I've heard a little of the Angels and Holliday's names being mentioned together, but it's just reporters throwing out possible landing spots. If the Yankees are out of the discussion then I will honestly say that there is NO REASON why we don't win the competition for him. The # of teams that can throw big money his direction is limited to a handful.
I tend to come from the other direction. Rasmus has loads of room to improve. Ludwick, Molina, and Skip have all established pretty reliable baselines. If anything, Lohse should improve- hampered by really fluky injuries, and wound up with his worst season as a SP since 2004. Ryan.... well, we'll see about Ryan. I'm mostly with you in that I think he's more likely to decline than improve. OTOH, you're jettisoning some 1260 AB's that went to Thurston, Barden, K. Greene, and Dunkiel. I know that those AB's won't soundly be replaced with superstars, but it's not unreasonable to expect a mild goose out of those AB's. You'd have to try hard to be worse than what that five-headed monster provided.
You're also jettisoning DeRosa and Holliday's production which, imo, had a larger positive impact on the club than their replacements had negative. I just wonder what this club would have looked like (in the standings) without the ridiculously hot April where Thurston and Barden were playing well over their heads and competing for rookies of the month.
Let's take a look at the standings --
April 16 7 133 96 .696
May 13 14 95 99 .481
June 12 17 118 144 .414
July 16 11 124 96 .593
We had DeRosa in July; Holliday acquired late July.
It's impossible to read anything significant into those numbers, but needless to say we were at our worse when we weren't getting insane production from insane sources (April with our 3rd baseman) and at our best when we had the best club (July-August).
IF we assume that this is a .500 team with replacement level production from 3rd and LF AND IF We assume all else is equal, you still need 10 wins from somewhere to make yourself a legitimate contender. And that doesn't count the loss of a Pineiro performing over his head or the likely decline of Franklin. Granted, we'll hopefully get improvement from Rasmus and Lohse (two good sources for a high probability of improvement)...
All that to say that the "mild goose" that we should get from avoiding the "five headed monster" still won't do the trick, barring ridiculously significant improvement from Rasmus (which, honestly, does anyone expect that?) As good as Rasmus might be, he's not going to post an OPS in the 900 range and jump his 2.3 WAR into the 5 WAR range... Make some minor upgrades (Cameron?), hope that Freese pans out, and that leaves you with an 85 win team on paper, or a dead copy of what we had in '08.
Understand that I'm not really arguing with you, just exploring it myself. I think that Holliday + Smoltz + the same club mentioned about (sans Cameron) and we're at 88 wins, which is more than acceptable entering the season.
