of the deal. The key takeaway:

As a one-for-one replacement on the roster for Bradford, this could be a
right-now upgrade, and whoever Mr. TBNL turns out to be will make it better
still, since that's basically a free body for buying back the roster time to
look at Cherry instead of employing the Moneyball celeb.

They ignore the $4.0 million in savings (the difference in cost between employing Cherry and Bradford), but for a team that is still looking to sign its number one pick and perhaps make a run at a very big-money free agent this offseason, that makes the deal even more of a postive from the Orioles perspective.

It's nice to have a GM that understands how to build a competitive organization; MacPhail and his staff realized that paying Bradford large sums of money to perform a job that Cherry could do for much smaller sums of money was not a wise decision. The trade emphasizes the importance of minor league depth, especially on the mound for largely interchangeable bullpen arms, and the folly of paying "proven veterans" lots of money on multi-year contracts to pitch limited innings out of the bullpen. If a deal involving a 33-year old middle reliever and a player to be named later can be deemed exciting, this one fits the definition for Orioles fans since it shows the people in charge finally know what they're doing.