Jed Lowrie

Posted by Jason Wojciechowski on November 2, 2014 at 8:02 PM

Susan Slusser has a report on Jed Lowrie's situation with the A's, which boils down to, "It's been fun, Jed, good luck at the next stop." Which was predictable, I guess, even if we were all twiddling our thumbs wondering what kind of odds to put on the A's making a qualifying offer to Lowrie. At $15 million, though, and with the way the QO has been destroying the market for players of his caliber (i.e. not the superstars), there's a real chance he'd accept the offer. That's great from the perspective of "now we have a shortstop" but it's not great from basically any other perspective -- even if $15 million represented a reasonable market value for his services (and it's probably a little high), the A's can't pay national market value for wins and expect to have that add up to enough to get them into the playoffs.

Slusser has some thoughts about where to get a shortstop now, including the oft-mentioned Stephen Drew, an unnamed Cub, or a Diamondback. Slusser asserts that the Cubs have depth at the position, which is true in the sense that they have Starlin Castro and Javier Baez and Addison Russell, and they do have weakness in their starting rotation (at least until they sign Jon Lester this winter), but what does that leave the A's doing, sending them Jeff Samardzija? I don't see it.

The Diamondbacks probably present a more intriguing possibility because they could make Cliff Pennington or Didi Gregorius available, leaving themselves with Chris Owings plus whoever they don't trade to man the middle infield, along with Nick Ahmed. Neither Pennington nor Gregorius should cost what Castro/Baez/Russell would cost in trade, which is fortunate because the A's don't have anything left in their farm system.

Or, hey, there's always Nick Punto.