Expanding on Beane's Decision

As I wrote at the end of my admittedly too long first post, the reason I truly liked this trade from the A's perspective is because of what it does for their future, and how quickly they restocked their farm system. These may not have been the best quality players that Beane could have received for Swisher, but it was a great combination of quality and quantity. How I feel about it has a lot to do with what Beane received for Haren as well, a trade which I did not like at the time because I thought he took quantity over quality, and it would come back to bite him. However after watching his farm system gain this much depth after only two trades, it really is quite impressive.

The reason I write this is because I just read ESPN's Rob Neyer's post about the current state of the A's farm system. I highly suggest reading Neyer's take as he sums it all up quite nicely, and he shows us John Sickel's rankings both before and after the two trades. I'm not going to copy and paste it here, but essentially, through these two trades Daric Barton, who was the A's top prospect becomes their fourth best prospect, and only five of their original top 12 prospects remain there after these two trades. And once again, I'd like to reiterate that there is more restocking to come in the likely trades of Blanton and Street.