Machado Staying Put, Ask Reportedly Included Russell, Montgomery, Almora

If you thought Ken Rosenthal’s hypothetical package of Addison Russell, Mike Montgomery, and a prospect for Manny Machado was crazy, wait’ll you get a load of what MASN’s Roch Kubatko reported Thursday. And this is a dude who knows what’s up as far as the Orioles are concerned, not just some rando egg avatar on Twitter throwing stuff out in the hope that it comes true.

I’ve heard that the Cubs’ discussions with the Orioles included shortstop Addison Russell, center fielder Albert Almora Jr. and left-hander Mike Montgomery. The Orioles aren’t going to come away from a trade with the only pitcher being Montgomery, though they’d gladly take him as a needed southpaw.

Wait…I mean, that’s…I’m just…wow. Because I’m at a loss for words, please allow me to express my thoughts on this scenario with a series of GIFs while I take a few moments to compose myself.

Okay, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, we can address this with more civil discourse. Which is to say that we can be like, “Dan Duquette, bruh, what the f— were you thinking?” Not only that, but Kubatko’s dismissal of the trade is based on the fact that the Orioles “aren’t going to come away from a trade with the only pitcher being Montgomery.” LOL, wut?

I suppose I should point out that Kubatko isn’t necessarily saying that the Orioles actually required a package of all three Cubs players, only that talks included those names. So it could have been some combination of two of them, which still would have been insanely exorbitant. In his assessment of Machado’s trade value, FanGraphs’ Dave Cameron wrote that Russell alone would have been a “crazy overpay.”

That’s not what you’ll find if you happen to do the unthinkable and wade into the comments on Kubatko’s column, in which O’s fans are almost having to convince themselves that they’d do this 3-for-1 swap. Gee, guys, I don’t know if we’d be cool with a total of 14 years of control over three players, one of whom is an All-Star and another of whom is a lefty starter.

Make no mistake, this is an insane haul and it’s irresponsible to even put it in print without acknowledging it as such. The Cubs would be stupid to do such a thing unless they were getting back Dylan Bundy or Kevin Gausman and more.

But that was never going to happen, especially when the O’s need pitchers had reportedly been asking for two starters with at least four years of control in exchange for Machado. It should come as no surprise, then, that Baltimore is moving forward with Machado still in the fold.

While you can’t really blame them for aiming high, various events both in and out of their control have led to another bungled offseason in Baltimore. They shot for the moon and ended up getting kicked in the ass by both this Machado no-deal and Zach Britton’s ruptured Achilles.

Which reminds me of that college student who had the worst Wheel of Fortune appearance ever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtSYXxoc0Zw

In any case, I guess we can go ahead and put all this Russell-for-Machado nonsense to bed, though I do think there was a degree of merit to the discussion. In addition to giving us one less thing to fight about online, crossing this rumor off the list now leaves us free to focus all of our attention on Yu Darvish with laser intensity.

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