Don't expect Cubs to answer CC trade

Tuesday, July 8, 2008 | Feedback | Print Entry

With CC Sabathia in Milwaukee, all eyes turn to Cubs GM Jim Hendry, writes Jay Mariotti.

Jay's right in that there will be general expectation in Chicago for the Cubs to answer. But they might as well table those expectations right now, for a couple of reasons:

    1. The Cubs don't have the minor league trade resources that the Brewers do. If they did, you can bet that they would have landed Sabathia, because they would have been more likely to overpay for him, rather than haggle the way that the Brewers haggled. The Cubs, as a monster money franchise, could have afforded to take a chance and unload some prime prospects for the 2007 Cy Young Award winner -- but they just don't have the same caliber of minor leaguers. That is not going to change between now and the trade deadline.  
     

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    Buster Olney is a senior writer at ESPN The Magazine. He began covering baseball in 1989, as the Nashville Banner's beat reporter assigned to the Triple-A Nashville Sounds. Later, he covered the San Diego Padres (1993-94), the Baltimore Orioles ('95-96), the New York Mets ('97) and the Yankees ('98-2001). Olney joined ESPN The Magazine in 2003, after six years at The New York Times, and he's the author of the Times' best-seller "The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty," a book about the Paul O'Neill-Tino Martinez Yankees dynasty of 1996-01.

    He grew up in central Vermont collecting baseball cards and listening to Red Sox, Expos, Phillies and Pirates radio broadcasts, and was a rabid fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers. He graduated from Vanderbilt University the same year as hoops legend Will Perdue, and ranks among the all-time leading scorers in pickup basketball at Memorial Gym. He claims to have witnessed the Commodores' winning football season in 1982 (although anthropologists have not yet confirmed this).

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