Today is the Calm Before the Storm

Today is the Calm Before the Storm my friends, not tomorrow.

See free agency starts on Friday, but tomorrow is going to be a frenzy, because we expect Cliff Lee to win the American League Cy Young Award.

So let's get all our rumors and links out of the way before we celebrate Cliff Lee's 2008 season ONE MORE TIME!

Let's start in-house and give the minor leagues one last cleanup before we move forward. I've updated the two major boards, offseason and the depth chart.

It looks like Jordan Brown is going to get added to the 40 man roster as expected.

We've also got some final clarification on the Rule V stuff thanks to Tony Lastoria. To sum up, Kelvin De La Cruz is not eligible, Hector Rondon and Carlos Santana are. Check my chart or his to be sure if you don't understand.

I don't know if I've mentioned it, I think i did, but I updated the chart to show the re-signing of Andy Cannizaro and Damaso Espino. Armando Camacaro joined them today and the Indians also signed a 33 year old named Jose Rodriguez according to Lastoria.

Moving onto something more important as far as this year..

Trevor Hoffman Suitors are as follows: Mets, Cardinals, D'Backs, Angels, Rangers, the Cleveland Indians, and possibly the Tigers who need a closer but aren't specifically mentioned by the initial report.

The Yankees have taken one of our "targets".. That wasn't going to happen anyway but Damaso Marte re-signed with New York. Randy Wolf has received an offer from the Astros, his current team.

Ryan Dempster has reportedly received a 4 year, 50 million deal from the Cubs.

This is very interesting to look back on and see what happened. But MLBTR puts out trade histories for every GM and they've finally gotten to Mark Shapiro.

Obviously the Colon Deal... Hafner for Diaz and Dreese, man thanks Hart. The two deals for Asdrubal and Choo in the same season for our first base platoon was absolutely brilliant..

The only deal that really sticks out as a bad one was Ryan Church and Macier Izturis for .. who? yeah Scott Stewart.. Josh Barfield still has a lot to prove, so that isn't a dead one yet. BP aside, that was just a messy situation where I'm sure Shapiro did the best he could.. That wasn't a bad trade, that was just a bad situation that the entire organization handled wrong.

It's interesting to see how many times we traded for and traded Russell Branyan.

Anyway that's pretty much all I have for ya today.. Tomorrow is Cliff Lee celebration day and I'll kick it off with a formal article that will be posted from another site. So.. Party.. Then I'll come on when the announcement is officially made and we'll have a big party for Cliffffaaaaad!