Its just not an easy call, any way you slice it. In the one sense, giving up a combined 12 years of service time for players who seem pretty likely to be, at the very least, reasonably productive major leaguers (Fernando, Niese), four or five years of service time for a decent relief arm (Parnell), and an interesting plus defensive SS prospect, seems somewhat ludicrous in any deal. But there’s just no way to quantify the market value of a guy like Halladay. You almost never see more than two pitchers of this quality hit the market, be it FA or trade, in a calendar year, and often you see just one or zero. Even if you have to bring him in and sign him to a market value contract, there’s no standard to compare an acquisition like this to, its essentially concentrated winnage.

If I had to take a stance, I’d say the relative cost for Halladay minus the relative savings you get with F! and Niese and Parnell doesn’t justify making this kind of trade. Payroll is still a problem for this team, whether we like it or not. If the payrolls for this year and next year were more in the $110-120 million range it’d be a tough call, but they’re not looking that way. The healthiest thing this organization could do for itself right now is conserve resources, take low cost risks, and spend their money prudently enough to marginalize their risk with the high cost moves, not add to it.