ESPN: Stark - Teams, start your engines ...

Jayson Stark’s look ahead to the Winter Meetings…

[Milton] Bradley was the runaway winner of our Most Likely to Get Traded at the Winter Meetings poll. And why is that? Because Milton Bradley can hit, gang. It’s that basic. He has a higher career on-base percentage (.371) than Grady Sizemore or Johnny Damon. And he has a higher career OPS (.821) than Torii Hunter or Ichiro. You can look it up.

So for a team like Tampa Bay, always hunting for big upside for manageable dollars, Bradley just might be worth a spin of the roulette wheel.

The Rangers could still get in on this, but Tampa Bay seems more likely. That’s because the baseball pieces appear to fit in place a lot easier for this man to wind up with the Rays, in that much-rumored three-way deal that would send Pat Burrell to the Mets and Luis Castillo to the Cubs. (The Mets, incidentally, then would be likely to turn around and sign Orlando Hudson to replace Castillo.)

What these teams haven’t been able to match up is the money pieces. Bradley has two years and about $22 million left on his I.O.U. sheet. Castillo has two years and $12 million coming. And Burrell has one more year, at $9 million.

So these teams, from all indications, continue to look for palatable ways for the Cubs and Mets to help even out the money. And while not much appears to have changed lately, Cubs officials have told other clubs they’re “confident” Bradley will be an ex-Cubbie by the time they hit the on-ramp to I-65 on Thursday.