But his baseball analysis isn’t much better than the average knowledgeable fan. He also hated the Tucker-for-Dye trade.

We really dodged a bullet.

Cone was not some hot prospect in 1987, he was a wild starter, converted to a reliever, who had not done well at the MLB level. The Royals were loaded with pitching, and Cone was not even among the top pitching prospects in the organization (I think Scott Bankhead and Melido Perez might have been considered better). The Royals needed catching, and although I think trading for catchers is a dumb idea, and Ed Hearn wasn’t exactly a known quantity, it at least made some sense.

In 1995, you knew what you had in Cone. He was the reigning Cy Young winner. He was still in the prime of his career. The Royals needed to shed about $12 million from the payroll, but they had a number of ways to do this – dealing Jeff Montgomery, Kevin Appier, Brian McRae, Greg Gagne, or Tom Gordon. Cone was in the last year of his deal, so maybe his value was diminished somewhat, but they had no shortage of suitors for him, and the fact they only got a mediocre AAA second baseman, a minor league reliever with one good year under his belt, and a no-hit shortstop in low A ball is a testament to incompetence. They rushed that trade, presumably because David Glass, then CEO, required payroll be slashed immediately, rather than give Herk Robinson time to search for the best deal. They could have cut payroll, but still set up the organization for success the next few years. Instead that deal would be emblematic of the organization’s inability to flip valuable commodities for good young prospects as successful small market organizations have done.