No more Mack-o-whack

Littlefield is pretty busy today, as now he's shipped Rob Mackowiak back home to Chicago for Damaso Marte, a former Bucco. I think Marte is probably better than either two names I heard earlier today, Looper and Roberto Hernandez, though I think I recall hearing that he drove the fans in Chicago nuts last year.

This means a couple things, I think. Either Littlefield really really likes Freddy Sanchez or he's close to acquiring another third baseman. Just Monday, he was talking about how he liked a platoon of Sanchez and Mackowiak at third base next year, now Mackowiak is gone. Of course he also said Wigginton was one of the guys that would get offered arbitration next year, now he's gone too.

Trading for Marte also means that John Grabow will either be non-tendered or traded somewhere, as there simply isn't room for three lefties in the pen with a rotation stacked with lefties.

According to Rotoworld, Chad Blackwell finishes off the Mark Redman trade and Clayton Hamilton completes the Bobby Hill trade. Both of them put up some decent numbers pretty low in the minors last year and I don't know much else about them. Hamilton is of note only because we drafted him in 2003 and he didn't sign, only to be picked by the Padres the next year.

As you probably know, I wasn't a big Wigginton fan. Still, dropping him kind of confuses me like the dropping of Restovich did. Why did we call him back up and watch him kill the ball at the end of last year if we were just going to drop him in the offseason? I thought the reason both of them were around at the end of the year was to get a look for next year, now they're both gone. Why did we even bother wasting roster spaces last year? I'm not complaining that they're gone because neither is very good, I just don't understand the logic behind keeping them around last year.