"Sing, O Muse, of the Cashman of Many Ways."

(with apologies to Richard Lattimore, and Homer)

This is how our esteemed general manager likes to think of himself, navigating through all the snares and terrors of major-league baseball with Odyssean brilliance, able to do all things at once.

But he's not.

To contribute my two-cents worth to what we've all been wondering, no, I don't think that Britton or Happ suck. Maybe even Lance Lynn or Lynn Lance or Yin Yang, or whatever his name is doesn't suck.

That's the thing with veteran pitchers who have already had their major injuries. They're much more likely to be in a slump than ready for the knife. And they're much better at correcting their problems and not letting them get inside their heads.  Could be, all three will have a terrific 2-3 months with us.

But that's part of the problem here. Then what?

They are all rentals, something which greatly limits their value. Even if they have a good or just okay rest of 2018 with us, they'll be off to the free-agent market, and who can know if they really want to stay in a town where the people ride in a hole in the ground, or spend each off-day surfing off San Diego's beaches?

Cooperstown Cashman is not Odysseus but O'Ditherer. His modus operandi is to never really make up his mind, but to move in several directions at once and cover his indecision with the pretense that he's playing a game far too deep for the rest of us mortals.

Are we going for it all this year?

It appears so. Hence the acquiring of guys who are supposedly great at beating Boston, and who will get us through the injuries or problems with almost all of our stars.

But if we were always going for it all, then giving Shreve most of the year to work out his problems was senseless. Trading him now, for a rental, just as he DOES seem to have said problems worked out, is even more senseless.

Ditto with Warren.  And ditto even with the guy we're keeping, Neil "Mr. Survivor Island" Walker.

All year, we have had ample time and opportunity to see what Frazier, Drury, McKinney, and Sheffield, and Rogers and Carroll, and maybe even Frare and Tate and Chance Adams, might do at a major-league level.

Any one of those guys could yet be a star. And if just one is, we will deeply regret it. They will be worth more than all the chaff we just picked up combined. That's true even if we win it al this year—something, let's face it, that's not going to happen barring catastrophic injuries to at least 3-4 other teams.

But we chose not to find out. All so we could make sure that Shreve and Walker came around, and so we could go way too far with Domingo German.

This is not good management. It is not looking ahead and doing due diligence.

And Cashman's typical second guess of himself, stripping the middle levels of the farm system to load up on 16-year-old crap shoots, is not "rebuilding." It is simply a way to get back to what Coops likes to do most, which is signing up huge, overpriced stars for crazy-long contracts. Right now, the agents for Machado and Harper must be licking their chops.

Sing, O Muse, of the man who never sees the next rock coming...