Heilman to the Mariners and then the Cubs

The offseason does crazy things to people. Hope springs eternal and that’s great and all, but there’s a fine line between hope and delusion. Example: last summer the Mets probably couldn’t have paid anyone to take Aaron Heilman off their hands, yet this winter, not one, but two teams have traded for him.

This isn’t just a Heilman thing. It happens a lot. Some Joe Palooka is almost run out of town on a rail in August, and the next winter some GM thinks, “ya know, if I can get a Palooka and somehow sign a couple of live arms, we might just be able to do something.” Of course no one has ever explained to me what a “live arm” is. Regression to the mean notwithstanding, I don’t know why such thinking prevails every year.

Whatever the case, thinking that someone looks better through the hazy shade of winter is close enough to a similar phenomenon that I’m going to dub it “snow goggling.”