Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 79: Are Teams Becoming More Willing to Trade Their Young Players?

Episode Date: November 8, 2012

Ben and Sam discuss whether recent events and rumors portend more young players on the move, and why.

Good evening. Good morning. Welcome to Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from BaseballPerspectives.com. This is episode 79. I'm Sam Miller and I'm with Ben Lindberg. Ben, hello. Hello. How are you? It's snowing. I guess that didn't really answer the question, but it is snowing, and I like snow, so I'm happy. Great. We're doing one topic today. It was my assignment to bring a topic. And so my topic is about untouchables. And before I start, we'll just acknowledge we both agree that there is no such thing as a truly untouchable player.

The phrase itself is sort of a kind of a, I don't know, colloquial usage of something that isn't literally true. Okay, so we acknowledge that everybody is technically touchable. But there are, you know, there are a couple of players in every organization who are sort of considered untouchable. And yet right now as we speak, there are rumors that the Arizona Diamondbacks are listening if anybody wants to make an offer on Trevor Bauer. And the Rays are, according to some reports long period of time where perhaps all of baseball history, certainly I think, though, in the last 20 years, where elite talent like this, players who have made the majors, who are not simply prospects but are elite sort of top ten prospects who also have made the majors, who are not simply prospects, but are elite sort of top 10 prospects who also have made the majors and sort of cleared that final hurdle a little bit, would never be traded.

And that the value placed on pre-arb talent has really, since the days of John Hart, been such a huge part of a competitive advantage that no team would really ever think about trading a guy like Matt Moore or even Trevor Bauer. And yet, here we are talking about it, and it's just less than one year since Jesus Montero was traded for Michael Pineda, which might be sort of the, I don't know, the greatest one of these sorts of challenge trades in Major League history. And if not the greatest, then the greatest since De Shields for Pedro in 1994. And so I just want to know, do you think that this is a shift in how teams are going to treat their young players? Do you think there's anything to this? Or is this just kind of the

lowering of the bar for what passes as reportable rumor? I don't know I guess with the Montero-Pineda trade it was surprising that that those two players were traded and yet also not that surprising because they didn't I don't know if they didn't fit with their current teams, but it seemed like the other team kind of needed them more than the team that had them. So it was, it was a trade that made sense in many ways. Montero was probably going to be a first baseman or a DH ultimately. And the Yankees had that type of player in spades already and the Yankees needed pitching and the Mariners needed needed some offense um so that wasn't a trade that really

uh I mean it just made sense uh in in many ways so I don't know if that's a trade that, I mean. Well, I want to interrupt. I mean, it made sense, but there are always trades like this that make sense. They just don't happen. Mike Axisa, how would you pronounce his name? I say Axisa, yes. Mike Axisa tweeted in February, and Mike Trout for Bryce Harper Trade would make baseball sense and be off the charts insane. And I was at the register at the time. I used that as a jumping off point for a blog post. And it did make sense. I mean, I think that he was right. It made a lot of sense for both teams at the time. But I looked at what would have happened

if the number one and number two prospects had been traded for each other in each year since 1995. And usually the mismatch in terms of results – I mean these are all guys who are essentially indistinguishable from each other at the time. They're one-two. There's essentially no difference between one and two. one and two. And yet, if you look a few years out, the return is usually so mismatched that I counted probably three or four GMs in a 10-year period who would have been fired from those trades. So even if they make sense, there seems to be a lot more downside than upside for a general manager, at least kind of in the most simplistic way of evaluating these things. Well, I'm trying to think of a reason why that would have changed in the last few years

because I guess the danger, the perception is still there. I don't know why that would have changed it could still certainly reflect poorly on a GM if he trades a very highly regarded prospect and it doesn't work out which it hasn't for the Yankees really in the very early going

not that it hasn't worked out so well for either team but yeah I don't know. I mean, I think the value of, of, uh, of an arbitration player, a pre-arbitration player has probably only continued to rise. It seems to me, right. I mean, the, the perception of the value, at least, uh, it's not like people are trading those players lightly now or appraising them as any less valuable than they used to. I wouldn't think.

I think that it's actually the case that they're evaluating them. I think that this is actually the result of a sort of a solidified and increased appreciation of just how valuable they are. It seems to me that the perceived value of these types of players has only gone up, which in a way has actually turned them from untouchable to the sort of players where the return is so staggering because there's kind of a shared appreciation for how valuable these players are. And so the price that you might expect to get back has finally maybe caught up to your own internal value of the player and his worth. Okay, so you're saying that now that people have sort of put a dollar value on these prospects, which people have done in various ways, that now you can exchange them because there is

kind of an easier way to get a handle on what they're worth, whereas before it was just sort of kind of a nebulous concept of what they were worth. They were just worth so much that you could never trade them. But now that you can put some sort of value on them, you can trade them even if that value is really, really high. Yeah, I think that the more information is, the more of the information is sort of defined, the easier it is to make what might be a sort of scary transaction.

I mean, if you went shopping for a car 10 years ago, almost no matter what you did, you were going to walk away feeling like the dealer had ripped you off, because you knew that they were trying to rip you off, they were better at it than you are, and they had far more information than you do. Now that all these prices are available on the internet and you can, you know, the advantages that have shifted to the consumer have given so much more information to the consumer that now you don't necessarily feel like you got ripped off when you're buying a car. And that's because all this information is public. It's all kind of open and you, there isn't a real kind of vagueness to the transaction.

So there's a blue book and a car fax for prospects. There's a blue book for pre-arb prospect, yeah. So now you no longer have to deal the guy with this sort of vague worry that it's going to turn out badly. I mean, it becomes a lot more, I mean, obviously baseball is never going to be this way, but it becomes a little bit more of an actuarial chart where you can kind of compare and figure out whether the deal makes sense instead of just sort of focusing on the downside of what happens if you, you know, if you give up somebody who turns out

to be good. So you think that we will see these trades, if not regularly, at least more often than we used to, and that will continue to be the case? I mean, I don't know. We're having this conversation because it appears as though that is happening. It appears that that's maybe happening. I mean, I don't know. If you want to put Delman Young into this category, then maybe that's a precedent. And I think that's maybe fair. And maybe, I don't know, I guess Andy Marte had never really reached the majors, so maybe that's not. But, I mean, it does feel to me like Pineda-Montero was more or less unprecedented.

And the idea that Matt Moore is anything other than an automatic hang-up, I think, is brand new. I do think that's a new idea. Now, if nothing comes of it and Pineda Montero is the last of its kind, then obviously none of this really matters. But, yeah, I don't know. I think it's conceivable, and if that's the case, what I said is probably what I would maybe attribute it to. So, I don't know. Yeah, it feels to me like in history there was a willingness to trade prospects, an over-willingness to trade prospects up until probably the mid-90s or so. And then since then, there has been much more reticence to trade prospects, but particularly

to trade young major leaguers. I could see both of those sorts of ideas disappearing if the return is right. I think part of the unwillingness to trade prospects over the last 15 or 20 years is that when you look at the trades for prospects before 15 or 20 years ago, they were always so lopsided. You would just get smoked on them because guys were trading top 10 prospects for eight months of a veteran or whatever. And I think that really happened. Now you have a guy who is an elite prospect, you expect a pretty good return on it. And so it makes it easier to pull the deal off. Well, I wonder, because we used to see a lot of trades involving prospects, as you said, but we didn't see a lot of trades that were prospects for other prospects. That's true. And I wonder whether that will become a regular thing.

I mean, Montero-Pineda was not quite that. Pineda had pitched a season and Montero had been up at least. But that was close to prospect for prospect. Very young and inexperienced players. But I guess the same thing applies. We're not necessarily just talking about trading a valuable young player who has already sort of established himself, but also maybe a player who hasn't even made it to the majors yet. It's conceivable that that could also become more common for

the same reasons, I suppose. Yeah, yeah. So I want to read a paragraph to you. Okay. Okay, this is how it goes. It says, The typical baseball trade of this era goes like this. A veteran player, often past his prime and invariably lugging a hefty salary,

is unloaded for a couple of obscure, low-cost minor leaguers. The trade is rumored for days, and when the deal is finally done, the resultant impact is analyzed in a matter of seconds. Very boring. That is written by Tim Kirchhen in 1994. And that's interesting.

I didn't really – when I was – I guess I was 13 when that came out, and I don't remember trade rumors at all um back in those days yeah I guess it was different if you were around the game so that's in his story on the Pedro DeShields um trade of 1994 and um of course that was a massively one-sided trade and it's almost unthinkable that um the dodgers made it at the time um a couple of interesting points from that story one is that um when montreal started shopping to shields um they narrowed it down to either pedro or aaron sealy uh and at the time i would have thought that aaron sealy this was after aaron sealy's rookie year i believe time I would have thought that Aaron Sealy this was after Aaron Sealy's rookie year I believe and I would have thought Sealy would have been the better guy and that would have blown my mind even more but of course it didn't turn out that way the Dodgers were willing to

trade partly because they had Darren Dreifurt coming up through the wings and so this is the this is sort of his conclusion and so at this, it looks as if the deal is one of those good-for-both-teams arrangements. Quote, no one got hooked on that trade, says the Philz Thomas. Nevertheless, San Diego Padre coach Merv Redmond thinks LA got the better end of the deal, saying, quote, DeShields might be the best second baseman in the league. It's always so nice to look back at retrospective reviews

and predictions like that, as you did in your article yesterday. And I enjoyed the comment someone left that called you a baseball nihilist because of your attitude toward predictions, which is pretty much my attitude toward predictions as well. Yeah, it's my attitude toward all of baseball. I do sometimes wonder how I enjoy baseball as much as you do. Right. Yeah, we both really love baseball,

but to hear us talk about it, sometimes you would think that we were sick of it. We do. We sound like, I don't know, we sound like two comedians dissecting a joke and just completely ruining the thing. Just taking all the fun and humor out of it and just turning it into this terrible, dull exercise. And yet it's all we do all day.

It is. And people pay us to do it too, which is even weirder. Yes. All right. Well, one quick final question. All right. Well, one quick final question. Trevor Bauer, Matt Moore, Jeremy Hellickson, which is traded this off? I guess I would say Hellickson. Okay. Yeah. I'll say none.

Okay. Oh, I didn't even know none was an option, but I probably should have. None is always an option, yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, I'd say he's the most likely. Okay. Yeah, that's probably true.

Okay. Although Trevor Bauer, I think it's conceivable that he's just really unlikable. I mean, it sounded sort of from the rumors that maybe they just don't feel a lot of emotional investment in the guy. They maybe feel some baseball investment, but this is all reading between the lines of half tweets and stuff. So it's not like I know anything, but that's sort of the impression I get. Sort of the impression you get with Justin Upton there sometimes also. He's kind of always on the market, it seems. He is, yeah. Is this the third year in a row?

Mm-hmm. Well, maybe. Do you think he'll get traded? Yeah, I guess not, probably. But I don't know. There's a lot of smoke every year, so maybe eventually there will be fire. Somebody a few minutes ago tweeted to me that the A's should trade Chris Young for Justin Upham,

which would be awesome. Yes. All right. That's all. That's the show. We will have two topics tomorrow.