In order to get the picks, the A’s would have to offer Randy arbitration. They run the risk of him accepting. That is a risk the A’s will not take for a 35 year old outfielder who doesn’t hit as well as he used to.

That, and Holliday is a better player than him anyway.

and on some level, it makes some sense, but in this specific example, it doesn’t really make sense.

The bottom line, as others have pointed out, is that Winn:

a) isn’t a lock for type A status (Elias doesn’t really use defensive stats I believe)
b) could easily accept arbitration
c) Holliday’s projected price range only puts him in the range of 8-10 clubs, almost all of which will finish in the top 15 thus exposing their 1st round pick. In theory, even if Winn was an A and rejected arb, he could sign with a team like the Royals.

However, in theory, the idea of swapping two sure fire candidates for type A status (since the compensation should roughly be the same) is interesting. One glaring point you failed to mention is that Winn makes more than 5 million less than Holliday, meaning the A’s could shed millions in salary and still get the same compensation.

The problem is, for two player’s to both be pretty much surefire Type FA’s that wouldn’t accept arbitration, it’s likely their production would be too similar to be worth the salary hike. But if such a scenario arose where, compensationwise, it seemed likely that both players had equal value, it could be incentive enough for a losing team holding the better player to dump him to save money and net a few prospects (even if they weren’t the elite one’s you’d expect)

Holliday = poser. His overpriced ass needs to be pushing for a trade back to Colorado if he ever wants to hit 20HRs. AT&T would eat him alive. The #s you see now are the real Holliday. So if you want to pay $13 million for a hack by all means.

And it makes sense.

But I’ve actually been looking at this from the A’s point of view. If I’m an A’s fan, I’d rather take a chance on Randy Winn netting two picks, plus get two decent prospects than just hold on to Holliday and get two picks for him after the haul that the A’s gave up for him. In all likelihood, the two decent prospects (say, Sosa and Gillaspie) would be as good as anything the A’s would draft.

This is why I even bothered to post this. Because I actually would do that if I were the A’s.

Of course, this is based entirely on the assumption that there isn’t much of a market for Holliday (which is supported by just about everything I’ve read).

2 votes for I’m not an idiot!

thehavenot, I give you kudos for very creative and outside-the-box thinking. In the end, though, I don’t think that the A’s would go for this for fear that they would never get the 2 pick compensation package for Winn, or that he would actually accept the arb offer. In which case we would have to offer at least 2 more prospects in place of Winn (for a total of 4) – and Sabean would never go for that. He’s been very adamant about not trading a major package of prospects for any player that will be a FA at the end of this season.

In the end, I feel that Winn will actually be more valuable to us than Holliday. Winn has been heating up over the past 3 weeks, and I see him hitting much better in the 2nd half to bring his numbers back closer to what he’s been for us over the past 3 years. I also think that he’s a perfect #2 hitter for us – good patience and good bat control – to hit in front of Pablito. As he starts to get on base more he will create holes between 1B and 2B for Panda to hit through, and force pitchers to offer up more FBs to Panda for fear of the stolen base threat that Winn still provides. Finally, his ++ D in RF is much more valuable to us than Holliday’s + D in LF.

The problem as mentioned elsewhere is that Holliday is guaranteed to be a type A free agent & pretty much guaranteed to reject arbitration. Winn is a question mark as to whether he’ll be a type A free agent and is very likely to accept arbitration. With the market as it currently is i doubt Winn would get more than 1/$5M or 2/$8M. He’s going to get a much better contract than that in arbitration and so he’d be silly to reject, especially with him staying in the bay area.

In the end they’d end up giving up Holliday and his pretty much guaranteed 2 picks for Winn on a 1/$8M and a couple of extra players. Even if that doesn’t end up happening there’s a very good chance of it & that’d be why Oakland would never make this trade.

heres my thinking…
as it is right now, randy winn is not guaranteed at bats because he is seen as a 4th of and some other guys are getting into the mix. if holliday was to come here and not produce, he would never be benched or put into any sort of platoon. whatever we get is what we get, in a glib sense. i like the fact that if a guy is struggling now, bochy is getting other guys into the mix. we trade for holliday and there is no mix.
if he does well, then we are awesome…if he struggles, though, like i have a suspicion he would…well, then, we are stuck with him. i dont like that idea very much.

I’m actually surprised that 10 percent of the people who voted thought that this was a good idea.

Keep in mind the splits. Holliday historically was (as we all know) helped by his home park. Unmentioned thus far is that Randy is historically a second half player.

Holliday 2009 overall….276 .373 .419

Holliday Away splits Winn post break splits
2008 .308.405 .486 2008 .332 .375 .451
2007 .301.374 .485 2007 .324 .377 .496
2006 .280.333 .485 2006 .249 .296 .349
2005 .256 .313 .416 2005 ..354 .391 .646

While we may suspect some improvement from Holliday, can we expect that much at McCovey Cove? Add to this defensive value and I think Randy is actually the better bet.

this one is at least somewhat well thought out. I think we would have to ship a prospect with Winn that’s worth at least a sandwich pick. We might have to ship over Winn’s 2009 salary as well. I also don’t really have a good gauge in this market of what a basic Holliday for prospects trade would look like…

Billy Beane