I got all fired up after I heard the trade news yesterday. The White Sox sent Jon Garland to the Angels for Orlando Cabrera and cash. A strange deal if you ask me.

No trade not involving blowing up the entire White Sox roster will satisfy me at this point, and this is no exception. Kenny Williams has added even more age to his roster at even greater cost.

I’ve been a big proponent for some time when it comes to trading Garland. He is without a doubt one of the more overrated pitchers in baseball. This is about the time that White Sox fans point to back-to-back 18 win seasons and scream, curse and yell. Well, settle down.

Garland is overrated.

The problem here is that Cabrera is JUST AS OVERRATED. If you’re going to deal an overrated player, why trade him for someone equally overrated, at a position you already shored up!?

Now I’m no Juan Uribe fan, but do you really think Cabrera is a big improvement? Well, he is and he isn’t. Cabrera’s 2007 OBP is an unremarkable .345 while Uribe’s is a pithy .284. That’s significant. But Cabrera’s slugging average is .397 while Uribe’s is .394. That isn’t so significant.

Certainly not significant enough to deal Garland, anyway.

I’ll stop right there because I just realized James Holzhauer wrote up a nice transaction recap this morning:

What’s really pointless about this deal is that it doesn’t accomplish what should be the Sox’s prime objective: Acquire young, cost-controlled talent. The Sox could have cashed in Jermaine Dye and Mark Buehrle for prospects at the trade deadline, or let them walk and collected compensation picks in the draft. Instead, they signed both to overpriced deals, giving the team a fighting chance at .500 for 2008, along with a less optimistic outlook for 2009 and beyond.

Even though I’m not Kenny Williams’ biggest fan, I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, since he could probably still collect draft picks when Cabrera leaves as a free agent after 2007. That was before I read this:

“Last year did not sit well with any of us. I’ll be damn if we’re going to go through that again. We will aggressively pursue a championship,” Williams said.

Look out, Cleveland. Williams thinks Orlando Cabrera represents aggressive pursuit of a championship, the kind of player who single-handedly takes a team from 72 wins to 95. As a Chicago native, I’m deathly afraid he thinks the next step is to throw $90 million at Torii Hunter to take them from 73 wins to 75.

I heard on 670 The Score Monday night that Kenny Williams was now going to work on trading Uribe. See how this is getting more and more idiotic?

Williams likes to fly by the seat of his pants and has no regard for logic when it comes to organizing a team. As Rob Neyer points out, “…The No. 1 principle of making deals is buy low, sell high — which is what the Angels are doing, and exactly the opposite of what the White Sox are doing.”

Garland is solid. He’s made 32 or 33 starts in each of the last six seasons and his ERA is always right around the league average or a little better. I suppose somebody might see his 10-13 record last season and think he doesn’t know how to win, but I see his 18-7 record in 2006 and think he was particularly lucky in 2006 and particularly unlucky in 2007. True, he’ll probably be the Angels’ fourth-best starter. But what a luxury!

Meanwhile, Cabrera probably will never again play as well as he did last season. He was 32, and it was his best season wince 2003. He won the Gold Glove this year, but didn’t deserve it. He’s solid with the glove, but probably no better than Uribe. Yes, he’s the better hitter. But he’s not that much better. In fact, the projections in the 2008 Bill James Handbook predict that Uribe will actually out-hit Cabrera next season.

And as I make the rounds from ESPN writers to bloggers and columnists, I’m having a hard time finding people who really like this deal.

But wait, Mike Downey at the Chicago Tribune thinks it was a good deal. He also thinks Orlando Cabrera is a world-class shortstop.

Of the half dozen Hall of Fame shortstops who played their careers after 1950 (Apiricio, Banks, Reese, Ripken, Rizzuto, Smith), none were as bad offensively as Cabrera. Except Smith. He was pretty bad. He actually had a career slugging average that was lower than his career on-base percentage. Yikes!

But I digress. What was I talking about? Oh, yes, world-class shortstops. I’ll tell ya what: If the Sox reach the playoffs in the Cabrera era (heh, Cabrera era), and he hits a homer to lift the team into the World Series AND Joe Buck screams “Go Crazy, folks!” I’ll let this whole thing go.

Just, out.