Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 346: Matt Kemp Rumors and Hot Trade Takes

Episode Date: December 11, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss the Dodgers’ outfield situation, then talk about the two trades made on Tuesday.

Better sell it while you can. Better sell it while you can. Better sell it while you can. Better sell it while you can. Better sound than one Good morning and welcome to episode 346 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. I'm Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller. So I guess we should have saved our Tyler Skaggs discussion from yesterday for today. I feel like we could still do it if you didn't bring a topic. I didn't. I think we should.

You didn't bring a topic? Well, I figured that. Literally your topic was complaining that we talked about it yesterday. I figured that we would talk trades. There were multiple trades. We could talk about that. There were multiple trades. We could talk about that. There are going to come days in January and February when we wish that there were any sort of signing or transaction because teams blew them all on one day last week instead of stringing them out and giving us something to talk about for the whole offseason. Somebody just messaged me that Mark Mulder is coming back. Have you heard this?

Yes. So that's a real thing? Yep. So based on that being a real thing, what do you think are the chances that Roy Halladay or Mark Pryor comes back? are the chances that Roy Halladay or Mark Pryor comes back? I mean, I would assume that Pryor is done at this point because, I don't know, why stop now? He's already been doing the rehab thing for years now, so he knows what's involved.

How old is Mark Mulder these days? Mark Mulder, 36. So he's like Halliday's age, right? He's two years younger than Halliday, I believe. Or maybe one year younger. Halliday's 36. Oh, really? Yeah.

Oh, you're right. He's older, 36, slightly. I don't know. Good point about Halliday's age. Thank you. That's a good point about him being 36 and not 38. Saved us for having to do that. Score one for you, Ben.

Do a corrections segment tomorrow. Yeah, I don't know. It's funny. If you do a Google image search of Mark Mulder, the fourth one is him golfing, and the fifth one is him with a giant-like cast on his arm. So that's pretty much Mark Mulder. The fourth one is him golfing and the fifth one is him with a giant light cast on his arm. So that's pretty much. That's probably what inspired him to come back. He Googled himself and he didn't want he didn't want his kids to one day Google him and see him with a giant cast on his arm. So he figured he'll come back and make some new memories.

back and make some new memories. All right. All right. So we can we can talk trades for a minute before we do. Can I. There are a lot of Matt Kemp rumors flying around and I'm sort of I'm sort of surprised that Matt Kemp is is on the market. This this obviously. Are you surprised by that. Would you if you were the Dodgers would you be shopping Matt Kemp around? This seems like a terrible time to shop Matt Kemp. Yeah, I think I absolutely wouldn't be. Except that just because you're selling low doesn't mean it can't get lower. I mean, it would be like saying last year that it would have been a terrible time to shop Brett Anderson around.

But, you know, things can get worse. If they just, I don't know, if they just think that he's unlikely to bounce back, then it's a much worse time next year. I mean, he's definitely movable right now. And if he has a bad year, if he hits 14 home runs next

year, he becomes unmovable. He becomes basically a slightly younger Josh Hamilton. So I can see the case that basically this is a teetering moment for him. And he could very easily teeter into unmovable. And that's an awful lot of money to be stuck with if you don't get rid of him now. That said, I mean, it's the Dodgers. If there's any team that you would expect to take Matt Kemp's contract on, if he were out there available, it would be the Dodgers. And if there's any team you would think would not be trying to shed payroll right now, it would be the Dodgers.

And the easy thing to say is, well, they have too many outfielders. And that's true if they're all doing well. But I mean, I guess I don't think that necessarily Carl Crawford's a great bet and is an okay bet. But from the Dodgers perspective, it's hard to imagine the Dodgers want to risk having a sub replacement left fielder with with the payroll that they have um and it makes it seems to me that they would be the sort of team that would say eh screw it we can we can carry 18 million dollars on the bench to have insurance yeah i mean it worked out it worked out well last year for them to have all four guys. And if they... Yeah, what else would they do? Just have...

I mean, Andre Ithier is like the best fourth outfielder in baseball if everyone's healthy and productive. And that's great. And if that's the case, then you can put those guys on the market at midseason or something. Or at least wait until Kemp comes back and plays in the spring and is healthy or you know re-establishes his value to some to some extent i would think unless you're right unless they have no confidence in him uh and if teams think that that's why they're

trying to get rid of him then he's not going to have any value. Yeah, I doubt that's the problem, though. I mean, I don't... It's not like by trading somebody, you immediately sink their cost, or else nobody would ever get traded. Right. I mean, they do have a credible excuse. They do have, you know, two $18 million outfielders and Puig. Although, who plays center in this scenario?

That's a good question. Didn't we see this? I guess Ether goes back there. I don't know. It's odd. Because they don't have four outfielders. They have three corner outfielders. And Kemp is not one of those three.

Right, that's true I mean Ethier played some center last year right but did you scare quote that did you scare quote play I don't know I didn't watch him enough to know how

terrible he was he played 74 games there and my impression was maybe he was better than people thought he would be um but yeah i don't know if if i were if i were the dodgers this seems like a case where i would i would use the luxury of having a giant payroll to keep all these guys unless unless one of them has like demanded a trade or something unless one of them had said i don't want to go into the season with these four guys and i don't want to be a them had said i don't want to go into the season with these four guys and i don't want to be a bench player and i don't want to share time or something

like if it becomes a some sort of disruptive clubhouse issue to to be juggling at bats between those guys then maybe then you have to trade someone but if if that hasn't been the case i i would i would wait i would at least see if he could be healthy for a little while and enjoy the depth. Ken Rosenthal had an interesting sourced tweet a few hours ago. He said, sources say the Dodgers' primary concern in Kemp trade is quality of return. Big if true. return, which is generally the case when teams want to trade people. They want to get a good return.

He means, of course, that it's not a complete salary dump and that they're willing to include money to get better players. But as a rule of thumb, generally true. Yeah, so the basic idea is that they're looking for a shortstop. Is that it, that they would try to trade him for Andrews or Nick Franklin or something? Yeah, I guess that makes sense. I don't know. I haven't really read the rumors enough to know what exactly they're targeting. But I do keep seeing Matt Kemp coming up on my computer screen.

All right. So the trades that did happen. I guess we can start with Kevin Towers. Well, I'm sure we'll get to that. So, yeah. So we'll start with the trade that we unwittingly started talking about yesterday, which is the three-team deal between the Diamondbacks and the Angels and the White Sox, where the Diamondbacks get Mark Trumbo.

I guess that is the big headline from this. And the Angels get back Tyler Skaggs from the Diamondbacks and Hector Santiago from the White Sox. And then the White Sox get Adam Eaton to play outfield for them. And then there are some more minor players involved in there and some players to be named later. But those are the big names. So we talked about Skaggs yesterday,

and I said I was surprised that they wouldn't make that trade. I guess they did. They were listening and decided to change their minds and make that trade. So, yeah. So Kevin Towers is the, I guess the internet reaction to this trade has been very similar to the internet reaction to every Diamondbacks move last winter, which is puzzlement and Twitter snark, I imagine. So you can see what the Angels are doing there. Trumbo has sort of been expendable for them in some sense, and they needed starting pitching, and they've got a couple legitimate back-end sort of potentially mid-rotation guys.

Yeah, was expendable for them, has been expendable for them for years until like three weeks ago, at which point he quit being expendable. But anyway, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, and the White Sox get an outfielder and a leadoff hitter and someone who improves their outfield defense. And Santiago is, you know, like a back of the rotation guy, potentially even a bullpen guy, maybe under some circumstances. So seems like, you know, you can see why the Angels made this trade. You can see why the White Sox made this trade.

And then there is the diamond backs uh and they made this trade to get trumbo and seemed to to give up a lot for that privilege they gave up a lot of team control years for skags and eaten to bring back trumbo who doesn't seem like a huge upgrade for them, even in the short term over over the guys that they gave up. So what are we missing here? I guess this is a chance for you to talk about Mark Trumbo's personality. What an awful thing to say. What a jerky thing to have just said.

I can't believe that it took 346 episodes for you to say something so mean. You know you were going to. So just talk about what a wonderful person he is. We'll get it over with. I want to talk about Kevin Towers, though. Okay. Because Kevin Towers, the thing that seems to be the common theme of all these trades that he's made that have been mocked is that the Diamondbacks seem to just sort of zero in on their guy and be very confident that they are assessing him correctly and be fairly confident that the guys that they want are not as valuable as they might appear to others. Essentially, they consider the

conventional wisdom on their guys to be wrong, and the conventional wisdom on other guys to probably be wrong. They don't really care, it seems like, whether this is a move that it seems like whether this is a move that makes sense to the rest of us. Basically, they have a car that they think sucks, and you have a car that they think is awesome, and they don't really care that the blue book on your car is a lot lower than the blue book on their car. They want your car, and so they're confident in their assessment of those things. And it's, A, it leads to a lot of reactions

like you see, where we're the blue book people, right? Everybody else is the blue book people, so it doesn't look rational. And basically, the only thing they have to sort of back their case is their own opinion and their own assessment, which doesn't mean a whole lot to us because it's just an opinion and we don't see what goes into the assessment. But the other thing is that even if you accepted that they're omniscient and that they know that the blue book is wrong and they're right, you still would like to see them be a bit savvier in the way they shop because you get the feeling that if most people are following the blue book, that you

can get them to give you closer to that. I think that the latter, as we've talked about or as I've argued, is kind of an insulting thing to assume about a GM. You have to assume that Towers is doing his best to get the best deal he can. He spends a long time on these moves. I mean, he spent a long time with Upton, especially. He spent so long trying to move Upton. So the idea that he could have done much better doesn't seem right.

And he spent many days on the or multiple days on this trumbo stuff um but anyway it does seem like like that's the easiest way to to pick at them is even if even if they're right it's bad shopping yeah and we talked about how the upton deal it wasn't even so much the return they got back, but just how much they publicized his availability. And almost, it seemed like they sort of depressed his value by just sort of being so down on him or being willing to get rid of him and explore trades over such a long period. It seemed like they, if anything, they sort of deflated his value themselves. Yeah, it does. So that's half of the equation. But as for the other part, their

assessments being out of touch with the rest of the league, that would ordinarily be very damning too. If you didn't have faith in them or if they didn't have a track record it would be very damning if 29 teams think something about your guy and you're the only one that thinks something else you're probably wrong um but i would argue that they uh that they i would argue that they won the upton deal despite it not making a lot of sense and i would argue that they won the uh the bauer deal despite it not making a lot of sense and I would argue that they won the uh the Bauer deal despite it not making sense and I would and really the Chris Young for Cliff Pennington deal was just about as weird and bad it seemed to me at the time and Pennington did nothing

but Chris Young was was horrible horrible and Pennington did a lot more than him um did I just say a name wrong i feel like i just said chris young twice uh no no i said the name right pennington did more than him so so arguably he won all three of those deals and so i don't know if that buys him some um some breathing space or if it should buy him all the breathing space. But basically the question I have for you is, if a GM has opinions that are not in line with conventional wisdom, is the appropriate thing to smother them and to essentially fall in line and try to more or less play the same game everybody else is, but just shave off a few grams here and there to get your profit? Or is the appropriate thing to just be Kevin Towers and just be bold and say, you know, screw it. You only live once.

I'm going to go with what I think. I'm going to stick with the things I believe, and I'm going to flourish. What do you think? Well, first, I guess we're assuming that the internet opinion on all of these players reflects the industry opinion to some extent, right? Which maybe is not completely the case. I don't know whether... Yeah, it's quite often probably not the case, but I think it's also quite often the case. I mean, like, for instance, the...

I don't know. Well, that's a good question. It's a good question. It's a good question. I was going to say, I think that it probably does a fairly good job based on what we hear after the fact, but there are definitely cases where a player didn't have the demand that we would have expected he did. Yeah. Um, so I don't know if you're the GM and you, I mean, he's, he's been a GM forever, so he, he's probably pretty confident in himself and is entitled to some confidence. He hasn't been fired yet. So I would think, and you hire all of your talent evaluators

and your scouts and you hire the people that you respect and you think they're the best. And I wonder like what percentage of general managers think they're the best. And, and I wonder like what, what percentage of general managers think they have the best front office? Do you, I wonder, you know, like everyone thinks everyone thinks they're above average attractiveness or an above average driver. I wonder what, what percentage of GMs think that they have assembled the greatest collection of scouts and front office minds in baseball, which obviously can't be true of all of them. But I bet more of them think that that's the case than could possibly be the case. That's a good question. Well, because first of all,

if you don't think that, then you would just think that you're losing every trade. You would just be terrified of losing every single trade that you went into. But if you did think that, like you said, probably the odds are that you are not. The odds are very good that you are not. So if you think you are, you've already lost the intellectual battle. You've already made a crucial mistake. Yeah. And there are probably certain, certain teams. I feel like if I were a

GM and I were trading with certain teams, I don't know, I might be more intimidated just based on their track record and trades, uh, over the years. You know, if I'm trading with Dave Dombrowski or trading with Andrew Friedman or Billy Bean or something, I would probably go over the numbers one more time just to try to spot where they were tricking me. But I don't know. If your opinion differs from the industry's and you know it, and you know you're sort of out on an island with a player, if you never act on that information, then you're potentially passing up an advantage every time.

Because you could be the one who's valuing these players appropriately, and everyone else could be wrong. And maybe it's not an advantage if it's where you're you're selling a player and everyone doesn't think he's as good as you think he is but if you if you you know like when everyone was aghast at the the Doug Pfister deal and everyone on the internet was saying we think Robbie Ray is a back of the rotation starter he's a four or five guy and And then the Tigers executives were saying, well, we think he could be a number two or something. If you think that's the case and you have a lot of confidence in your evaluators,

then I guess you should act on that information as if it's true, unless you can find a team that doesn't evaluate them the same way and just get them cheap anyway because they don't know what you think you know. But I don't know. I guess if if towers if the Diamondbacks didn't ever say anything about scrappiness or character or being better people than other teams players.

I wonder whether we would be as flummoxed by their moves or not because then we as it is when we don't understand something they do we just assume that it's that we assume that they think he's just a good guy and that seems like a strange way to make million dollar decisions and so we say that it's dumb whereas if they even if they thought that but didn't say it we would assume that they were basing their decisions on something else, which for all we know, they are. But that's kind of the convenient explanation for why they're making these moves, which is. Yeah, go ahead. Didn't we say I feel like we said at the beginning of the year or just before the year began that this was going to be like the big test of the great grit experiment and that if it didn't work this year that gibson

would get would would be in a lot of trouble and it didn't work and yet like they just keep going like it's interesting that nothing changed yeah all i remember is a zachary levine tweet where he said like this is the the referendum on whether that works they won 81 games last year and they won 81 games this year and I think their their Pythag record was like six games worse not that not that one season of results is definitely uh conclusive but but yeah it if if there was a an advantage to building a team of character guys it wasn't wasn't really something we could perceive you just mentioned that they outperformed their pythag record as though that's not a grit skill they didn't they didn't oh they did the opposite

yeah oh so they were 87 they would i i think i don't think they outperformed or under i think they were right on it but their their pythag record was several games worse than it was the year before they had well the year before they had underperformed it though did they um well that's what that's what we're saying so if they if the year before that so they basically had a six game improvement in Pythag outperforming. So it worked. In 2012, they went 81-81. Their Pythag was 86-76.

Okay, I see what you're saying. The only thing that matters is grit scores. So they were negative five. They actually lost five games per tie. And they were plus one this season yeah yeah exactly they yeah so they six six grit improvement well that's significant so i can't argue with that uh and and so i i guess that's and i haven't seen what they've said about this trade if anything yet i don't know whether they've come out and talked about how wonderful a person Mark Trumbo

is, but he fits that mold, right, based on what you know and have written about. He is, you know, a character guy. Yeah, I mean, everybody likes him. He is a guy that everybody likes a lot. Yeah. Well, alright. I guess we'll see whether they finish more than plus one Pythag this year because of Mark Trumbo. I'm not sure if he's a grit guy, but now that I think about it, I think he's a little bit of a grit guy. We don't generally ascribe grit to big dudes. But now that I think about it, he played the second half of 2011 on a pretty badly hurt leg and played through it.

And I remember even at the time, even before I knew he was hurt, thinking how well he got down the line for a big guy. So he was – even in pain, he was gritting it out. Yeah, you get points for that. Plus, you know right-handed power is hard to find these days. Oh, my gosh. Got to get that power. Well, I feel like this went in both directions. This was a huge pet peeve transaction for me because I really don't like when people break value into the components as though some components are more valuable than others.

When they're basically all – that's what war does. I mean that's why we look at war, because it adds everything together. So once you sort of accept that the adding together thing more or less works, it's silly to then say, oh, but he can't hit lefties, as though that is more important than the rest. And so you had it coming from both sides. I feel like there's a lot of people who really don't like Trumbo because he doesn't war the Sabre way. And then there's not enough power in the game,

so he's more valuable, Kennard, which I despise. So in both directions, people were just ignoring the fact that he's a two-and-a-half-win player, making a lot less than a two-and-a-half-win player makes. And he's got some good value, and he's certainly not an MVP. He's a good guy, a good player who most teams would be improved by. And there's no shame in getting him.

And he's also not the MVP. He's not Paul Goldschmidt. So that's what he is. It's great. It's good. It's a fun guy. Can you tell the nodding story? The nodding story?

The Mark Trumbo you wrote about how he didn't used to nod when he received instruction from coaches. Yeah, he had a bad rep when he was coming up through the system really early. They were transitioning him from pitcher to first base with a little stopover at third. And he was really bad at defense originally, or at least that's what his reputation was. And he had a little bit of a reputation for not taking instruction well. And he's a quiet guy and a fairly thoughtful one. And so it sort of seems weird

now to think that he would have a bad reputation but you know the coach just thought he wasn't listening or he was you know just he he was too smart for him or something like that and somebody i think told him or maybe he discovered that or somebody maybe mentioned like when we give instruction to you you don't nod. Or you, what was it? You know this story better than I do. He did nod? He might have, I think he just. I think he nodded but didn't say.

He nodded but didn't say. He didn't verbally acknowledge that he nodded. Yeah, exactly. And so when he was, when he found out that he's supposed to say, like, okay, like that's all it took and his reputation in the organization took off. Okay. Like that's all it took. And his reputation in the organization took off.

Okay. So yeah. Where did I write about that? I want to go look that up so I can get this right. RJ linked to it in his transaction analysis. I will send you a link as we are talking here. So the other trade that happened, again, we sort of brought it up yesterday without knowing it when we talked about the Brett Anderson-Will Myers rumor that we've talked about on the podcast like 10 times. And so maybe because I had that in my mind that Brett Anderson was supposedly a player who was almost traded for Will Myers straight up last winter, if you

believe that report, my initial reaction to what the A's got back for him was underwhelmed. was underwhelmed. Pomeranz and Chris Jensen, who is not someone I had ever heard of, and the A's even sent a little money Colorado's way. But the more I thought about it and the more I wrote about it, because I already did a piece on it for BP, it seems about right, really.

Because at this point, we are still sort of thinking and talking about what Brandon Anderson could be and what he has been in short bursts at various times. But he is ultimately he's a pitcher who has barely pitched over the last few seasons. He's totaled 163 innings. And at this point, his former top prospect status and his draft position and all the things that make us like him sort of pale in comparison to the recent injury history. And if Doug Pfister brings back a back or mid-rotation starter and a lefty reliever and a not particularly valuable utility guy and Pfister has none of those durability concerns and he's actually making less money than Brett Anderson is now,

if that's the return for Pfister, then what could you really expect for Brett Anderson who's making $8 million and missed most of last season? Not a whole lot. So you trade one kind of change of scenery lefty guy for another, and there are a lot of parallels between these two guys. But it seems to me like it's about what you could expect for him, if underwhelming, given

what we've thought that he might be traded for in the past. Yeah, I don't think that Anderson should have had any trade value at all. I mean, if Anderson were an arbitration guy in line to make $8.5 million this year, he would have definitely been non-tendered, I think. in line to make $8.5 million this year, he would have definitely been non-tendered, I think. Well, so Bean, I guess, was pretty confident that he would have some trade value, right? Because they picked up his option for $8 million, probably with the intent to trade him at that point. Yeah, yeah. And I think part of the thing that is,

I guess part of the thing that's nice about him is that he's got, it's like the option next year is the valuable one. Because basically, if he's good, then you get him next year for a very reasonable price. And if he's bad, it's a low, it's a small investment in trying to find out. So I guess my non-tender thing, it depends on what his service time was. If he was a five-year service guy or a four-year service guy,

then maybe you pick it up. If he was a sixth-year guy or a third arbitration year, then I think you wouldn't but that option gives some long-term upside but i mean it's not just that he's only thrown 163 innings in the last two years um it's that he had a 60 ra last year it's that he was terrible in the bullpen it's like the i don't i don't see um i mean i i I don't think that I have ever been more sure that a guy was going to turn into an ace than Brett Anderson. So I totally see the allure. When he was pitching in 2010 and early in 2011, he looked so unhittable that if you saw that once you it would take a long time not to keep thinking

it's still in there but i mean eight million is kind of i mean i know it's not a lot but it's kind of a lot for a guy who is like basically been sheets without the durability you know yeah uh yeah and i mean his his peripherals were okay last year like his his defense independence stats were sort of where they usually are well they were okay but they were they were in the bullpen mostly and he was he was really wild yeah um and if you and if you start talking about is the thing is if you start talking about his defense independence stats they weren't that great before last year that they were you know with if you add with the ground ball rate they're good but they weren't really ace level so you needed that you needed him to take a leap forward

probably already to some degree but i don't know i'm not surprised that anderson didn't bring back anything big and the thing about pomeranz is that he has still that he has been good all this time in the minors. In Colorado Springs, too, which is not an easy place to pitch either. Yeah, so you can imagine a world where he was still a prospect, and he would have a lot of value. He's had a couple of really short stints in the big leagues that have gone really, really badly. But I don't think the book is closed on him at all yeah and he was he's he's five years of service time left so yeah it's a big difference he's only like nine months younger

than anderson but yeah there there's a lot of team control left and he's a guy who's kind of rushed up to the majors in his first professional season and uh yeah there's there's sort of a lot to like there and and i feel like there it sort of makes sense that these players would trade places with their profiles because anderson i guess fits the profile of a pitcher who would be good in courseors Field or at least would be less bad than most pitchers would be in that he's a high ground ball rate guy and he's a guy who relies on his slider pretty heavily. We had an article earlier this year by Dan Rosenson who looked at which pitch types were affected most by Coors Field and his conclusion was that you want to have a slider if you're pitching there and you don't want to have a curve ball.

So the Rockies acquired a slider guy and traded a curve ball guy. So you would think that maybe Pomeranz would be better in Oakland and the A's have a better track record for developing pitchers. It's sort of hard to separate that from the ballpark, but he probably isn't even in the rotation on opening day, barring an injury because the A's have so many starters. So he would go to AAA, and maybe they work on his mechanics a little bit,

and maybe he'll be up at some point in the year. But you would figure that over the five years that they have him, they should or certainly could get more value out of him than they're giving up and enough that it makes sense that they're spending what they are, first to pick up Anderson's option and then to send a little cash to Colorado. So not a bad deal. Kind of underwhelming given what maybe they could have gotten for Anderson if they had sold him earlier. I guess this is a clear instance of holding onto a guy too long, in hindsight at least. But given what he's worth right now, it's probably not a bad deal. You know I'm loathe to give opinions, but I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to call this one a coup for the A's.

All right. Well, you're not the first internet writer to say something nice about the A's. The Rockies could have a decent rotation, though. They could have a really good rotation. They already had a pretty good rotation. Yeah. Yeah, their overall numbers as a rotation last year weren't very good. I was actually surprised because I thought they sort of had an underrated rotation.

I think they had something like three of the ten best ERAs in franchise history. Yeah. Chassin and De La Rosa and Chatwood were all very good. Yeah. And they'll be back, and then they'll have Anderson, theoretically, and I guess Jordan Lyles. So that's not bad. But I don't know. They're paying Anderson $6 million for this year,

and then they're on the hook for his buyout for next year if they don't pick up his option, which is $1.5 million. So $7.5 million is a little less than the Padres gave Josh Johnson coming off an injury year to kind of make good. And Pomerantz seems like a guy who just sort of needed to go elsewhere. So I guess that if you look at it from that perspective, it's not a bad deal for them necessarily. All right, we're done?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, we're done. Okay. All right, so we'll be back tomorrow, and we'll have an email show on Friday, so send us some at podcast at baseballperspectives.com.