29 Trades for 29 Teams: Colorado Rockies

The Colorado Rockies are in fact a baseball team that exists. There really are only a few ties between the Rockies and the Orioles...off the top of my head I can think of Garrett Atkins, Melvin Mora and Ty Wigginton as guys who played for both teams. I'm sure I'm forgetting more than one, but I wanted to end this cold war between the two clubs.

In reading the SB Nation Rockies blog, I learned a few things:

• No love for Keith Law
• 2B and 3B are up in the air
• They have a bunch of underwhelming starters.

I'm starting to think we should start an exchange program.

So, what do they need that that Orioles have? Well, I'm not sure that the Orioles have a lot, but I do see their need for 2B/3B types and naturally I thought of Robert Andino. You have to like Andino's story especially if you liked Hayden Penn more than you should have, and the fact that he was the first Oriole to hit an inside the park homer in Camden Yards since Babe Ruth did when he was a kid getting drunk at his dad's bar, which may or may not have happened. Anyway, I think Andino makes some degree of sense for the Rockies since he can play all around the infield and can hit lefties.

Why do the Rockies need Andino? Well, I think playing in the NL West you are never really out of it given how fluid that division appears to be from afar. In that regard, it makes sense to bolster your roster as best you can on a year by year basis. So 2012 could prove a year they are in the hunt for the division title if CarGo and Tulo can find that magic, or it could just as easily be a relatively anonymous year where they finish 4th. But Andino's versatility and ability to hit lefties I think make him attractive to the National League.

What do they have that the Orioles want? And what is Robert Andino worth? Always with these questions! To Andino first, he is relatively fungible utility infielder, but there is some upside: he is 27 and his OPS against lefties the last 3 seasons in .699. That has to be worth something. The Rockies literally have 10 candidates for the starting staff in 2012, at least per some poster on their blog. One guy who struck my eye is their 18th ranked prospect according to this website: Christian Friedrich. Friedrich is a former top prospect (like Andino!) and is a left handed pitcher who repeated AA in 2011, posting a 4.83 FIP in 2011. He set the world on fire in 2009 but disappointed in AA in 2010 and didn't fare much better in 2011. So he is potentially not highly valued by the Rockies. From the Orioles perspective, he would join a series of meh guys in AAA who could start when the guys who actually make the team inevitably falters. For the Orioles, it also clears some of the log jam at second/third, though does open a hole as the backup shortstop, and given Hardy's injury history, that could prove costly. But the idea of a 24 year old lefty pitching prospect is pretty intriguing to me.

So, what do you think?