Mets trade for Santana

NEW YORK, NY — Who would have thought this morning that trading for Brian Schneider and Ryan Church would only be the second-worst trade that Omar Minaya would make this week?

That turned out to be the case, though, when the Mets GM capped off the worst couple of days in his career by being duped by the Minnesota Twins into trading Jose Reyes and Phillip Humber to the Twins for a 24-year-old Single-A pitcher named John Santana.

The drama began at 10 am Friday, when in a joint press conference, a beaming but unsuspecting Minaya strode to the podium and declared that the Mets had traded for Johan Santana. However, he was surprised to see Minnesota Twins GM Bill Smith striding to the stage.

“Not so fast, Omar,” Smith said, brandishing a sheaf of emails that the two had exchanged. “As you can clearly see, in every one of these trade negotiations, the player in question is referred to as either ‘Santana,’ ‘the lefty,’ or, in the original email, ‘John Santana.’ At no point did the Twins offer Johan Santana to the Mets; after all, why would we need to trade him, when you’ll give us all this stuff for John Santana?”

John Santana is in his third year of professional baseball after a two year stint at Culver Stockton College in Missouri, an NAIA Division II school, where the left was 8-6 with a 4.14 ERA in his second year.

A stunned Minaya protested but was quickly informed by Commissioner Bud Selig that he had in fact been duped, and that there was really nothing he could do, aside from “maybe reading emails more carefully in the future.”

After a brief moment to compose himself, Minaya painted a glass-is-half-full view of the situation, commenting that “Johan Santana has never won a World Series.”

“Plus,” Minaya said, “John Santana hit 87 on the gun last week, I hear, and we’ll even be able to use this Santana jersey that we had specially made. So it’s not such a dark day.”

Smith said, for his part, that he didn’t feel great about the ruse, but that it was not personal and just business. “Look, people hear what they want to hear,” Smith said. “Besides, I mean, let’s not cry too hard for the Mets. They’ve still got Ryan Church.”

It’s going to be tough for this sport to sweep any nations, but it’s still pretty frickin’ cool!