6-4-2 — an Angels/Dodgers double play blog

Mike Waldner in the Daily Breeze has come out in favor of the trade, making the astonishing comment that "Navarro's much-ballyhooed potential was a figment of former GM Paul DePodesta's imagination." Wow, so a guy who was sixth in the league for average among catchers playing 50 or more games is a "figment"?

Buster Olney, predictably, also doesn't get it:

Andrew Friedman wanted Dioner Navarro, and he got him, in a trade with the Dodgers. Got to admit that my gut reaction to this deal is that the Dodgers got an incredible steal -- Navarro already had lost his job as L.A.'s No. 1 catcher, and I think Mark Hendrickson is among the most underrated pitchers in baseball; he's a classic lefty, getting better as he gets older. In a marketplace in which many teams are dying for pitching, I thought the Devil Rays would get more. We'll see if it works out for them.

And then there's this:

... after doing more thinking about Tampa Bay's trade of Mark Hendrickson to the Dodgers this week, I believe the AL-NL disparity is part of the reason why the deal was a head-scratcher for me, from the Rays' point of view. Hendrickson is not a dominant pitcher, he's not going to the Hall of Fame, and he'd never be the staff ace if and when Tampa Bay becomes a more competitive team.

But he's a solid left-hander who is getting better, and he is battle-tested in the AL East, where the lineups are rugged and where there is no room for the faint of heart. Hendrickson went 11-8 with a 5.91 ERA in 2005, and in the great tradition of left-handers, he seems to be getting better with age; this year, he is 4-8, but with a 3.81 ERA, and he has averaged seven innings per start. He threw 15 scoreless innings in April, had a 5.59 ERA in May, and a 3.58 ERA in June.

Okay, so we're supposed to cut Hendrickson some slack — to the point of calling this a steal for the Dodgers. But taking a look at his career splits and erasing his numbers against the Red Sox and Yankees only yields a 4.53 ERA. The guy had to face the Devil Rays as a Blue Jay, and still ended up with a 4.15 career ERA! How does that happen — unless he's a screaming 32-year-old mediocrity?

Update: Christina Kahrl brightens my day:

Ah, it’s always fun when a new GM "does something" to prove that he’s on top of things. There’s something delightfully overstated about the Dodgers’ need to go out and get Hendrickson to "solve" their problems in the rotation. It’s pretty amusing, considering that just about the only way he seems like an asset is if you get really worked up over his great day in PETCO on June 14. Counting that complete game, one-run win, the guy has four quality starts in thirteen this season. Four, as in one fewer than Seo, but in three more starts. Hendrickson’s not young and improving, not at 32, and his brief run at respectability in the last two months has lowered his career ERA to 5.01. Maybe it’s a good thing that he’s wilder this year than in seasons past, but absent a trick pitch, it looks like he’s just been fortunate with his defensive support. That might last in LA, in that the Dodgers boast a better defense than the D-Rays, but he’s always been hittable, and if he’s wild, homer-prone, and hittable, how is this supposed to be an improvement over the likes of Tomko?

...

[T]o give credit where credit is due, Ned Colletti has scraped up Tomko and Aaron Sele, and now traded good stuff for Hendrickson. Shopping for mediocrity takes an eye for a particular kind of talent, and on that score, Colletti certainly seems gifted. To be fair, Odalis Perez seems so broken he can’t get up, and Perez is DePo’s mistake, not Colletti’s. But why not just plug Seo into the rotation? Handing away a catching prospect of Navarro’s measure to acquire a journeyman starter on a really modest streak of adequacy does not seem like the best way to secure a title in LA, and it doesn’t seem like a necessary move. With Navarro and Seo, the club already had insurance behind the plate and a perfectly handy in-house solution to their rotation problems. I suspect that isn’t the consideration in play, though, and if the man they call Ned can’t equal DePo’s first-year feat, how long before new cries for blood paint the pages of Smogtown’s dailies? All the more reason to be seen as doing something, and if Ned cares, how can you hold it against the guy that Hendrickson isn’t really any good? Won’t that be Hendrickson’s fault?