The day after the deal

There's lots of reasons that it's hard to judge a trade in the immediate aftermath, there's personal bias, there's the fact that no one will play a meaningful baseball game for 2 and 1/2 months, and there's the problem of not knowing everything that went down before the trade did. Still, after lots of thinking, my take on this trade can be boiled down thusly:

It's a good trade for us any way you look at it. We have a huge strength (bullpen) and a huge weakness (lefty bat). We used the strength to fill the weakness. That's a good trade. It's not going to instantly vault us into contention, it's not going to give us a terrifying offense, but it is going to make us better for the next few years. That being said, if DL had the chance to make the exact same trade for Duffy instead of Lillibridge, the trade isn't nearly as good as it could've been. I'm not exactly on the same page as Nate Silver, who's saying Lillibridge is one of the 10 or 15 best prospects in the game, but I haven't seen the guy play so it's hard to say. To be honest, I never could convince myself that Duffy was the type of players the Braves would accept to get the job done (though I do realize it was reported everywhere). If that's the case, then this is a great trade. I'd certainly rather give up Lillibridge than any of the four starters we have in Pittsburgh. This trade doesn't forgive five and a half years of mismanagement by Littlefield, it doesn't make us instant contenders, and it's probably not even a slam dunk as far as trades go. But it is a step in the right direction and I'm as happy with that as just about anything else.