Okay, so in the past day, Hunter Pence has been reportedly pulled off the trade market and put back on. We’re officially in the realm of the NFL draft smoke screens, where you can’t trust anything said about any player. Hunter Pence may or may not be traded, but we can’t know what’s going on until a trade comes out.
We do know that the Phillies are willing to pay the luxury tax, so they should be willing to pick up Pence in a deal. Does Philadelphia have enough to make a trade happen? OremLK over at The Crawfish Boxes made a great case why Houston probably will not get Domonic Brown for Pence and may be lucky to get Jonathan Singleton. Tim Dierkes also touches on the reasons why top prospects do not get traded.
On the Wandy front, there are these persistent connections to the Diamondbacks, as that report broke on Sunday and then we hear that Houston was scouting the Arizona Triple-A team yesterday as well as the Braves’ Triple-A players. We talked about this on the podcast Sunday over at TCB, but Kevin Towers and Ed Wade have solid history, which has to help the possibility of a trade.
Oh, yeah, the Braves just may still be interested in Hunter, too. As we’ve talked about before, there’s so much talent in the Atlanta system, it’s easily the most attractive for trade purposes. If Pence does go there, the Astros could get a really good package with picks outside the Top 100. It’s still more likely that a guy like Michael Bourn is actually the one headed to the ATL.
We’ll update you as we find out more…