COLUMN: Risky trades, risky contracts

     Baseball, more so than any other professional sport, immerses itself in the act of trading players. Throw in free agency and championships can be won or lost with trades and signings more so in baseball than any other sport.

     Big market teams have an advantage when it comes to signing free agent players. The Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers and Cubs all come to mind when discussing the free agent market.

     Over the past few years the current trend in the trading game seems to be sacrificing prized prospects to win world championships. No one has been guiltier of that than the Cubs.

     Back in 2016 the Cubs felt they were a closer away from winning a World Series. So they shipped one of their prized possessions, SS Gleyber Torres, to the Yankees in exchange for RP Aroldis Chapman.

     The Cubs won their World Series, did not sign Chapman who was a free agent after the season, and Chapman went back to the Yankees. A few weeks ago Torres was called up to the big leagues and currently is hitting .309 with 4 homeruns and 15 runs batted in.

     Last season the Cubs acquired P Jose Quintana from their cross-town rival Chicago White Sox in a 5-player trade. The key piece that the White Sox acquired was prized OF Eloy Jimenez.

     Jimenez is currently playing AA ball for the Birmingham Barons. He’s hitting .331 to go along with 7HR and 28 RBIs. He leads his minor league team in all three categories.

     Meanwhile, Quintana went 7-3 last season with a 3.74 ERA. This season he is off to a slow start at 5-3 with a 4.47 ERA. To be direct, Quintana hasn’t quite panned out like the Cubs were hoping he would.

     The Cubs also went crazy this past off-season spending $126 million on free agent P Yu Darvish. Darvish has gotten off to an even more puzzling start. He currently sits at 1-3 with a 4.95 ERA.

     This past week both Quintana and Darvish both showed signs of becoming the pitchers that the Cubs expect them to be. The jury is still out on both of these transactions being deemed a success.

     A new name that is being mentioned as a possible future Cub is Oriole IF Manny Machado. Expect his name to pop up more as the season progresses. The Oriole player is a stud and Baltimore is going nowhere.

     The question remains, do the Cubs have what the Orioles would command in a Machado trade? Not in the farm system. I believe it’s going to take two current starters, maybe SS Addison Russell and/or OF Kyle Schwarber or Ian Happ.

     Time will tell if this pending trade has any legs. It’s obvious that the Cubs want to win at least a couple of more World Series with their current group of young talented players. It may take another risky trade to get them back to the top.