Peavy Deal Dead

So sayeth Robo:

The Cubs’ pursuit of Jake Peavy is over.

Padres general manager Kevin Towers said he was told by Cubs general manager Jim Hendry on Thursday that the Cubs were no longer interested in pursuing a deal for the former Cy Young winner.

The teams had spoken for weeks about a potential trade but talks broke down this week.

The Cubs were frustrated by the Padres’ attempts to seek five or six players for Peavy with one team executive saying, “They’re looking for a Herschel Walker-type deal.”

It was fairly obvious weeks ago that (a) Towers was going to ask for a lot; and (b) that Peavy wasn’t going to help by being coy with respect to where he would or would not play. That pretty much killed every possible deal, with Atlanta and Chicago each realizing that Towers was driving a harder bargain than he really had a right to be driving.

The Padres need to stop, take a deep breath, plan on entering 2009 with Jake Peavy as their opening day starter, hope that Peavy gives some random interview somewhere in which he says he “just wants to play for a winner” and then says absolutely nothing else, and then try to trade him next June.


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pete
15 years ago

Get this:


Agent: Peavy ‘frustrated’ with Padres

Padres star pitcher Jake Peavy is ‘frustrated’ by the team’s inability to trade him after threatening to do so for months and ‘shaken’ over the Padres’ latest failure to deal him to the Cubs after weeks of talks, Peavy’s agent Barry Axelrod said.

‘We tried to cooperate as best we could,’ Axelrod told SI.com in a phone interview. ‘Frankly, Jake is frustrated now more than ever. And I’m more frustrated than ever.’

http://www.fannation.com/si_blogs/hot_stove/posts/31661

Unbelievable. As I and many others have pointed out over the past couple weeks, the Axelrod and Peavy couldn’t have done more to torpedo Towers’ attempts to trade Peavy. After all the public talk of where Peavy will and will not go, and on what terms, he and his agent have forfeited any right to be ‘frustrated’.

If anyone should be frustrated it’s Towers, who has repeatedly been put in the position of trying to get an acceptable return for Peavy despite the entire world knowing that only one team was in the running at each step.

If Peavy really does want to be traded (and, despite this, I kind of have my doubts), he and his agent should shut up, wait for the Padres to come to them with a proposal, then ask for compensation to waive his no trade clause.