Since I'm tired of hearing people talk about how the Astros were wrong to trade Hunter Pence, here's my rant of the day.
Everyone keeps seeing the Philadelphia Phillies right fielder light up the scoreboard lately, and while it's true he's had a fantastic season, this doesn't discount all the other seasons Pence has had before 2011. And the point is, even if Pence had this good of numbers for four years running and wasn't becoming overly expensive with each passing year, the Astros still made out like bandits in his trading. When you take an excellent farm system like Philadelphia's, and you get their absolute best hitting prospect (Jonathan Singleton), and their absolute best pitching prospect (Jarred Cosart) for the second-best player on your club (because yes, Michael Bourn was the Astros' best player at the time), you've made an incredible deal. Forget Hunter Pence, Roy Halladay and Felix Hernandez are the kind of guys you trade those type of prospects for. Heck, the Astros got better farmhands than the Royals did when they dealt Zack Greinke.
According to Baseball-Reference, hitters comparable to Pence through their age-27 season include: Bobby Higginson, Rondell White, Sam Chapman, Andre Ethier, and Aubrey Huff. Were/are those players good? Yes. Were/are any of those players great? No.
In July, I understood the "Don't trade Pence! He works harder than anyone on Earth!" people, as there were valid opinions on both sides of the coin as to whether or not management should deal him. Now, seeing the haul we got in return for him, you'd be asinine and simply a bad student of baseball to believe that the Astros were wrong in doing what they did.
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