Roster Moves Made...And Trades???

- The Chicago Cubs completed their Theo Epstein Compensation by receiving 19 year old first base prospect Jair Bogaerts. You can find out more on the youngster here. Honestly it is a better piece than I thought we would have gotten.

- As expected the Cubs made a flurry of roster moves today by sending Randy Wells, Casey Coleman Travis Wood, Scott Maine, David Sappelt, and Welington Castillo to the minors. Non roster invitees sent to minor league camp were Blake Parker, Edgar Gonzalez, Matt Tolbert, and Blake Lalli.

- Randy Wells, Casey Coleman, and Scott Maine were big surprises for me. From these moves it looks like Rodrigo Lopez and Shawn Camp may have made the pen (another option is Corpas). Scott Maine not making the pen means the Cubs will only go with one lefty in their bullpen which is pretty interesting. I also thought either Randy Wells or Casey Coleman would make the team as a long reliever, but neither did.

- This also means Steve Clevenger gets the back-up catcher job so Castillo can catch everyday in Iowa.

- It also means that Lendy Castillo looks like he made the team.

- Jeff Samardzija landed the No. 3 spot in the rotation with Volstad nailing the #4.

- Randy Wells has been told he is the next man in for the rotation spot if there is an injury.

- The biggest non-move of today is OFer Tony Campana. I talked to my source today and he said that Theo and Jed are still working on a trade involving Marlon Byrd so they wanted to keep Campana in ML camp. If Byrd is traded that means that Campana would likely share time in CF with Reed Johnson. Again the Cubs do not want to start BJax ML clock so he will start in Iowa.

- So we know that Soriano exercised his no-trade to go to the O’s earlier this year but did you know he did the same thing with the M’s? According to my source he turned down a trade that would have sent him to the Mariners for Chone Figgins.

Until Next Time..