Orlando Cabrera is
the seventh member of the Sox to be previewed for the 2008 season, which reminds me about
one thing I saw in the Trib's (excellent) SoxFest coverage I failed to highlight earlier:
The Sox are expected to start negotiations on a contract extension for
shortstop Orlando Cabrera, but Williams said the Sox would receive two
draft picks for 2009 if they can't re-sign Cabrera because of his
status as a Type A free agent.
Any reference to draft picks from anybody associated with the team is encouraging to me, because
compensation has been overlooked before by some people. Hopefully the Sox will lowball Cabrera in order to appease fans who either miss Jon Garland or really like Cabrera, with the draft picks in mind all the way. I don't see that happening, but a fella can hope.
That was the penultimate note in Mark Gonzalez's piece. The final one, which also pertains to Cabrera in a sense:
Guillen said he had extended invitations to spring training to Sox
favorites Robin Ventura and Carlton Fisk, as well as to former hitting
coach Walt Hriniak.
Juan Uribe never hit better than when he implemented the Hriniakian toe-tap, a method endorsed and enforced by Frank Thomas when he was with the Sox. It'd be funny if he rediscovered his timing and made the Cabrera trade completely meaningless, though not in a ha-ha way.
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The DFA'd David Aardsma brought the Sox a bigger return in a trade than either Tadahito Iguchi or Rob Mackowiak. Weird, huh?
Aardsma
will swap his White Sox for red ones, with minor-league pitchers Willy Mota and Miguel Socolovitch coming to Chicago:
Mota, 22, went 5-3 with a 2.60 ERA and 22 strikeouts in 17 relief
appearances with Class A Lowell in 2007, his first season as a pitcher.
The 6-foot-1, 195-pound native of San Pedro de Macoris, Dominican
Republic, limited opponents to a .225 (23-for-102) average and averaged
7.2 strikeouts per nine innings pitched.
Mota, a converted outfielder, worked in relief for Lowell.
According to White Sox director of baseball operations Dan Fabian, Mota
possesses a power arm, with a live fastball in the 92-to-95 mph range.
Socolovich, 21, split the 2007 season between Class A
Greenville in the South Atlantic League and Lowell in the New York-Penn
League. The native of Caracas, Venezuela, was 2-2 with a 6.65 ERA in 11
relief appearances with Greenville and 5-4 with a 3.56 ERA in 14 games
(13 starts) with Lowell. He has 115 strikeouts in 56 games over three
Minor League seasons.
"He's more of a polished pitcher, with good pitchability," said Fabian of Socolovich, whose fastball falls in the 88-to-93 mph range. "We liked the upside on both."
This is the second-ever deal between Williams and Theo Epstein, and both have been about the bullpen. Moreover, both times the Red Sox traded for a reliever who may have been available on the scrap heap. In 2006, the Sox
turned spring training invitee Javier Lopez into David Riske, who, like Cabrera, should've been worth two draft picks had Williams offered him arbitration.