Brendan you no block out cherry picker.  (See what I did there?  You cherry picked for easy layups and you just cherry picked two obvious examples for your argument while ignoring the overwhelming facts.  It has double meaning.  BAM!)

Andrew Friedman doesn’t get credit for cutting trash like Fly Eli and trading Delmon.  If taking out the trash makes you a good GM, I am the greatest GM ever because I take dirty diapers to the trash every day.

Yes.  Josh Hamilton did get 23 chances from Major League Baseball.  And we employed him through all 23 chances.  I would think you and your pinko-commie left coast buddies would be commending us for rehabilitating Hammer’s poor soul, or, at the very least, think of a way to tax us for it.  

After we put up with all the non-baseball time, Friedman makes the logical choice to sell him in the Rule V draft once he was finally clean.  I mean, why pay him to actually, you know, play baseball.  Right?  That makes no sense.  Maybe no one was sure if Hamilton ever would live up to all his potential but, if you are going to put up with all the bad, why would you dump him right when he is finally clean?  That’s like running 26 miles and saying, “screw it, that last .2 seems long, I’m going for ice cream.”

The same thing happened with Edwin Jackson.  We deal for a guy that everyone in baseball agrees got rushed to the Majors and, wait for it, keep him in the Majors.  How does that happen?  He had options left.  If we were so married to Andy Sonnanstine, why didn’t we send Jackson to AAA to learn to pitch?  Come to think of it, why didn’t we do that anyway?  Instead, we gave up and, now that he learned to pitch, he has crammed it up our cram hole two different times.  But, you know what they say, when the going gets tough, trade the going to Detroit for a 5th outfielder you can’t use for a year and a half.

Look, I like Andrew Friedman.  He has obviously done a good job.  But let’s not act like he doesn’t have an incredibly itchy trigger finger.  If he lived in your neighborhood in LA, he’d be rolling around South Central with Trey Styles and Doughboy staring down a life sentence for his next gun-related crime.