You’ve been following TDGX. You love TDGX. We all love TDGX.  And every week here at The Dynasty Guru, I am going to be bringing you commentary from our flagship experts’ league, directly from the participants themselves. Today we’re going to cover all of the transactions made post-draft, including a few trades–one involving an elite prospect and another involving a potential high-end starting pitcher.

The goal here is to give you insight into the moves made by our group of experts so that you can use this information the next time you need to make a trade or prominent FA move in your league. So let’s not mess around with too much longer of an introduction. We’re going to break this up into three sections: trades, major league additions, minor league additions.

TRADES

3/22/14: Mike Buttil trades Andrew Cashner to Ian Kahn/Tim McLeod for a 2015 1st round pick and 2015 3rd round pick

Mike: “Paul and I aren’t shy about trading pitching, which is probably pretty obvious considering we dealt a pitcher as talked about as Cashner. To be honest, we were torn about Cashner from the beginning. It took some convincing on my part to draft him where we did because of his age (27) and injury history and he didn’t really jive with our plan to wait longer on pitching in this year’s draft. We considered what our options were to replace him, and saw some serviceable arms still on the wire. We acquired Kyle Kendrick from free agency to replace Cashner’s spot on the roster, and while he won’t replace Cashner’s numbers, we felt good about adding him to our rotation in a league this deep.

One of the things we considered in making this deal was the penalty we paid in keepers for 2015. Acquiring the two draft picks will allow us to get back some of the pieces we will lose when we send 15 players back into the pool. Since next year is the only year that this penalty is in effect and there will be something like 60 players thrown back, we are happy to have five picks in the first three rounds regardless of the position of the picks. We also like having extra picks given some of this year’s amateur draft talent that will be available in next year’s TDGX draft. Kudos to Ian for making a simultaneous move that brought two later picks back to his team.”

Ian: “Mike had committed 15 players to get that first slot to draft Mike Trout. That meant to me, that he would have to be looking over the course of the season to consolidate his base, and acquire draft picks (which has no keeper limits) in the process.

I spoke to Mike about a number of pieces on his team that held interest to Tim Mcleod and myself, but what we came to was the idea of a 1st round pick and a 3rd round pick in the 2015 draft for Andrew Cashner. Unlike other similar Dynasty drafts, these picks in 2015 will have many Major League pieces that otherwise wouldn’t be available. It also fit into Mike’s plan to have extra picks moving forward.”

3/22/14: Ian Kahn/Tim McLeod trade Travis Wood to Craig Goldstein/Mauricio Rubio for a 2015 2nd round pick and 2015 5th round pick

Ian: “Craig was in a bit of a bind to find that depth for his staff. We moved Travis Wood for Craig’s 2nd and 5th round picks in the 2015 draft. Tim was somewhat concerned about moving Wood, but I wanted some picks back for the draft next year, or at least as pieces that can be used in other deals as the season goes along.”

Craig: “Having lost Jarrod Parker directly after the draft, we felt a need to address our pitching shortage, as that was probably a weakspot even with Parker. We felt like what amounted to 37th and 40th round picks were well worth the bulk innings that Travis Wood provides, even with a relatively substantial step backward.”

4/6/14: Craig Glaser/Tom Trudeau trade Nick Castellanos, Julio Urias and Addison Reed to Chris Crawford for Oscar Taveras and Matt Barnes

Tom: “Craig and I built our team without 2014 in mind, meaning one of our primary assets is our willingness to concede present value. That made Addison Reed an obvious trade chip for us. He has a chance to be a good fantasy closer for many years, but closers and rebuilding dynasty teams don’t mix well.  At just 22 years old, Nick Castellanos was a less obvious trade chip, but the fact that he is in the Majors today means his utility to other owners is slightly higher than it is to us. We suspect Julio Urias will be a fast mover, both in the minors and on prospect lists, but his age made him expendable.