Former Met whipping boy and last year's Maestro di Meh, Aaron Heilman is on the move again.

Number 47 is now a D-Bag, traded for a St. Rita kid and a potential LOOGY.

My quick take?  I'd rather pay John Grabow 7 million than have to look at Aaron Heilman anymore.  He's kind of Jay Cutler looking, if you ask me.  Hope he enjoys the Bob, or whatever they're calling it these days.

I guess THIS is how Hendry is going to avoid arb hearings this year - trade all the arb eligibles!

It appears Hendry has completed GMDirective.2 - John Grabow will not enjoy the passionate rush of unbridled free agency, for he is a Cub through 2011.

GMDirective.1 is of course the Supermassive Black Hole, the MuppetMaster himself, Milton Bradley.  But whither Grabow?  AJ gave him the ol' tepid meh the other day.  A well-deserved meh-dley of lukewarm, certainly.

Is any man worth 7 million dollars?  The President?  Your kid's teacher?  The fireman who runs up the stairs when everyone else is running down, etcetera etcetera, blah blah.  Is John Grabow worth 7 million?  Not in a sane world, he isn't. But Baseball is not the Real World.  It abides by its own rules, rules that we must know and understand.

A winning team needs good relievers.  However, in all but the most Goose Gossage-esque figures, we don't really know in November 2009 who is gonna be good in 2010, do we, Brad Lidge?  All we can really do is avoid guys who we know are terrible. 

• John Grabow is not terrible.  In fact, he's slightly above average.  MLB Sez So!!  He's Type A and everything.

A winning team needs both lefty and righty relievers.  More precisely, a good team needs guys who a manager can count on to retire a certain type of hitter an acceptable amount of the time.  One of these types of hitters is Left Handed hitters.

• John Grabow gets left handed batters out, usually.  Not, like, all the time.  But, more often than not.  And, perhaps even more often, if he was used a bit more judiciously, unlike his time with the Pirates, where judicious use was not a luxury they could afford.

A winning team spends a eff-load of cash every year.  They shouldn't spend an exorbitant amount of money on a player or players who will not make a significant impact on whether the team wins the championship.

• John Grabow will not significantly impact the Chicago Cubs in 2010-11, unless of course it is a significantly negative impact.  And even though 7 million dollars is a mind-blowing sum to you and me, to people like Tom Ricketts, Jim Hendry, and John Grabow, it is not so mind blowing. It is NOT impact player money.

We need a decent left-handed reliever, and Grabow is one.  He is making a gawd awful lot of money, but not so much that it is going to destroy our competitive chances the next two years if things do not work out.

I know what you're afraid of, though.

This kind of tastes like the Dempster deal last year - recall he was signed, I believe, on the first day after the Exclusivity window was over.  Now, there may be a few really smart people out there that knew how last Winter was going to shake down.  But for most of the rest of us, going into the silly season, we figured Dempster was a bit overpaid, but not overly so.  We figured that the Sabathias of the world would get their 200 million (which they did) so 52 million for Dempster was not so bad.  Most of us did not realize that even the Baseball Economy would bottom out, and the Dempster-like creatures of the world, like the Derek Lowes and Kyle Lohses, would sign for much, much less later in the Winter.

Will history repeat itself?  Did Hendry jump way too soon and overpay for Grabow?  Could we have just let him cruise around for awhile, hoping for another MLB Economic Crash?  I say no.  Last winter was a fluke (but I am usually dead WRONG on all things financial).  But this deal, like the Dempster deal, ain't gonna kill us.

Not like Bradley's $30 million, anyway.  Muse, take it away....