If all the results are in, Dave Littlefield's performance at the deadline was, in a word, horrible. It was even worse than I expected.
OUTGOING
1B/OF Craig Wilson
SP Kip Wells
1B Sean Casey
Minor league SP Oliver Perez
RP Roberto Hernandez
INCOMING
RP Shawn Chacon
Minor league RP Jesse Chavez
Minor league RP Brian Rogers
1B/OF Xavier Nady
Chavez and Rogers are spare parts. To compare them to, say, Jonah Bayliss in terms of their potential would be unfair to Bayliss. To compare them to Matt Capps would be ridiculous.
Chacon had a 7.00 ERA for the Yankees. He's not that bad, but he's pretty freaking bad - for the last three years, he has struggled to strike out as many batters as he's walked. That's extremely unlikely to produce even halfway decent results in the majors. His salary is about the same that of Craig Wilson, for whom he was traded. I don't think he is eligible for free agency after this season, but I'm not sure that's relevant, since I'd scream bloody murder if he were taken to arbitration anyway. Since Wells and Perez are now gone, he may occupy the vacant 5th spot in the rotation for the rest of the year, and then he'll probably gone. Since the return for Wells was so pathetic, one wonders why the Pirates couldn't have just traded Wilson for someone who, you know, has value and kept Wells. A pitcher with a 7.00 ERA and a multimillion-dollar salary really should have had negative trade value, but that's all Littlefield got for Wilson.
Nady is a slightly below average player, as I said in an earlier thread. He doesn't hit that well, and he doesn't play defense well either. Unlike Wilson, he'll be around for a couple years, but it's debatable whether that's a good thing - at his age, he appears to merely be a patchwork type of player. That's way too little to get for Perez, who you'd think a lot of teams would like to take a stab at fixing, and Hernandez. The Pirates even had a bunch of leverage in that trade, since Duaner Sanchez, one of the Mets' top setup men, just got injured in a car accident hours ago. However, they wound up losers in that trade as well. But at least Littlefield ended up finally catching Nady, his big white whale.
I don't see anyone here who's likely to help much. I even see one player in Chacon who's likely to outright hurt the team.
In short, I can't believe how bad this is.