C-Notes 2044.07 - Busy Week?

[GoldenOne]

The Charlotte Cougar Front Office seemed to be burning up the phone lines this week. In the previous three weeks, the Front Office produced a couple of seemingly innocuous trades, bringing in Lucas McNeill from Yellow Springs and a AAA player waiting for his big league opportunity in Lorenzo Bueno from Louisville. The players sent back in those trades werent even on the tongues of even the most fervent Cougar followers.

This week, however, saw a couple of players that all fans know the name of get traded. First, we saw Catcher Aaron Stone find his way across the country to Seattle in exchange for Catcher Francisco Salazar and CF Dennis Murray. Murray was the obvious target here and he has seemingly liked the move to the East Coast, going .393/.469/.643 in his first 7 games with the organization. He'll find his way up to the big league club as soon as there is an opening, without a doubt. Salazar was an obvious salary dump for Seattle. His hitting abilities took a massive drop the last couple of seasons in Seattle so perhaps this is the time for the young guys in the Charlotte organization to get their chance.

The second trade of the week came as a huge surprise to Cougars fans. Despite the rumors, and despite SP being so scarce in the BBA, nobody in Charlotte really thought they would see Adergazoz Ouakili be traded, especially not to an in-division foe in Rockville. GM Golden has been hinting for weeks that if the team was not performing up to expectations, there would be moves made to rebuild (yes, tearing something down and starting over, no matter what it looked like, is still a rebuild) the team. With Ouakili proving the pundits wrong in the last two seasons about someone with as low a stamina as him starting (he started 61 games the last two years) and a low salary for several more years, he seemed like a nice commodity to bring back a nice haul. And he did.

Coming back from Rockville in the Ouakili trade (along with RF Brady Greer) was BBA RP Zhi-xin Chien, AAA (who pitched great in his first BBA start) SP Paul Springer, AA Closer Stan Smit, and three 18 year olds that got sent straight to Rookie ball in Elkins, WV - CF Herb Vessey, LF Hasheem Makin, and C Farid bin Mubarak.

While the Cougars have given up some big pieces of their roster this year, they seem to be setting themselves up nicely with potential fill-ins for this season and potential starters for several seasons to come.