Trade Review 2023 #1 - Winter Meetings

[Ted]

With the winter meetings behind us, it's time to look at the handful of trades from the first half of the offseason. We'll also be continuing random nautical etymology.



Huntsville/Brooklyn
Huntsville receives:
P Alejandro Ramos

Brooklyn receives:
SP Jose Garcia (prospect)

Huntsville's roster has started to shape up nicely. If that were not the case, this move wouldn't make as much sense. Alejandro Ramos isn't the kind of pitcher that will win you games on the strength of his arm very often. However, he is a rubber armed, reliable, back of the rotation guy who can keep a team in the game. As Huntsville's offense has come together, it provides a nice setting for the 28 year old journeyman. His contract is reasonable at 8 million for 2023. If he pitches well and takes a similar extension, this could end up being a really nice pickup for the Phantoms.

Garcia is the kind of prospect that is hard for me to give up on, but the Phantoms might have done the right thing. Since 2019, Garcia has improved his CO from 3 to 4. He also is a 6 movement guy and we know how Kyle feels about them. Garcia has terrific stuff and if he ever learns any command, could go deep into games. Only time will tell if he turns into a late bloomer or if the Phantoms got "something for nothing". It doesn't look like Garcia is being challenged much in AAA due to his overwhelming stuff. Were I Brooklyn, I'd put him in the pen on the big league club and see if being around the vets doesn't help him progress.

This is a pretty good trade both ways. Brooklyn gets a retread and a chance at a fine pitcher for a player they were not intending to use as a starter. Huntsville fills out it's rotation and loses a questionable prospect. I'll take this spot to apologize to Kyle somewhat. As previously noted, I'm not a fan of trading prospects away to rapidly move from rebuilding to competing. I find that often teams simply underestimate the number of additions and moves needed to revamp a building roster, and end up with a half put together team with vets that flame out before the rest of the minor league system catches up and is ready. Huntsville may prove the exception. Their division doesn't have a clear dominant team, and this helps, but Kyle has made a truly significant number of moves to put this team together and seems to have done enough to get over the "halfway assembled" hump.

Grades
Huntsville: Talent B-, Organizational B
Brooklyn: Talent C+(possible A- if Garcia develops all the way, but we'll say he gets 1-2 more CO and call him a C+ talent), Organizational B

Groggy - Current Usage: I'm a little groggy this morning.
Drunk from having consumed a lot of grog.
Grog
Watered-down pusser's rum consisting of half a gill with equal part of water, issued to all seamen over twenty. (CPOs and POs were issued with neat rum) From the British Admiral Vernon who, in 1740, ordered the men's ration of rum to be watered down. He was called "Old Grogram" because he often wore a grogram coat, and the watered rum came to be called 'grog'. Often used (illegally) as currency in exchange for favours in quantities prescribed as 'sippers' and 'gulpers'. Additional issues of grog were made on the command 'splice the mainbrace' for celebrations or as a reward for performing especially onerous duties. The RN discontinued the practice of issuing rum in 1970. A sailor might repay a colleague for a favour by giving him part or all of his grog ration, ranging from "sippers" (a small amount) via "gulpers" (a larger quantity) to "grounders" (the entire tot).


Louisville/Indianapolis
Indy receives:
$1

Louisville receives:
SP Jose Aicon

The Sluggers are hurting for starting pitching a bit with some losses to aging and FA. Aicon is a good low risk gamble. He's only marginally declined from a guy that is a rubber armed back end of the rotation 4 FIP guy. He did stink up the joint in limited action in Indy last year, but was dominant in AAA, which makes one think he may still be able to be adequate at the big league level. His contract is almost no risk, as the vesting option is easy to control. Indy didn't need him last year, so they let him go for nothing to same a bit of scratch. Hard to play the "They should have gotten more" game either. I wouldn't trade anything worth mentioning for a flyer on Aicon.

Grades
Indianapolis: Talent N/A, Organizational B
Louisville: Talent C-, Organizational B+

Hand over fist - Current Usage: They're making money hand over fist. [Implying continuously, with rapid progress.]
To climb steadily upwards, from the motion of a sailor climbing shrouds on a sailing ship (originally "hand over hand").

Huntsville/Calgary
Huntsville receives:
1B Bartolo Melendez
3.5M cash

Calgary receives:
2B Deion Jordan
1B Jorge Valencia
RP Miguel Jimenez
SP Natsume Tsuchiya (prospect)
RP Shane Long

Kyle already covered this one pretty well. Melendez is a heck of a hitter, and has a mouth-wateringly lovely contract. He is getting a bit long in the tooth in baseball terms but has hardly regressed much at all. Melendez is the kind of guy one can build a lineup around.

I'm not sure why Calgary made this deal unless this is the beginning of a rebuild. At the time of the deal they had not yet signed Gabriel Gomez, who is maybe slightly worse than Melendez, and while younger, has equal or more decline. I also don't know how much I like the return. Jordan is a rare lefty second baseman, but he is a poor defender and is relatively one dimensional (slap and run). He also is a bit underdeveloped for his age and doesn't have a track record. Valencia is a neat young player, but really isn't a prototypical first baseman. Speed is nice but he isn't the masher most of us would like at first, especially in a league where there aren't many power hitters at nontraditional power positions. Jimenez at 7/7/6 and 22 years old needs a bump (I suppose a 22 year old has an outside chance at velocity going up) to contribute at the major level. Tsuchiya (8/7/6 potentials at 23) is similar. He can probably man the back end of the rotation when he develops but needs a bump to be an impact starter. Long is an 18 year old reliever who has a decent shot to become something out of the pen if his control holds up.

I'm not try to knock Calgary. It simply feels to me like they got a handful of players who seem one flaw away from being impact for an amazingly cheap masher, a move that only makes sense to me in a retool or rebuild. Adding Gabriel Gomez (who is a lot more expensive then Melendez), the loss of Melendez doesn't hurt as much, and now they might be a better team, so what do I know anyway. I think it's almost guaranteed that Kyle gets more out of Melendez than the guys he moved combined would have given him over then next three seasons.

Grades
Huntsville: Talent A-, Organizational A-
Calgary: Talent B-, Organizational B+ (maybe B if they felt they were going to get Gomez all along)

Associated waiver move: Picking up Lucio Vazquez from Vegas. I get why Vegas waived him. They have other players and are scared of the 45 mil remaining on a player who has declined, and rightly so. This is why I (and many others I'm sure) didn't claim him. Now seeing what my other options in FA have been and how much money I couldn't spend, I wish I'd picked him up. Way to strike while the iron's hot Kyle.

Head Most probably already knew this was a naval term for a bathroom but here's why.
1. The forwardmost or uppermost portion of the ship.
2. The toilet or latrine of a vessel, which in sailing ships projected from the bows and therefore was located in the "head" of the vessel.

Atlantic City/Greenville
Atlantic City receives:
SP Jessie Stewart (prospect)

Greenville receives:
SP Esteban Benitez

Greenville has noted they are going for it. This is a typical "add a vet" type move for a team in that position. Benitez has defied odds and is pitching well at 37. He did lose a little velocity already and that frightens me some. You never know where the cliff is. However he's gotten better command at the same time and that has helped. Odds are he has a good campaign as a solid middle of the rotation type for Greenville.

Stewart is a stereotypical 7/7/7 17 year old with loads of room to go on velocity. He's 3/4/3 right now and that's not too bad for 17. It will be a long time before we can reliably say what he will be. Fresh off winning it all, Atlantic city seems to feel they could afford to let Benitez go and replace him with Jesus Paez, who has terrific potential but is a little wild at 23.

This is a fair trade in terms of value. I think Atlantic City will need to upgrade their pitching if they want to make another run at it, but they would have had to probably anyway, so losing Benitez isn't too bad. Greenville is in an odd situation. They won a lot last yer, and have a bare cupboard in the farm system. I understand going for it somewhat, but when you are spending 20 million more than you are making and your minors are empty, with the team already in the red before the season starts, you might be courting disaster. Given that many felt (sorry Avery, maybe you're just smarter than the rest of us) that Greenville overachieved last year, the Moonshiners might have been better served by selling anything of value and restocking the farm system now. If this goes badly, they could find themselves in the kind of financial and talentless purgatory that forced California and Yellow Springs into wasting an entire season last year and starting from the ground up. Who knows when those two franchises will really compete again.

Grades
Greenville: Talent B-, Organizational C+
Atlantic City: Talent C+, Organizational B

Know the ropes (learning the ropes) - Current Usage: It took him a bit but now he really knows the ropes around here.
A sailor who 'knows the ropes' is familiar with the miles of cordage and ropes involved in running a ship.

Yellow Springs/Indianapolis
Yellow Springs receives:
SP Hermenegildo Padez
CF Salvador González (prospect)

Indy receives:
1B Newman Watson

Hermenegidlo Padez (For the love of ... don't name your children things that rhyme with dildo) never turned into the player he was supposed to. He's been a 4 flat FIP guy over the last few years and if he gets that 1 CO bump many players do in their 5th or 6th season in the bigs he could get a little better. He's decent late rotation stock on a good contract for what he's producing. Gonzalez is really far away from being a factor, and may never be. His biggest problem is that he is a shitty fielder. It's tough to see him overcoming his error proneness to man a decent right or left, especially if his speed decreases and he loses more range. He does have the offensive upside to stick in the bigs if he can realize his potential.

I don't know what to make of Newman Watson. He screams overperformed his ratings last year. He has only an 80 game track record. At 26 I don't know if he ever gets that little bit of pop scouts think he might not have realized. I had some interest in a acquiring him from Yellow Springs as well, but ultimately didn't want too pay much. The difficulty as we have all realized with a 10 point system is there is a big difference between 8 and 9 (i.e. 80 and 90) and when this is the level where you become superior to the average pitcher, it's even more pronounced. I think Watson will be a good, but not great hitter. .295/.330/.470 is probably more reasonable.

Here's my problem with Watson (see Valencia above). He's not an elite masher. There are only so many places you can hide a poor defensive slugger on a baseball field. When you choose to not play one at first, most of the time you will not be able to replace that kind of home run production at another position. I call this the Mark Grace fallacy. It goes as such: I fucking hate Mark Grace (as a baseball player, not as a guy. Mark Grace seems actually kinda neat as a person). I hate when a team I like signs a player like him. He sucked. He sucked horribly. He doomed the Cubs to years of offensive mediocrity simply because he had no freaking power at all. In his best years (twice) he posted a 4.0ish WAR. Usually he was around 3.0 or less. This seems decent, but it isn't. It's actually a negative. 'Roid arguments aside, when other teams are playing guys like Bagwell, McGwire, McGriff, Canseco, Gozalez, Palmerio and on and on and on, and your first baseman can't even hit the ball out of the park 20 times a year, he's garbage unless hes getting on base 50+ percent of the time. It's simple math. If the good teams have a first baseman with a WAR right around 5.0 on average, and you don't, and your offense isn't any good, you need another one. I wanted to punch every Cubs fan who talked about how great "Gracie" was and how he was the only thing they had going for them. He stunk.

Diatribe aside, I'm not saying Newman is Mark Grace. He has a lot more power. I just feel he's a candidate for a player that tricks you into thinking you are adequate at a position when you aren't if he can't repeat his YS numbers. Yellow Springs makes a very shrew trade here (including beefing up the 1B position with other guys through FA, etc) and selling high on Watson.

Grades
Yellow Springs: Talent B-, Organizational A-
Indy: Talent B-, Organizational B-

Leeway - Current Usage: Can you give me a little more leeway on that deadline?
The amount that a ship is blown leeward by the wind. Also the amount of open free sailing space available to leeward before encountering hazards. Often used in coming up against a lee shore, when a ship would anchor too close to the shore and then the wind would change direction, making it impossible to get underway without being pushed aground.
Leeward (/ˈluːərd/ in nautical use)
In the direction that the wind is blowing towards.

[avery]

I agree about Mark Grace and Watson not being elite. The pitcher I got, whatever his name is will be a source of steady innings on a team chasing 60 wins...

[indiansfan]

Yep we are trying to rebuild without totally throwing in the towel. This deal got us younger but still competitive. It was quality for quantity. 2 things that hurt last year were bad bats at SS and 3B and a big drop in homers when Melendez and Cochran got hurt. Jordan gives me an upgrade bat in the infield and the 2 1B give me an extra power bat. Plus in my park I think Gomez can hit 40+ I did make the deal thinking I had a good shot at Gomez but would have grabbed another guy if I didn't get him.

[crobillard]

I was interested in the Melendez and Watson trades. Good analysis on both of them. I think Watson could be a bit better than your analysis suggests, but you're right, if he isn't then he's just a shitty defender with a shitty bat that can't steal bases.

[agrudez]

I definitely agree Garcia could burn me hard (even with his '4' CON he smoked AAA last year), but at this point I was betting that he's pretty much done developing. It should be noted; however, that this was also my thought when I included Garza (whom had 6/8/6 ratings at 25 years old at the time) in the Mike Davis deal, so... yeah, haha. Of course, I *do* think you underrate Ramos a bit as well. The closest season he had to being a SP was '20 in which he had 15 GS and 17 RA - and he compiled 3.6 WAR that year. I think he has a legit chance for 4-5 WAR as a full time (for the first time in his career) SP.

I think we agreed almost verbatim on the other deal - and I definitely appreciate the nice grades! If I end up making another one that moves Perez, Backstrom or De La Cruz you have my permission to rip me, though. Even a self described prospect hater has to have his limits!

PS. I still don't like it, but I can accept a '6' MOV from a LHP if he is elite elsewhere (like Garcia). A RHP could be 9/6/9 and I'd probably pass, though.