By Chris Brown – STL Baseball Today
“Our strategy going into this was going to be to try to strengthen our bullpen and also look for a left-handed bat to fit into our lineup. We felt like over the last week we were able to accomplish that.”
Those were the words of Cardinals general manager John Mozeliak shortly after Friday’s non-waiver trade deadline had passed. One week after acquiring former Marlins’ closer Steve Cishek from Miami, Mozeliak struck a deal to acquire veteran reliever Jonathan Broxton from the NL Central Milwaukee Brewers. In between, the team added that left-handed bat in Brandon Moss from the Indians. (Read all about those three trades here).
Here’s much more from the Cardinals GM as he addressed the media regarding the trade for Broxton as well as the team’s approach at the trade deadline overall:
On Broxton and the trade taking shape:
“Why Broxton? I think when you look at the last six to eight weeks of how he’s been throwing, we felt confident he is trending in a very strong direction. It just felt putting him into our bullpen, with Cishek, is definitely going to help out our manager in terms of making sure Maness and Siegrist don’t just get overused.”
“This deal, it’s something we had talked about for a few days, but it started to crystalize last night and then this morning (Friday morning) we were able to finish it.”
On pulling the trigger on Broxton deal instead of waiting:
“We could have waited. We could have waited ‘til it entered into the waiver period to try to do something like this. But we got to a comfort level and we felt the dollars were right to just do it.”
“I think we had a plan that we wanted to see happen. I don’t think we were overly active in terms of trying to fish for something that we felt was just going to make headlines. I felt like we looked at it as – we knew what we wanted to get done and I think we did that.”
On a potential bigger trade:
“In terms of the noise in what you hear outside of what we were working on, it was there. But it wasn’t as if it was overly intense because I think people looked at our club and realized we weren’t trying to break up the big (league) club. And we have certain assets and prospects at the minor league level that people knew we probably weren’t likely going to part with.”
On moving forward and how Holliday’s injury affected deadline decisions:
“I think we’re pretty confident in what we have. Certainly when Matt (Holliday) went down we knew we had to do something. We had been chasing the Moss deal for a while, and so once that injury happened we knew we had to get it done.”
[Related: A look at the three deals the Cardinals made prior to Friday’s trade deadline]
Feature image used under Creative Commons from John Max Mena. No changes made. Image license.
