Mets Trade Benson To Baltimore
On this day in 2006, the Mets traded Anna Benson (and her husband) to the Baltimore Orioles.
In return for Anna and Kris Benson, the Mets received John Maine and Jorge Julio. Eventually, Julio was flipped to the Diamondbacks in late May for Orlando Hernandez. Had El Duque not suffered a cramped calf, perhaps Mets history would have been different.
We’ll never know.
In any case, Happy Send Anna Benson To Baltimore Day!
Your photograh dept. has really improved in 2013. And for the record, what exactly did the Wilons have against Mrs. Claus/Benson?
And then many stories were written. And the Wilpons were annoyed.
*shrug* Doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. Certainly not the type of rationale a fan likes to see for a trade, though. On the other hand, “let’s trade a sack of baseballs for a stalled prospect and a wild flamethrower” is a fine rationale.
The Benson deal was 90-95% due to Anna. The deal turned out OK but in retrospect, but at the time, it wasn’t perceived as a great return — Maine was a failed prospect with mechanical issues and Julio was only useful in blowouts. If Minaya didn’t flip Julio for El Duque the deal would’ve been disastrous.
In retrospect, the Mets might’ve been better off with 32 starts by Benson than the menagerie that tried to fill the gaping hole in the rotation he left behind. He pitched OK for Baltimore, and likely would’ve had much more impressive numbers had he still been with the Mets, rather than on a bad team in the AL East.
As to Dickey, yeah, all the blather about the Dickey comments is not a BFD. The Mets all along looks to have been ready to trade him. His comments didn’t change the equation much at all from my vantage point. But, it’s yet another thing to latch on to for those around here who want to find anything to criticize Alderson and management.
Benson wasn’t some essential part of the rotation. Personality issues are going to affect teams sometimes. Personality is part of what people watch teams for too, it not all fungible fantasy baseball, let’s get rid of Hairston in July so maybe we will get some prospect who maybe might get us something maybe sometime.
Net, John Maine and El Duque gave them what Benson very well might have, you yourself once noting Benson likely having a short shelf life.
And as for Duque and Maine replacing Benson, no. Both were generally 5-inning pitchers, other than Duque’s sudden length in September. Benson was more of a 6-7 inning starter, and that extra inning or so would have meant fewer appearances and innings by relief pitchers.
Further, El Duque was a favorite of Omar Minaya, and he was a spare part in AZ. That said I would bet that he would have been acquired anyway, with or without Jorge Julio.
And he did suck: 4.9 Ks and 1.2 HRs per 9 in 2005 before the move to the AL East (where those numbers degenerated to 4.3 and 1.6). His entire Mets career looked like batting practice to me. Maine’s erratic and fragile pitching with occasional dominance was way better than that.
Not at all, but reminiscing provides an excuse to post a picture of an attractive woman and entertaining chatter on what has been a cold cold winter so far in Metsville. All we need now is to see the Braves win the Upton Jr. stakes.
If the D’backs extract enough talent from the Braves, I’m all for it. I think the Upton brothers, while good players, are underachievers who will provide more than their share of drama. No Cox, no Chipper — that club is ripe for some dysfunction. Given their budget constraints, if the Braves sink too much money into those two, and give up too much talent, my guess is they’ll regret it.
Of course, if they get J-Up for a bunch of prospects who never pan out, then they win the trade, and that sucks for us, drama or no drama.
So yeah, I’m seriously bemoaning the trade of Kris Benson. Not because he would’ve pitched like Sandy Koufax, but because he wouldn’t have pitched like Jose Lima, Geremi Gonzalez, Alay Soler, Victor Zambrano, or Dave Williams — a group that accounted for 25 starts and a 6-10 record (not to mention, enormous strain on an overworked but otherwise talented bullpen).
Assigning Benson’s suckiness in the vacuum of a few stats doesn’t come close to telling the whole story. His absence seemed like a tiny snowball, but it rolled down the mountain and likely played at least part of the role in the Mets’ downfall in the NLCS that year — indirectly.
If you want to argue Maine’s importance in ’07 and ’08, that’s another story. But who knows — the Mets might’ve been able to get Maine anyway, for someone of lesser value — the O’s had given up on him and was pretty much available to anyone interested in making an offer. For all we know, it could’ve been Maine instead of Jon Adkins and Ben Johnson that the Mets received in return for Heath Bell after the ’06 season.
First, Maine and El Duque combined for 35 starts, which is only two or three more than Benson would have made on his own. Second, Maine didn’t enter the rotation until July. Many of those crappy spot starters took the mound in the first half of the year — due mainly to losing Brian Bannister at the end of April, and then losing Victor Zambrano in May (which may have been a blessing in disguise). Why was Bannister part of the five-man rotation? Because Kris Benson had been traded.
So if Benson’s not traded, he’s in the rotation, Bannister is in the minors, and he doesn’t blow out his hammy running the bases, because he’s in AAA where there’s a DH. Likely, he’s the guy who comes up and replaces Zambrano in the second week of May. Maybe he still blows out his hammy running the bases, but at least it happens a few weeks later.
Further, Maine and Duque averaged about 5 innings per start, which meant the Mets had to keep more relievers available — particularly long relievers such as Darren Oliver. Oliver likely could have made a few spot starts instead of Lima, etc.
But the real gist of it is that the Mets rotation was in a constant state of flux due to the injuries to Zambrano and Bannister (and later, Hernandez and Pedro Martinez), so there were often two or three question marks among the five starters. If Benson is there, the Mets would have had one spot that never had to be filled.
In black and white, the extra three or four starts they provided over Benson would appear to beat my argument. But in reality, Benson provided, on his own, more depth and length.
– Give the Mets some credit for Jorge Julio. They recognized value, and recouped it. His stuff was electric enough that once Peterson kept him in the strike zone for a few weeks, the Mets could fill a need via trade. You and I now think of Julio as something of a joke, but that’s not how MLB GMs saw him in 2006.
– The intended rotation went from Pedro-Glavine-Trachsel-Benson-Zambrano with Bannister as backup to Pedro-Glavine-Trachsel-Zambrano-Bannister with Maine as backup, plus a guy we could trade for El Duque. The hype on Bannister at the time was that he could minimize walks and get grounders well enough to contribute. This wasn’t just a perception of silly Mets fans, it was near consensus that he was ready to be at least okay in the majors. Sounds like all we could hope for from Benson.
– In Maine, you get a young guy with a special tool (deceptive life on fastball) who’s cheap and under control for a while, and dominated AA. Even if he doesn’t pan out, it’s a respectable gamble.
Lima Time & Co. was weak, but who cares? We won all the regular season games we needed to win, no one anticipated Pedro & Zambrano going down, we got Duque for Julio, and Maine outpitched Bannister and beat the Cards in Game 6 of the LCS. You really have to search for a very specific angle to say missing Benson should have or could have or did hurt the team.
My point with the stats was that the K/9 + HR/9 + eyeball test all added up to “Benson is easy to hit”. I didn’t see any reason to expect him to put up better numbers in ’06 than ’05, and worse numbers shouldn’t have been a surprise. Plus, durability should not have been assumed, given his injury history.
I’m trying to think of a modern parallel for this trade. Maybe Joe Blanton for Henry Rodriguez and Martin Perez, with Danny Hultzen waiting in AAA? I’d do that in a second.