Trade Rumors: Jim Bowden's Big Board

One of ESPN's recent additions to their online baseball coverage has been former Nationals GM Jim Bowden, who currently writes The GM's Office blog for The Worldwide Leader. And even though Bowden certainly has some odd manners of evaluation that probably shouldn't be repeated by anyone, he still can provide some unique takes about the role of a GM and players in general.

Today, he posted a massive post regarding the trade deadline, including lists of which teams he believes should sell and which should buy, as well as analysis on the best-available players at each position this summer. We'll cover some tidbits here, but you'll have to swim over to ESPN.com in order to read the entire thing.

• Bowden mentions that, "The Rays would take [Carlos Pena] back if the Cubs eat all the money, but that's not happening." That seems hard to believe at this point. I can believe that the Cubs would want more than just salary relief for Pena, but would Tampa Bay really be willing to take him back? Chicago also has another top bat in Aramis Ramirez, although given his no-trade clause a deal is highly unlikely.