Toronto adds Steven Matz from the Mets for Sean Reid-Foley, Yennsy Diáz and Josh Winckowski
They also signed Marcus Seimen. Toronto’s opening day roster is going to be stacked.
While I would probably vote Schilling in, I can’t subscribe to the idea that your behavior after you retire shouldn’t necessarily count. MLB and the Hall of Fame are, after all, in the entertainment and PR business.
If someone committed murder or trafficked in child pornography, most would agree that Hall of Fame membership was out.
But if jerkishness was a disqualifier (during or after one’s career) we’d have a whole lot of Hall-purging to do, starting with Cap Anson, Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, John McGraw…
Jon Lester to the Nationals
Interesting article; however it neglects to mention that anyone who advocates lynching anyone, should never be honored, in any way, shape, or form.
Arenado to St Louis. It will be unpopular in Colorado for a year or two but depending on the return it can be an excellent and smart move to get out from under that contract.
Joc Pederson to the Cubs on a 1 year, $7mil deal
The Blue Jays signed Marcus Semien to a one year deal.
Semien’s MVP level season in 2019 was obviously a huge fluke, but he’s usually a good player anyway and grabbing him for a year where he will be motivated to play for a bigger contract is a reasonably good risk. What’s a bit more puzzling is where he’ll play, since the Jays already had a set infield. Semien hasn’t played an inning at any position besides shortstop in seven years, and the Jays have a 23-year-old shortstop I presume they don’t want to move leftward on the defensive spectrum.
So, I’m not sure what they’re going to do. Granted, Bo Bichette has already demonstrated a propensity for getting hurt so Semien may have to play shortstop out of necessity, but when things are good it seems to me the smartest approach is to have Semien play third, have Vladdy Guerrero play first or DH (preferably DH; he is a dreadful first baseman) and I guess Rowdy Tellez plays the one of first or DH Vladdy doesn’t play.
However you slice this their lineup looks very good, so maximizing the arrangement defensive skill is important.
Sorry, no. It’s a heist. None of the players that seem to be named as going back to Colorado are premium, A+ prospects, and that’s what Arenado is worth. The names as reported by Ken Rosenthal are:
Austin Gomber, 27-year-old pitcher. A little MLB experience. He’s 27, not a prospect.
Luken Baker, 24-year-old first baseman. Hit .244 with limited power in A ball in 2019. C level prospect.
Jhon Torres, 21-year-old shortstop. B+ prospect, could be A- if he has a good 2021. The only real catch.
Maybes:
Jake Woodford, 24-year-old pitcher. Maybe a B- prospect.
Angel Rondon, 23-year-old pitcher. B+. I like him more than Woodford; more command and a year younger.
I think there is more reason to be skeptical of “real player for prospect” deals when most of these guys did not get to play a full season of real baseball in 2020. That sets back development.
How often do REAL MVP-type trades for prospects ever work out? I mean, they usually don’t. When teams get ripped off for a premium prospect it’s usually when they overvalued the guy they were getting back or made a panic deal at the trade deadline. These offseason moves - I mean, just thinking of the Blue Jays, they traded away Roy Halladay and got nothing in return for him that worked out (and cost themselves a playoff spot in 2010 as a result.) Then a few years later they dealt a bunch of guys to Oakland to get Josh Donaldson and it was a total reverse, a titanic heist. I can’t even remember who the Padres got when they dealt Fred McGriff to the Braves. These trades, over and over and over, get next to nothing back for the team trading away the star.
An MVP level player is just so, so hard to replace. A guy like Nolan Arenado could, just doing what he normally does, put up 18 WAR in his first three seasons with the Cardinals. 18 WAR is a pretty decent CAREER. That is, quite honestly, higher than the over/under line on career WAR for any prospect they’re giving away to get him, and stuffing 15-18 WAR into three seasons from one guy - occupying just one roster spot - is far likelier to result in a championship than getting nit from a bunch of guys.
Pre-covid you would have a stronger argument.
Arenado is almost thirty and has a crushing contract. He regressed in last years shortened season. He wants out. Will the Rox be competing in the next two years? No. Their best course of action today is a rebuild.
Arenado’s “Regression” last year was still 1.6 WAR in 48 games, an All-Star level of performance. If he does THAT for three years he will probably be more valuable than every guy he was traded for. Probably all of them combined.
Could this work out for the Rockies? Sure, anything’s possible, but let’s be clear on the history; these trades are almost always total failures. From a baseball point of view, that’s simply beyond any doubt. I have managed to find one example where the trade worked out - when the Indians dumped CC Sabathia, one of the players they got back was Michael Brantley, and Brantley gave them 24 WAR, a pretty darned good run.
Speaking of the Indians: they “dumped” Cliff Lee to the Phillies in 2009, getting a package of mostly spare parts in return - but one of the players who was unheralded at the time was Carlos Carrasco, who arguably did more for the Indians over 11 years than Lee did for Philadelphia in less than 2 (the Phillies did get to the World Series once that time around with Lee).
Another example of a top player sent off for a package of prospects was Mark Teixeira, who the Rangers traded to Atlanta in exchange for players who turned out to be long-term pluses for Texas, helping them get to a couple of World Series - Matt Harrison, who pitched well for them for several years, reliever Neftali Feliz who had a few fine seasons and some guy named Elvis Andrus who’s been a mainstay of their lineup.*
So while oftentimes the team acquiring the headline guy makes out best, there are exceptions. It may be a bit premature to label this one a steal for the Cardinals.
*left out Jarrod Saltalamacchia, another useful player dealt to the Rangers in that trade.
I watch baseball, but for the playing, not for the dynamics of team building. IOW, I’m watching the checkers, not the chess. And sometimes I’m only watching the tic-tac-toe. So I’m not qualified to dispute anything you, @madsircool, @jackmannii, et al, say here.
Instead I’m looking for more info.
ISTM that MLB under the luxury tax = sorta salary cap is not about getting the best winningest team. Its about getting the most cost-effective team. Assuming for a moment fixed revenue, every dollar of salary foregone is profit to the owners. Even if they pay right up to the aggregate limit, any time they can trade an over-priced player for a right-priced player, they can upgrade the total quality for their team and, statistically, win more games.
Obviously revenue is not fixed. Some locations are more “baseball towns” than others, but just about every team takes in more revenue when they’re having a good season (or better yet a run of good seasons) than when struggling and sucking.
As applied to Arenado specifically, was it simply a matter that Colorado overpaid for the 18 WAR they got? And somehow StL thinks they can get more marginal bang for less marginal buck from the same guy? Or that in their more baseball town situation, extract extra revenue from their fans vs COL for the same cost as COL was paying and whose fans won’t pay as much for the same show?
I suppose my bottom line is that discussing trades by looking only at on-field performance is like the old joke about a sports radio broadcast:
In partial scores today: Rockies 12.
Absent the other team’s score, or a calculation of results per dollar spent, we’re not looking at the measure of merit that management is. And so we’re not going to come to the conclusions management did. Is there often an aspect of fashion, or of “gotta do something, anything!” to trade decisions? Sure. Plus a host of other sub rosa factors the public doesn’t know about, or at least that teams & players try to keep quiet. e.g. personality conflicts.
But MLB is a business before it’s entertainment before it’s sport. Bang/buck is how business, any business, works.
IMO, and perhaps ignorantly so. Looking for enlightenment here, not an argument.
That’s clearly what Colorado is banking on, though they’re now going to be paying part of his salary anyway. They are voluntarily making him an even better buy for St. Louis.
Of course there is the issue of cost effectiveness, but we aren’t talking here about thin slicing the difference between a B and a C. Arenado is an MVP class player and
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These trades usually fail. Jackmannii found two more examples of ones that worked out okay - Lee for Carrasco et al. worked out really well for both teams, actually - but the list of ones that didn’t is quite a bit longer.
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The only opportunity you have to get players of Arenado’s calibre cheaply is prior to them being free agents. Players that great are simply not cheap. If you can repeatedly develop them yourself well done, but sooner or later they have to get paid, and it’s very hard to win championships without at least one or two elite players. A policy of never having any… well, it can be done, but as a fan I’d be pretty dismayed. Denver isn’t THAT small a market, surely?
If you’re gonna make a move, you don’t want to make one that usually explodes in the face of the team making it. It’s like drafting high school pitchers; from time to time is does work out. The Tigers got Justin Verlander out of high school. But it usually fails, so why do it?
The Rockies could at least have gotten an actual A prospect, surely?
Very interesting. Thank you.
Back when I was involved in union work there was a lot of discussion of win-win negotiations vs win-lose negotiations. I always thought that argument was checkers when chess is needed to actually win.
IMO there’s 3 levels to the game:
- Pure zero-sum thinking. Either the union gets a $1/hour raise or the company gets a $1/hour cut. The same pie is cut differently.
- “Win-win” thinking. By altering the total deal, we each come out better by gaining something we value differently than the other side does. The pie is now bigger, in addition to (possibly) being cut differently.
- Accurate perception. Did win-win actually make the pie bigger? Or only fool you into mistakenly believing the pie is bigger? And what about your slice of that pie? Is it actually bigger, or are you mistaken? Can I fool the other side more effectively than he is fooling me?
My belief is the skilled operator excels at level 3. Which enables selling a distorted perception of the level 2 reality to a less skilled adversary. Said another way, level 3 is where all the material value-add occurs; that’s where/how you sell a bill of goods rather than actual goods.
Finally, once you’ve successfully gotten a level 2 agreement, there begins a level 1 battle to chisel additional value from your adversary. You want to drive them back to just short of their “point of indifference” in the argot; the place where they could just as easily take it or leave it. If you haven’t pushed them right back to a hairsbreadth above their point of indifference, you’ve left level 1 value in their pocket that should be in yours.
Sounds like StL played COL pretty hard on this one. Which doesn’t answer your meta-question about why MLB in general does these sorts of trades more often than seems successful.
Doing level 3 negotiating at a champion level takes a rare combination of ability to dish out sincere-sounding BS while never falling for their BS and also never falling for your own BS. That skill is pretty rare. Getting caught up in the “art of the deal” is all too easy. Your ego is not your friend. Finally, all these decisions are largely managed by and arrived at committees on both sides. Some single somebody signs the papers. But that somebody didn’t decide in vacuo; the group dynamics of the negotiating team is usually unhelpful to the cause.
Lets take a look at his home/away split:
Home: .322/.376/.609
Away: .263/.322/.471
We can expect him to perform closer to his road splits in St Louis. He is also closing in on 30. Justin Turner is still on the open market and can be signed for far less for fewer years. While its true that this could explode in the Rockies face, there is a chance that they can save some money while they rebuild and reinvest it in younger players who will hopefully begin to peak when SD’s run ends.
Justin Turner is 36, a huge age difference, and while a fine player has never been as good as Arenado has (albeit in part because he never stays healthy for a whole year.) He’s not an equivalent signing.
I didnt mean to imply that he was. But, as a stopgap, he would be just fine. They are not going to compete for the next couple of years anyway.
There is also the issue of keeping a player around who doesnt want to be there. Who can become poison in the clubhouse. He alone wont take you to the next level in the next couple of years so let him go.
It’s not like he was a significant contributor over the past several years, but I’m certainly sorry to see him go. It’s best for everyone, he’s no longer an MLB player and should be moving on to the next phase of his life.