Billy Wagner is not Boston bound

re: Wagner as long as the picks come. That means he has to be signed by someone. It would have been crazy without the possibility of picks. With the possibility, it is not crazy but I don’t expect that it is all that helpful and I have my doubts (see above) that Wagner will compete. But, no big deal. As for your question, I can actually give you my perspective on the moves that have been made. I will try to be honest and include cases where I liked the move but it failed.
a)RamRam for Coco-Liked it. Good move given that it was hard to expect more considering that teams knew we were trying to dump Coco.
b)Penny and Smoltz-well, I had mixed feelings. I was never a big fan of Penny. I liked the Smoltz part of it more (cue laughter here). I never expected Smoltz to be as needed as he was (eg did not expect to be down 2 starters) and I thought he might be tried as a pen arm first. Obviously neither of these were successful (although Penny was fine in the first half-so a partial success).
c)Saito-had no problem with that.
d)LaRoche-liked it.
e)VMart-Was ambivalent to mildly negative. I like VMart as a player, but worried he would not be able to catch much (still might not so much in the future). Upside is that he switch hits and catches and is a good teammate. Down side is we lost 2 arms drafted high (but not ones with high starter potential), and the fact that as a hitter, VMart is not such an upgradeover LaRoche. BTW-LaRoche has hit better for the Braves than VMart has for us-WAY better (in 20 games he has 7 HRs and a 1.239 OPS. He has 20 HRs on the year, just like VMart. Furthermore, could have used Masterson since he departed-had a shutdown start the last time out for the Tribe). So we basically traded guys who were projectable arms and young to get a minor upgrade in hitting but a major upgrade in terms of the hitting from thr catcher position. Maybe the best way to view the trade is that when VMart catches we get 2 hitters VMart and whoever else hits insted of Tek. I would say that the trade worked out so far, but did not have overwhelming logic behind it.
f)LaRoche for Kotchman-I like this (I have always liked Kotchman) except for the global clusterfuck we have created at 1b.
g)AGonz-I hate it. Before you jump on me to discuss how good AGonz has been-recall that after a few months of starting Nick Green had an OPS of 811 which was higher than Derek Jeter’s at the time. These things don’t last. AGonz is perhaps the worst starting hitter in all of the AL. If he does not look like that now, he will. While he may seem more sure handed in the field, UZR shows he clearly does not get to as many balls. We saw that at the start of the Penny-Yankees game where his Alex Cora-like range cost 2 base runners.
h)Wagner-meh. See above. Not too damaging but doubt is much of a move. We have 2 guys who can shut down lefties and need length (Tawaza?) from the pen, not a LOOGY.

OK-fire away.