Minneapolis Millers said:
Ras- what if some team pulled a Royals with us, offering a Myers type for Lackey? Couldn't that make the Sox better in 2014? What if the Padres offered Headley, Gregerson and a B- prospect for Lackey and Middlebrooks? Any team with extra hitting could trade it for Lackey, given our depth at SP. It's not that far-fetched.
Is there a Myers type to be had? He was the Baseball America #4 prospect in the game headed into 2013. I don't follow other teams' systems to even have a reasonable guess at who that might be going into 2014, but of course you would look at it, and maybe it would be worth it but the player would have to be pretty much ready to go from Day 1 the way Myers was and be an improvement over the incumbent or play first or catcher.
Also, that trade was almost universally regarded as a terrible one for KC and I don't think it's reasonable to assume your trading partners are morons. It happens sometimes, but not all that often, and after the Punto deal, we have no room to complain for years.
And just for the sake of perspective, let's pretend that Myers is available, and he plays third. You trade Lackey for him. Then you have to trade something else to get a Lackey quality starter back or you're going with a rotation of Lester, Buchholz, Doubrton, Peavy, and Dempster and I don't think anyone wants that. Well Lackey quality pitchers are expensive so we'd be trading more than one of Barnes et al. which, even if it evens out the overall major league talent level, cuts a pretty big hole in the pitching prospects you're going to be using over the next few years which means that if you kept the wrong ones, you end up making the near future worse instead of better. And sure, maybe whatever pitcher you end up trading for is going to be good enough that you can afford to get less from that crop of pitchers but at some point you have to stop talking in hypotheticals and start dealing with what is reall there.
Which is to say, is there a Myers type to be had, and if there is, is there a Lackey-caliber pitcher to be had, and if there is, then why isn't the team with the Myers type talking directly to the team with the Lackey type rather than bringing us into the middle of it?
Also, I'm not going to pretend to know all that much about the Padres, but they don't look to me like a team that is going to be trading offense for pitching any time soon.