Kirk Gibson is the Steve Yzerman equivalent in that he's smart, open to new ideas and was a champion with us. But he's ill.
Maybe Alex Avila is the answer.
The only consolation thus far is that he's not trading anything we need for next year. Thus far anyway. When we get a real GM(tm) we can start building for realzies.
Imagine if we didn't have a lame duck GM right now. I'd be using this deadline to acquire talent for 2023. Not prospects. I'd be out trying to get established starters. I saw that JD Martinez was available. Is he any good?
Not disagreeing that it was ungovernable. They who wanted democracy and the rule of law were drowned out by the superstitious, evil and the idiotic.
I was trying to make the point that they made the right choice in the end despite all the emotional sunk costs.
Lets not go nuts. We made a strategic trade on our resources which sucked from a enduring commitment to the Afghan people we tried to support for so long but was becoming more and more unsustainable. So we traded the the asymmetric drain that was the perpetual search for Islamic democrats for the peer competitor struggle with China and the near-peer competitor struggle with Russia which involves defending actual democracies like Japan/Taiwan/Korea and emerging democracies like Ukraine.
I'll make that trade but it sucks to lose Afg after that long war.
So, to tell a few tales. We (the US CT community) wanted him alive because he was such a terrible leader that he ran AQ into the ground after UBL's death.
But, eventually... ya gotta pay.