I am not here to tell you about a dream I had, because there is little more uninteresting than someone else’s dreams. Instead, it’s baseball-related and I have a question about dreams.
Last night I dreamt that the Cubs traded Patrick Wisdom and Trevor Williams to the Mets for James Wood, who is a top Padres outfield prospect. Now, obviously I can see some parallels to the actual trade with the Mets last deadline, plus the ever-present interest in acquiring Padres prospects, and that’s probably why it bled into my head the way it did. But why would my brain – just because it’s “asleep” – have so many glaring factual errors? I know Trevor Williams is already on the Mets. I know James Wood is not in the Mets system. Why would my sleeping brain do that? I’m sure you see this kind of thing all the time in your own dreams, and I just wonder why we mess up simple factual stuff.
Bringing it back to the baseball of it, I also think I had the Mets on the brain because of this tweet:
I won’t stake anything on Cerrone, who used to cover the Mets extensively but who has fallen off my radar in recent years. So I can’t speak to the veracity of the rumor. But I think it’s worth saying that *IF* the Mets seriously considered trading Francisco Alvarez, one of the three best prospects in baseball, it’s hard to imagine it being for any player seriously on the block other than Juan Soto (Luis Castillo is not enough, right? And Shohei Ohtani isn’t ACTUALLY being traded, right?). And boy do I have a hard time seeing division rivals getting together on that scale of a deal.
… which means I start doing mental backflips (dreaming, if you will) to try to figure out how the Cubs could put together a package of players that could MAYBE net Alvarez, but I still don’t see it. Even a Willson Contreras, Ian Happ, David Robertson combination package is probably not a “good idea” for the Mets to send out Alvarez for, even if you could make an argument that there’s a value equivalency there.
In other words, don’t get your hopes up for Alvarez. The Cubs tried to target him a year and a half ago in a possible Kris Bryant deal, long before Alvarez had truly exploded, but nothing ever came together. At least the Cubs’ scouting was right. (The Cubs should just trade for Soto themselves … )
All right. Enough of that. See, told you it was baseball-related. On to the Bullets …