Zach Day Can't Even Get Traded Right
You know you're having a bad season when they club tries to trade you but you can't pass the physical.Just days after being released from manager Frank Robinson's dog house when he was sent down to AAA New Orleans, the erstwhile pitcher now finds himself in the team's outhouse, the disabled list. After team officials agreed to trade him, a routine physical found that Day had a fractured bone in his wrist while pitching against the Reds last week. He took a ball off his wrist, and yet threw another 40 pitches. "The hits just keep on coming" said Day from New Orleans.
GM Jim Bowden was disappointed in the latest turn of events. "We finally got a deal that would help us and this happens" Bowden mused after hearing that his trade fell through. According to two different sources, the other team involved was the Florida Marlins, and the other player was outfielder Juan Encarnacion, an outfielder with 33 RBIs, 7 home runs and a .270 batting average. Day will be on the disabled list 4-6 weeks.
All of this kind of makes you wonder how Jim Bowden and Frank Robinson would incorporate Encarnacion into the Nats lineup. You would think that a player who has more RBIs than any current member of the team would start and not languish on the bench. Since a straight-up trade between the two players seems a little one-sided, there was likely another outfielder going to Florida. The question is, Who? My guess is Ryan Church, possibly Marlon Byrd. An outfield of Encarnacion - Wilkerson - Guillen would certainly have been a powerful one.
Alas, so goes the travails of a small market team. Unnamed sources said that the Marlins would have picked up a great deal of Encarnacion's salary. Hmmm. A guy with 33 RBIs, making only 4 million a year, and the team wants to trade him so bad that they're willing to eat his salary and take a pitcher who has only pitched one quality game this year.
On the surface, this trade would have been great, but maybe, just maybe, we should be happy we're keeping the outfielders we have now.
Zach, this just isn't your year.
# posted by Farid Rushdi @ 7:57 AM 
