However, this past week, Rosenthal made a post about how the “Miami Marlins might do well to trade Hanley Ramirez.” Yes, Ramirez has dominated the Marlins headlines lately. This past week, Buster Olney reported that the Marlins were listening to offers on the “disgruntled” superstar. Joe Frisaro was quick to dispell those rumors.

I am not taking a shot at Rosenthal about the Marlins trading Ramirez because he is unhappy. I have a real issue with some of the proposed trades that Rosenthal has come up with. The Marlins are better off keeping a disgruntled Ramirez and suspending him if he does not give in to what the team needs him to do. There is no way the Marlins should give any leverage or power to Ramirez if that is the case come Spring Training. With his down season and the fact that he is coming off of shoulder surgery, the Marlins would be wise to hold onto Ramirez, as his value has never been lower. With his trade value lowered, the Marlins would not be able to receive fair compensation that would make up for the loss of Ramirez. To his credit, Rosenthal does mention that in his post:

No, this is a player who occasionally flashes a selfish, petulant side — and frankly cannot be trusted to graciously make way for Reyes, his fellow Dominican.

Ramirez’s trade value is lower than it once was because of his shoulder, his sub-par performance last season and the $46.5 million remaining on the final three years of his contract. Some teams also believe that he is not a winning player.

But c’mon, he’s Hanley Ramirez.

So then I ask, does trading the Marlins most important player to their success make sense?

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Last season, the Marlins struck quickly at the GM meetings. The Marlins agreed to send Dan Uggla to the Atlanta Braves for Omar Infante and Mike Dunn. The Marlins then used some of the money that had recently been tied down to Uggla to go out and sign catcher John Buck.

The Marlins in the past have also been busy at the winter meetings. In 2007, they made a blockbuster trade with the Detroit Tigers. The Tigers received Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis for Andrew Miller, Cameron Maybin, and four other prospects. Trust me, Marlins fans are not soon forgetting this trade. The winter meetings is also where the Marlins acquired now superstar and face of their franchise, Hanley Ramirez. Ramirez was acquired along with Anibal Sanchez for Mike Lowell and Josh Beckett from the Boston Red Sox. This is a trade where both teams benefited quite well, except when Beckett was drinking beer in the locker-room, of course.

So with the Marlins having a busy past at the winter meetings, what can we expect this time around?

If the Marlins make any moves, I would expect it to be the signing of Jose Reyes. However, that is unlikely with the new CBA likely not expected to be agreed upon this week.

Expect the Marlins to lay some groundwork on potential market for first basemen Gaby Sanchez. The team has been interested in Albert Pujols and Prince Fielder, and has even expressed some interest in moving Logan Morrison to first. Gaby looks like a long shot to return to the Marlins in my view.

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Obviously, in structure, this is the McGriff trade, inasmuch as the Padres are giving up the superstar. And, as most people who follow such things will tell you, if you’re giving up the best player in the deal, you probably lost the deal.

This line struck me as intriguing because the Marlins actually went through that exact situation a few years ago, and that situation mirrored the one that the Padres had on their hands. After the terrible 2007 season, the Marlins knew that they were running out of time with superstar Miguel Cabrera and decided that they had to trade him. While he was still under team control for two more seasons, the Marlins were going to owe him a lot of money in arbitration (he was paid $7.4M in his first season of arbitration), so his value was deflated much in the same way as Gonzalez’ was for having only one season left in his contract.

What I wanted to talk about was the idea that teams who trade away the best players in the deal are often the “losers” of the deal in the future. A lot of it goes back to how you evaluate trades and whether it is correct to make judgments on a deal after the prospects have begun to develop. I am of the opinion that, if Padres fans want to judge this trade appropriately, they have to judge it with the information they have right now and not look back at it retrospectively after the prospects either fail or succeed.

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Now that the Marlins have dealt away both Maybin and Miller, the team is left with just Burke Badenhop as the sole representative of what once was a promising haul. Many people would be tempted to call this trade a “loss” having seen the results of the haul the Marlins received. While the use of the terms “win” and “loss” is a discussion on semantics, I do want to defend the thought process that went into initially making the trade. No matter what the results have shown now, it is incorrect to make judgment on the decision and the return of the trade itself based on information we know now. In other words, it is unfair to criticize the Marlins’ front office about the trade using information they, and indeed no one, had access to, particularly how the players involved were going to perform in 2010 and beyond.

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