Dramatic Transaction Reenactments - Episode 1: Putz Traded

I am both excited and scared to roll out the video below. This is the first of at least two episodes in a series I'm going to call Dramatic Transaction Reenactments. It is a departure from my usual analysis, to say the least, and we'll see where it goes.

This first video is how I imagine the J.J. Putz trade went down behind closed doors. We learn how confident Mets GM (at the time) Omar Minaya is about his ballclub's talent, and see some early glimpses of what life will be like under the leadership of Z and new manager Don Wakamatsu.

There might be some embellishments too. It is a Dramatic Transaction Reenactment after all:

This video didn't come out of thin air into my mind, and if you want some of the back story, click "continue reading."

One of my earliest baseball memories is drawing cartoons with one of my friends. It was 1996, right in the heart of the classic all hitting, no bullpen, you gotta love these guys Mariners. The M's GM at the time was Woody Woodward, and being a little kid, I knew two things about him:

1. Woody's glasses made him look kind of dorky
2. Woody's name was kind of dorky

Ergo, Woody Woodward was clearly a dorky guy, and it didn't take long for me to look back in M's history for several terrible trades that he made. My friend and I were so amused with him that we started making comics about the trades.

I wish I knew where some of the comics were. All sorts of great Mariners showed up in the strips. For whatever reason, we made Woody Woodward say that everyone had "extreme potential." I'm assuming I heard him say it at some point, and thought it was a dorky thing for him to say.

I remember that Woodward also always used people's full first and middle names to address them in the comics. For instance, Griffey wasn't Griffey. He was always "George Kenneth." Another great one was Sweet Lou. He was always "Louis Victor." This is probably the reason I randomly know some middle names of different players.

By the way, it's a good thing Woodward was gone before Ichiro. I don't what I would've done, because he doesn't have a middle name. Although, it would have been wonderful if Woody had been around for "Dudley Michael" Hargrove.

I digress. Anyway, these childhood memories came flooding back to me when I happened upon the following video (warning, foul language):

It didn't take me too long to find the website this video was made on. It is called xtranormal, and is extremely fun to play around on.

I will freely admit that I'm stealing this video's concept, but it is just too good.

I am tempted to go back on what I remember of the comics my friend and I drew growing up, and recreate those as videos too. However, I decided to start with a more contemporary deal, and several ideas came to me for the Putz trade.

By the way, I have no idea of Omar Minaya's personality is remotely close to how I portrayed it in my little digital short. I just thought it made for an amusing character. There is a reason I'm calling the series Dramatic Transaction Reenactments.

There is at least one more video on the way, but that's all I'll say for now. There are tons of transactions ripe for the picking, so this could be a somewhat lengthy series. Or, it could stop at two.

The video was fun to make, and I think is a nice break from the sea of analysis I've been doing on different off-season deals. I hope it's worth a few chuckles.