It’s so short-sighted it’s not even funny.

We found out in 2009 that this team doesn’t have anyone on it’s major league roster who can get on base consistently. Trading the only player you have in your entire minor league system who looks like he might be able to add that extremely important dimension to your ballclub for the next 6 years is incredibly stupid.

What we do have however, is young pitching coming out of our ass, nose and ears. In fact, that’s pretty much all this farm system has (well, that and raw latin shortstops). Which is great, don’t get me wrong. Not knocking the farm system for that. But that’s your position of strength. That’s the pool you can deal a really good young player from and not say “gee, trading him killed us” a year or two down the line. Kinda like the Braves lost Neftali Feliz to us but they’ve still got Tommy Hanson.

That principle goes double considering the only thing we should be trading any of our top prospects for is another quality arm. I don’t know why there’s still people who don’t get this, but trading one of our quality arms for another, more established quality arm hurts us a lot less than trading our only quality bat for another quality arm.

And don’t give me this “we’re the Rangers, we’ll always be able to acquire offensive talent” bullshit that ESPN feeds the masses. Being the Texas Rangers doesn’t automatically mean we’re going to score a ton of runs every season for the rest of our existence. You still have to have offensive talent to score those runs, and nearly all our offensive talent is already at the big league level, failing to score runs.