Take a deep breath

I've been listening to and reading a lot of the national Santana reaction -- even the local Vegas sports radio guys are up in arms about it, because about half of them are from the Midwest.

The recurring theme, of course, is that the Twins got screwed and they deserve to get ripped left and right for making a "panic move." Well, I'm not going to defend the Twins here, because that's not my job, but I will point out a couple of interesting reactions to the hysteria.

1. The most common attack comes in the form of, "They had better packages on the table from the Red Sox and Yankees in December and should have taken them." Yet after a few minutes of ranting, these same people almost always say, "Well, we don't know for sure that those names were all on the table. The Yankees and Red Sox were basically trying to keep Santana away from the other team and were never really interested in giving up too much for a guy headed to free agency and asking for $140 million over six years."

So which is it -- they had better offers on the table, or we don't know what they had on the table and it was likely that when push came to shove, those big names wouldn't have been included? I guess only Billy Smith, Theo Esptein and Brian Cashman know for sure, and they're not talking.

2. Everybody seems to be going crazy that the Twins didn't get this Martinez kid, who is the Mets' No. 1 prospect according to Baseball America, and that the Twins should be getting ripped because they don't know if Gomez or any of the pitchers are going to pan out. But, if they had received Martinez in the trade, wouldn't it have been just as logical to say they don't know if Martinez will pan out? I also hear that the Mets have a weak farm system, so getting four of the top seven prospects from their minor leagues isn't really saying much. Again, wouldn't that same logic apply to the magical Martinez? Either way, it's a crap shoot.

3. The other bit of prevailing wisdom from the "experts" is that the Twins should have hung onto Santana until the trade deadline if this is all they could get for him. Yet it's pretty clear that Santana and his agent said that they'd invoke his no-trade clause and ride out the season, then split via free agency, leaving the Twins with two first-round draft picks instead of a package of prospects.

So, would you rather have this Mets' package, or let a cloud of negativity hover over the season, deal with the "Will Santana leave?" questions every fifth day, and get two late first-round picks (one a sandwich pick between the first two rounds, and the other from the team that signed him, which would probably be late in the first round since it would be the Yankees, Red Sox or Mets who would sign him)?

I think it's fair to scrutinize this trade and even conclude that it wasn't a great deal for the Twins, at least on the surface. But it's entirely unfair to only look at the negatives of the deal without considering the even-more-negative outcomes that likely would have occurred as well. A little balance -- is that too much to ask?