The reality of trading Milton Bradley

Since I try to link to MLBTR as little as possible, I’ll direct you to WV23’s post instead. The Tampa Bay Rays are apparently willing to take Milton Bradley, but only if the Cubs are willing to pay just about his whole salary. Short of a Carl Crawford coming back in some sort of package, this makes zero sense for the Cubs - though they do seem to enjoy paying players to play for other teams lately. Good job, once again, by the Cubs of suspending him and putting themselves in this hole. The unfortunate part about this is that any team that is going to trade for Bradley is going to do so in a way that they can release him at any moment. They will not want to pay much of his contract, if anything over league minimum. I don’t really agree with this, but if Hendry is insistent on getting rid of Bradley he’d be smart to just release him. It’s very likely that any trade would bring back a bad contract that the Cubs would take on in full while the Cubs also pay much of Bradley remaining contract. So, why would you trade for a contract you don’t want when you can accomplish the same thing by simply releasing Bradley? I think the kind of deal the Cubs are looking at is something like Ordonez plus Dontrelle Willis for Milton Bradley and about $20 million over the next two seasons. They’d be taking on a contract worth $18 million in 2010 plus whatever awful contract Willis has and they’d still be paying Bradley. Why? Because the Detroit Tigers aren’t going to acquire Milton Bradley unless they are paying him such a small amount that they could release him at any moment.