Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 711: The Least Active Team at the Most Active Trade Deadline

Episode Date: August 3, 2015

Ben and Sam banter about Dave Stewart’s violation of front-office unwritten rules and a bad call on Bryce Harper, then discuss the extra-active deadline, the Padres’ inactivity, and the latest top-prospect promotions.

We had such a good time Hey, why didn't you call me? I thought I'd see you again Good morning and welcome to episode 711 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, brought to you by the Play Index at baseballreference.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg of Grantland. Hi, Ben.

Hello. How are you? All right all right good anything to talk about yeah a couple things so one thing about the trade deadline you saw the report about dave stewart blabbing about what the padres supposedly asked for yeah for craig kimbrell so he was doing a radio interview and he said we really did not get a very positive response for trying to acquire Kimbrell and he said I don't know that it was not wanting to trade within the division but I can tell you the quality of players that they asked for including our first baseman Paul Goldschmidt and the host interrupted and said they asked for Paul Goldschmidt and Stewart said now you now you get it. And he laughed. Is this a violation of the unwritten rules of general managing?

Oh, yeah, without a doubt. Yeah, okay. Because if this is true, first of all, it's probably not that unusual, right? We talked about with the Astros leak, some of the deals that either they had proposed or someone had proposed to them. And they seemed like a lot of the time the Astros or the other team were just aiming very high and kind of asking for unrealistic things as starting offers. And so maybe it wouldn't be unusual for a team to come back. And I don't know what the Diamondbacks were asking for,

but if the Padres actually did come back and say, we want Goldschmidt, who's one of the best players in baseball, that would be probably unrealistic and yet maybe not totally unusual for what we know about trades. And normally we don't hear what any team asked for from another team. I mean, you've got to be able to negotiate in a safe space yeah you don't you don't want what you asked for to come out on the radio and be repeated everywhere after that right now that said is it conceivable that in breaking this unwritten rule stewart is essentially um uh undermining other clubs' abilities

to give him lowball offers in the first place, knowing that they're going to be shamed for it. That could be. It seems like if there's anything in it for Stewart, then I would say, fine, go for it. I would overlook this. However, I don't feel like there is i i think that probably this would fall under the category of things that stewart has himself done and would

be super mad if someone revealed publicly like that i mean you can say it it's it's perfectly welcome to say well the offers we were getting were unrealistic, not naming names, and sort of give a general idea of how ridiculous it is. But otherwise, no. I mean, I don't know. Okay, so did we feel this way, though, when people were throwing Ruben Amaro Jr. under the bus because he was asking for top prospects? Was it different just because they weren't named that the general managers or whoever it was who was leaking his requests weren't named? Right, it was anonymous sources.

It was not necessarily GMs. It was people familiar with the talks or whatever. And yeah, did they name specific prospects all the time or did they just say he's asking for like our three top prospects or something were there specific teams and players involved i guess there were at times i don't remember and i don't remember if it was that i mean a lot of times with unnamed sources you're someone heard something or like an agent or somebody from another team or whatever is, is leaking it. So, so it's not necessarily like a general manager doing it and violating that trust space. But no, I mean, it's clearly, it's like,

you know, this is not, there's a reason that, that this does, that we don't get to hear these things. There's some professional courtesy involved in this sport that makes sure that business can get done. Right. Okay. Well, we're going to talk about the Padres a little bit later in this episode very soon. One other thing on Friday night, Bryce Harper was ejected from a game against the Mets. Important game. The Mets ended up sweeping the Nationals in a very exciting series, but this was the first game. None of that was decided yet. It was tied. It was the 11th inning, and the Nationals need Bryce Harper, and so he was thrown out in the 11th inning because of a ball strike call, and he had seemed to be dissatisfied with the zone throughout the game,

and from what I could tell, didn't have a great reason to be until the 11th inning. And one of my favorite sabermetric stats, I think, is the strike probability that Harry Pavlidis and Dan Brooks do, and it's sort of available through the BP database, and people will write about it at times. You can go look up what the probability and people will write about it at times. You can go look up what the probability of any pitch being a called strike was, and it's based on the pitch type and the location and the count. And so we've got millions and millions of pitches from the PitchFX era, and this basically says, given where it was and when it was, what were the odds that it was going to be a strike.

And you can look at this for every pitch. So I looked at that for Bryce Harper. And so in the 11th inning, he went swinging strike, ball, called strike. There were no issues with those. And then the fourth pitch of the at-bat was a ball. And it was a ball. It should have been a ball. It had a probability of being a called strike of 16.7% So it was very unlikely to be a called strike And it was not a called strike But the last pitch that Harper got upset about

Was almost in exactly the same place And it had a 15.7% probability So basically the same location and the same strike probability As the previous pitch which had been called a ball but this one was called a strike and Harper struck out and he said something nasty to the umpire and he got thrown out and the nationals kind of had to mix and match just to field a team they had to put Dan Ugla at first base for the first time in his life or his career and Ryan Zimmerman was in left field

and they lost Bryce Harper and Matt Williams was upset. And he's just said he needs to stay in the baseball game. And then he repeated, he needs to stay in the baseball game. And Harper said that he was sticking up for my team and myself. So I want to know, is there any argument for Harper getting ejected in that spot? Or I guess just in general, for a star player getting ejected by standing up for him himself and his team? It clearly was a bad call. It was not only a bad call, but an inconsistent call, which is the thing players hate. Do you think there's any benefit to Harper getting thrown out that counteracts the negative of not having Bryce Harper? Are you speaking in code about someone that we both know? No, although it's something I've wondered about often this summer,

watching baseball players get upset about strikes. So I didn't see this ejection. I've seen other Bryce Harper ejections, and there was a very controversial one maybe a month and a half or two months ago, and there was, I don't know, a lot of consensus that the umpire was behaved wrongly in kicking him out. However, it all... This was not that.

He struck out, he turned turned around he made angry gestures and just screamed in the umpire's face i don't know what he said but clearly he seemed to say it wasn't a case where an umpire went after him and escalated it i don't think well i was even going to say in that case the one i'm talking about yeah uh it was very clear that bryce harper to me it was very clear in that case that Bryce Harper was going to get ejected. That he was doing things that he was being told not to do. And it's like, okay, you're going to get ejected for doing that. If it were a quick outburst, if it was one word that was over the line, if it were pure emotion, then there

wouldn't be a reason for that, but it would be totally understandable. It's an emotional game. But I suspect that in this case, as in most Bryce Harper cases, there's a point about three seconds before he gets ejected where you think, oh, well, you're going to get ejected. And those three seconds in my mind, he also knows three seconds in advance that he's going to get ejected. And those last three seconds that get him there are on him. And so, no. Is there an excuse? No.

There's no, you're not going to get another. I don't think there's probably any real great reason to think you're going to get a lot more calls if you abuse the umpire. I do think that there's a working the refs angle that everybody does and you do it and you go up to a line. But at a certain point, you're not working the refs anymore. You're sort of selfishly chasing your own emotion. It's fun to be angry. And he was angry and he indulged himself in that anger. Yeah, I could kind of see it maybe in an earlier era where, you know, it's unpleasant to be yelled at like this in front of many people by an irate man. And maybe it could have been a kind of

corrective to bad umpire calls in the future. It's possible that it could have been the opposite too, that he would have gotten a reputation for yelling at umpires and then umpires would make even more bad calls at him. But maybe they would want to avoid being screamed at by him in the future. And maybe word would have gotten around or something that he won't let you get away with with a generous strike zone, that sort of thing. But at this point, now that umpires are monitored and regulated so closely and they get feedback on their calls after every game, they don't really need the players to tell them about that.

Although, you know, their union seems to provide them with so much security that if they do screw up, I don't know that it necessarily affects them that much. But it's an interesting argument that you need to stand up for your team, that the team leader, best player on the team, best player in the league, needs to

say something when something goes against him. But I don't buy it. Yeah, I mean, when something goes against him. Right. When something went against him. He didn't get ejected for arguing from the bench when you know Escobar. Right. Okay.

All right. We can move on. All right. So we didn't talk about any of the Padres' moves last week at the trade deadline because the Padres didn't make any moves last week at the trade deadline. And if you had to bet at the beginning of the week who would make the most moves, it would have been the Padres. And so obviously every year some guy doesn't get traded who you thought was going to get traded or some guy does get traded who you didn't think was going to get traded. But the Padres had so many anticipated moves and did so

little that it was in a way the biggest story of the trade deadline. When 1 o'clock, I think it was, 1 p.m. Pacific passed, it was like, oh wow, look at how many people are on the Padres still. And so, have you pondered what AJ Preller is doing? And I guess more along a kind of a bigger thematic look at this is just that we every once in a while will appoint some GM, the new hot GM. And then a couple of years later, you and I will talk about how nobody thinks he's the hot GM anymore. And so we talked about that with Jack Cerencic. We talked about that with Alex Anthopoulos when he was on the wobbly chair a couple, maybe what, a year and a half ago. And there have been others. There are teams in some way seem to kind of be like pitching coaches or closers, where there are a handful that remain

excellent throughout their career, but there are also a lot that rack up a lot of saves and then a year and a half later are non-tendered. And so A.J. Preller's rise and fall is the fastest of all of them. He was hired, in fact, like a year ago this week? Yeah. I was driving home from my first ever indie ball game, which I believe was in early August. Okay. Anyway, hired a year ago, was the story of the offseason had some moves that seemed inspired and some moves that seemed curious august 5th august 5th there you go but his ability to make

moves and uh his uh his furious work ethic were quickly legendary he made comments at the beginning of the offseason where he talked about how the Padres were going to be contenders, and that's why he needed to sign a bat, and we all mocked him, and then he signed five bats, and they looked pretty good. And then now, already here in August, sort of punchline-y. Not quite bad evaluator punchline-y, the way that two or three other GMs are, but kind of punchline-y for what he's done to the Padres this year. So is either of these extreme assessments of Preller justified? And what do you make of his inaction last week? Well, first of all, you're really underselling the Abraham Almonte to the Indians for Mark Zepchinski trade. That was a blockbuster. So he pulled that one off.

Yeah, that's kind of the move that a contender makes. Yeah, well, it seems that he thinks that he is a contender, or at least that was the message that was circulated via sources, but not via Dave Stewart after the deadline and the Padres in action. If I can just say a few things about the deadline as a whole, because I wrote about this today for Grantland, we talked about most of the big moves last week, but we didn't get to some of them. We didn't even get to the David Price trade. We didn't get to all of the trades because there were just too many to talk about. This was the biggest trade deadline ever. I don't know whether it seemed that way to you at the time.

It kind of seemed that way to me, trying to keep up with all the trades and write about them. But this was the biggest deadline ever. I went back to 1986, which was the first year that the deadline was at, was on July 31st. So it's a 30 season sample. And by far, just looking at the previous year wins above replacement that were produced by the players who were traded, so Troy Tulewitzki's 2014 wins above replacement player and David Price's and all those guys. So add them all together, there were about 70 wins above replacement player exchanged from one team to another this July.

And in all previous Julys since the deadline moved to July 31st, that was by far the most. The second place one was like 52 or something, so it wasn't even close. or something so it wasn't even close and it was not only the volume of moves being higher than it had been in most recent seasons but just the quality of the players changing teams was much higher so there were nine guys at this deadline who produced at least three wins above replacement player last year, and that was also the most. There was one year, like 1997, I think there were eight, but this was the most. Carlos Gomez, Ben Zobris, Troy Tulewitzki, Ioannis Cespedes, Juan Uribe, who just snuck in there, Johnny Cueto, David Price, Cole Hamels, Scott Casimir, all of those guys produced at least three wins of a replacement last year, and they were all traded this year. We could speculate about the reasons for that,

but the activity of every other team made the Padres' inactivity even more glaring. Every single team made a trade in July. There were a couple minor ones that you have to count for that to be true, but every team did something. And you're right you're right the Padres it seemed were going to do a lot of things it was almost inconceivable that you would have the most active deadline ever and not have the Padres be involved and I didn't really think they would sell for most of the season just kind of playing armchair psychologist, which is not a reliable thing to do. But when Bud Black was fired about a third of the way through the season, some people's reactions to that said, this is the beginning of the sell-off. This is a prelude to the Padres being sellers. And I hadn't really even considered that in my write-up of the thing because I just felt that based on what we knew about A.J. Preller at the time, which is not a whole lot, we're inferring and we're reading profiles and watching the moves he makes. from adding all that talent and trying to make the Padres into a contender right away

and reportedly being hired because he was the guy who said he could turn the Padres into a contender instead of having a years-long rebuilding process, it seemed unlikely to me that he would then, after a disappointing first half, tear it all down. And so I'm not shocked that he didn't do it even though the odds are long and the padres went into the deadline winning 10 of 14 or something they had you know played pretty well recently and maybe watching all that winning deluded them into thinking that they were serious contenders which they still aren't even after winning a couple more games after the deadline. They, you know, their playoff odds are low single digits. They're extreme long shots.

And so I'm not shocked just playing armchair psychologist and watching what Preller has done over the last several months. But I almost would have expected them to go the other way and trade for a shortstop Or something, that wouldn't have surprised me So I'm surprised that they didn't do something Okay, so Matt Trueblood Wrote a non-transaction analysis On teams that didn't trade

That you thought were going to trade And that'll run on Monday So Ben, you haven't read it yet But he broke it up For the Padres, he broke it up into two groups And I feel like One of the groups is what you're talking about That's the group of he broke it up for the Padres. He broke it up into two groups. And I feel like one of the groups is what you're talking about. That's the group of Kimbrell, Shields, Kashner, and Tyson Ross,

all of whom were speculated to be on the market. And yet by trading them, he would have basically been trading away from next year's core as well. And it's less shocking that he didn't trade those. But Ian Kennedy, Justin Upton, Will Venable, and Joaquin Benoit, those guys are not going to be on the team next year. The only justification, like you could see A.J. Preller giving up on this year without giving up any part of his soul. You call it a quick about face, but the playoff odds, their odds did a

quick about face. He turned them into a team that was a very legitimate contender that had better playoff odds at the start of the season than the Royals and the Giants. And now, as of today, has a 1.6% chance of making a playoff series, a one in a thousand chance of winning the World Series. I mean, you know, he's not like, this is not like, you know, Hunter S. Thompson on a bender. He's a reasonable person who made reasonable moves with a team that had a reasonable chance of competing. So I don't think that we've learned, like,

anything that obscene or extreme about him, right? Yeah, well, it took a, it seemed to take a very single minded pursuit of talent. I mean, we we did a podcast, we wondered how he managed to do this, how he managed to pry all of these players away from every other team without necessarily giving up all of his top prospects or anything. And so, yeah, I mean, a good GM responds to what happens. So he must have really wanted to win after just, you know, not sleeping all winter so that he could put this team together. It would be extremely disappointing to then disassemble it. But that's the hard choice that you have to make to be a good leader to plan for the future. No matter how much you wanted to win, no matter how much energy you sunk into winning,

you should respond to the changing circumstances. And maybe that's, you know, something that we saw Billy Bean do. Not to go right to the Billy Bean is a great GM argument, but that's what we've seen the A's do this season. They spent all offseason making tons of trades and putting this roster together and seemingly putting a good team together in terms of how the A's outscored their opponents and that sort of thing. And then, you know, they didn't win games. scored their opponents and that sort of thing and then you know they didn't win games and so they sold off casimir and clippard and zobrist and a bunch of guys that they had brought on because the circumstances had changed and fairly or unfairly they were not likely to make the playoffs and so they acted like a team that was not likely to make the playoffs and the padres did not right and the race as we talked about when we talked about the Rays, the year before had a team that was much better than this Padres team is

or seemed to be. And yet they made the rational calculation that it just wasn't going to happen this year and sold parts off. So let's get to the question of whether the Padres are good, though, next year. And because the second group, the Kimbrell, Shields, Kashner, etc. group, keeping them, it's a lot easier for you to accept that Preller thinks that next year's team should be better.

He's going to have an offseason to retool. And for all we know, maybe the Padres really are good. And even if they are really good, like with the A's, even if they are really good, well, they A's, even if they are really good, well, they're still not going to make the playoffs. They're way out of it. And so at a certain point, you have to give up on the season that you're in.

I mean, he's not going to be, like, reloading on, you know, August 28th, presumably, if he's down 14 games. As for next year's team, it's not clear to me. It seems like, well, okay. So I wrote about this for Fox Sports. I wrote about basically where the Padres are now compared to where they were before the flurry of moves in the winter. And obviously they gave up a lot of prospects. So their farm systems were.

They spent more money. They took on a lot of long-term commitments. they spent more money they took on a lot of long-term commitments uh their commitments for 2017 2018 2016 those years are put them kind of in the top third of major league teams they're up there with the big market teams even though they usually carry a very small payroll but the thing that's sort of like the most distressing about all this is that uh just before the trade deadline when well just as they do now when they had all of their players, our expected winning percentage for the Padres going forward was exactly what our expected winning percentage was for them last September 1st, which was after they'd already traded Houston Street and Chase Headley, and when they were a bad team, you know, a bad team that needed to hire A.J. Preller to fix everything.

Yeah. They spent an entire offseason adding stars, and yet their expected winning percentage is to the thousandth point. It was exactly the same, partly because they traded some good players away, as it turns out. You know, Grondahl and Joe Ross and Jesse Hahn are guys who would be, like, among the better players on this team. Jesse Hahn are guys who would be among the better players on this team,

partly because they took on guys who we didn't love, but also partly because every single player that Preller signed basically has seen his stock drop since he signed or traded for him, with maybe the exception of Upton, although Upton's trade value is certainly much less because he no longer had a draft pick attached to him if the Padres Upton, although Upton's trade value was certainly much less because he no longer had a draft pick attached to him if the Padres traded him, and because he was so close to free agency. So, and pretty much everybody else, like Will Middlebrooks has been a disaster. Matt Kemp has been very bad. Will Myers has hit like 100 at bats and just had his rehab shut down or whatever uh james shields uh went

from pretty good late off-season bargain signing to unmovable contract he's having the somewhere between the worst and third worst year of his career depending on what you look at craig kimbrough's having kind of i mean he's still very good but is sort of having the worst year or maybe second worst year of his career. He's already allowed more earned runs this year than he did in each of the last three years. And his strikeout rate is down. And then there's another one. Oh, Derek Norris, OPS plus has dropped from 118 to 88. And so that, when you're looking at that,

that doesn't seem like you can really blame preller for it right i mean he like i i think you can defend him in a way like i'm not josh johnson and brandon morrow getting hurt who saw that coming but i mean he he both of those were tiny signings yes right They were overlapping risk. And it turns out that, in fact, he's gotten probably even less than he expected. But he got 33 innings out of them. What would you have guessed at this point? 70?

Yeah, probably more than 33. And so even that one, even on the guys that he knew were going to sort of screw him, he got extra screwed. And so I'm not sure if I want to be the guy defending AJ Preller or not. I haven't thought that much about it. Maybe I do, maybe I don't. But you can certainly see an argument for it, that he did build a team that could very easily be in, you know, second place a game and a half behind the Dodgers right now if everybody performed to expectations.

And instead, everybody underperformed. Like, at a certain point, it's up to the players and it's up to whether they execute and it's up to whether you happen to get the guy when he's having his good year instead of his bad year. And so, like, up to the deadline, I was willing to stand behind Preller and say it was still a fun offseason. It was still, like,season. It was still amazing what he was able to accomplish. It did make the Padres more marketable for a year at least. I was impressed with what he was able to do. Then it all went belly up on him, just like it did for Billy Bean this year, just like it did for the Rays a year ago. Sometimes it happens,

year just like it did for the Rays a year ago. Sometimes it happens unpredictably. However, I can't fathom a defense for the trade deadline. That to me now shifts this from understandable to oh well, we're dealing with that guy. I'm kind of rooting for him to make

the playoffs now because I would actually not mind it all being wrong and if they somehow did tear off a 22 and 5 month or something like that and like miraculously get into it like that'd be fun that'd be cool i like i like gms who do that who have unreasonable faith in their team to compete and don't make me watch them lose on purpose um and so i wouldn't totally bother me if you were rewarded, but it does seem extremely delusional. Yeah, I really enjoyed the offseason. They took a totally boring

team. Like the Padres were famous for being not famous. That was about all they had going for them. Like you would periodically say, oh yeah, I wonder what the Padres are up to. I haven't thought about the Padres. I haven't talked about the Padres. They were just the most under the radar team, understandably so. And he made them the most exciting team of the offseason. And I picked them for the wild card. And I don't know whether I just bought too much into the excitement and figured a team that made so many moves must be good. I think I was realistic about the fact that they had a strange roster and their pieces didn't fit together. And Jeff Quinton wrote that good article for Baseball Perspectives about how maybe the

critics of his offseason were just focusing too much on the balanced nature of a team and the aesthetic nature of how its parts fit together and complement each other. And the important thing was just that he had added all this talent and one way or another, these players would produce. And I sort of bought that argument and I expected the team to become more balanced over the course of the season because I figured that a guy who made so many moves over the winter and traded for Craig Kimbrell basically on opening day would continue to make trades to improve the team throughout the year. And that really hasn't happened. And yeah, even the moves

that I didn't like, Matt Kemp trade, we didn't like the Matt Kemp trade at the time. And yet I didn't expect Matt Kemp to be a replacement level player. I thought he would still be somewhat useful. I thought they didn't make a great trade for him, but that he wouldn't immediately fall off a cliff. And so, yeah, so many of the moves that they made, the pitchers just giving up tons of home runs and Petco Park and not historically guys who do that. I don't know what to make of that. It seems like they have had a number of players perform worse than they should have by all rights. And yeah, I kind of agree with you, though, that they should have adapted to the circumstances of being a losing team and acted like one. And maybe it's possible that they just the deadline got flooded over that last week. Every team was making trades.

Tons of really good players were available and were changing teams. And maybe Justin Upton was not as attractive when there were, you know, Carlos Gomez was available and Jay Bruce was reportedly available and Cespedes was available and all these other players were available. maybe it was just hard to find a fit it was maybe the the market kind of tanked because it was flooded with so much talent and maybe he didn't think that he could get something back matt makes matt says something in his uh in his piece that um uh i i don't know if it's true i'm'm trusting that it's true, but it's a good point if it's true, which is that in each of the past few trade deadlines,

they have gone from seller's markets to buyer's market the closer you get to the deadline. And that makes sense. I mean, every couple days, another team shifts from buyer or hold to seller and uh so by the end of it you have more sellers and fewer buyers than you did three weeks earlier two weeks earlier and uh the Padres seemed especially given that they hadn't won 10 of their first of their final 14 14 games earlier really seems like they could have like really cashed out big time 14 days earlier if they hadn't waited and even talked themselves maybe into thinking they were competitors.

But there is, I think, a real, probably a lesson here for next year's GMs and every year's GMs. Trades just don't really get made until the deadline. And that has always seemed insensible, unsensible, insensible, nonsensible, nonsensical, dispensable. More than one of those things, unsensible. And I know that it's hard to make trades before the draft because everybody is focused on the draft and then you've got to sign your guys and so trade deadline really doesn't even start picking up like even those conversations don't really occur until sometime in june but still like it feels

like you know it does seem crazy it seems like everyone's procrastinating it's not really that it's probably just that you want to keep your options open. You don't want to signify to your fans that the season's already over. Right, that too. You want to see if you're a contender or not, and you get a better idea of that every day. And if you're selling, then every day you hold on to the guy, well, the less valuable he gets because the team that acquires him is getting fewer games. because the team that acquires him is getting fewer games. And yet you're also sort of just leaving him out there so that you can get more offers. And it's probably hard to pass up the next potential offer that you could get. But it is crazy that the season goes on for months before this deadline

and almost every move is made in the few days leading up to it. And so many of them are so predictable. There was no doubt that the Phillies were going to listen to offers on Cole Hamels. And yet it takes until the deadline for them to actually trade Cole Hamels. There are not a ton of teams, but at least a handful of teams that by mid-June know that they're definitely sellers. And so, I mean, I don't know. Yeah, you just sort of get the feeling that we could be having a totally different discussion

if the momentum to trade some of these guys had picked up 14 days earlier for the Padres and they could have gotten ahead of everybody and maybe they pull off a couple of huge deals and we're like wow look at the return they got and yet instead they're going to lose you know four guys who had trade value and at the end of the year and get one draft pick out of it while paying their salaries for this year although let's actually let to be fair of of the four Kennedy Upton Venable Benoit do which of those four, Kennedy, Upton, Venable, Benoit, which of those four have the profile of guy who will get traded in August? Benoit?

Because there are a ton of trades in August. We should not forget. Right. There are always way more than we think there are. Yeah. I'll say Benoit. And just Benoit, not Kennedy, not Upton? They probably all do.

Well, Upton probably does. You think Upton can get traded? I mean, you don't think... He might be too good, too desirable to pass through waivers. Right. And, yeah, I mean, definitely a guy you claim to block, even if you don't want him. So it would surprise me if they could move up to in august but i forget who

gets traded in august what there are a lot of them but i forget who they are yeah what i forget what kind of players someone do a piece on the the guys who get traded in august like on what the profile is so if you're a padres fan would you roll it back if you could go back to josh burns and just wipe away the aj preller era would you do that would you press reset oh yeah yeah absolutely i mean not i again i don't think that you need to be ashamed of it like i it just didn't work out and it not working out has heavy heavy costs uh i still think that it was a good option i mean you mentioned kemp and this is the thing is that everybody who writes about how bad aj preller's offseason was they're going to talk about how that shouldn't have done the matt kemp deal they took on more money than they had

to they gave up grandale fine that's fine it wasn't a good trade at the time but nobody was predicting matt kemp was going to be replacement level. No. Nobody was. He was the best hitter in the second half last year. Exactly. And so what we're really talking about is that everybody was as wrong about Matt Kemp as you think A.J. Preller was. Like, you probably thought, like, you, guy who doesn't like Matt Kemp that much, you probably thought, ah, he'll be lucky to get three wins.

And Preller, probably crazy old Preller, he probably thought he'd get four. He said he got zero. So, you know, you're just as bad. We're all just as bad. We all missed on Matt Kemp. And you can't blame Preller for missing on it when we all did. So, it's like that is often the case where it was that way with Josh Hamilton, where everybody was talking about how

the Angels were sunk because of Josh Hamilton. And it's true, but they were sunk because Josh Hamilton was performing like a one-win player, which absolutely nobody thought was going to happen. They just thought he was overpaid. So even in retrospect, we don't know as much about these moves as we think we did, or we shouldn't be as

confident in saying I told you so as we probably want to be by the way we started this episode with the diamondbacks let me end with the diamondbacks the only trade that they made in july and to make the every team made a trade in july fun fact work you have to include this one so the phillies traded two minor leaguers and future considerations to the Diamondbacks for future considerations. I don't know that I've ever seen the future considerations going both ways. It's a weird one. Future considerations is not to be confused with player to be named.

Future considerations literally means you owe me a favor. Yeah. confused right with player to be named like future considerations literally means like you owe me a favor yeah it's it's what you like it's what you do future considerations is what you call it when you want to give a player away and you don't want to insult that player by saying oh what did we get for you nothing right so the phillies gave away two minor leaguers yeah and also so they're both giving each other future considerations seems like a swindle for the diamondbacks a really weird trade no um one last note the there was another little flurry of top prospect promotions so that the yankees are promoting luis severino and the red sox are promoting henry owens and the Rockies are promoting Henry Gray. We did a podcast earlier this year about prospect promotions and whether it meant something, and I sort of thought it did. So this now brings the total of baseball

prospectus preseason top 101 guys who have made their major league debuts this year to 29, made their major league debuts this year to 29. And the average over, you know, almost 20 years of prospect lists or more, 25 years of prospect lists, is 28.7 in a year. So we've... September. Yeah, right. So we are now just a couple days into August, and there have already been more top prospect debuts this season than there usually are

in a typical season. And in a typical season, about 30% of the top prospect debuts come after August, mostly in September, obviously. So it has continued to be kind of a crazy year for prospect promotions. And I'm lumping all this stuff together. I'm lumping the aggressive prospect promotions and the crazy unprecedented trade deadline and the preseason projections that put every team less of a spread between teams than we'd ever seen before in the projections era and the bad teams buying all the good players that you chronicled over the offseason and that we've continued to see at the trade deadline with the Astros and the Cubs suddenly being the buyers. I'm just lumping all this together into a baseball is really interesting right now kind of bucket.

And unfortunately, you and I are seeing more of the pacific association than we are of major league baseball but this has been a really exciting competitive close season for a number of reasons that have manifested themselves in some really interesting ways lots of cool trends going on these days good stuff okay so that is it for today You can send us emails at Podcasts at BaseballPerspectives.com You can join our Facebook group Closing in on 3,000 members At Facebook.com slash groups Slash Effectively Wild

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