Revisiting the Jason Bay Trade
From MLBTR
Full article HERE.
4 months ago
cocktailsfor2
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A highlight from the linked article:
"If LaRoche blossoms this year and the power comes on," said Huntington, "then we have five or six years of Andy LaRoche for a year and a half of Jason Bay, and it still works out to be a good trade for us."
Free your ass and your mind will follow.
There’s no one I root for more than LaRoche. He’s been on my rotisserie roster since he was in the Pioneer League and he’s a symbol of the Huntington era that I so much want to see succeed.
But when you want something to work that much, it seems inevitable it won’t.
I think Kevin Hart’s struggles have me feeling bleak about the whole team this week. Just want someone we traded for to wildly exceed expectations.
If he doesn't...
…and he stays at his current level, then we’ve still got several years’ worth of control of an average regular, which is fairly valuable in and of itself.
Problem now being...
an average regular at 3B isn’t necessarily an average regular at 2B…especially defensively. Of course, this assumes Alvarez shows up in Pittsburgh in some reasonable timeframe.
And that...
…Alvarez doesn’t end up at 1B in the fairly-near future, which I still think he will.
It’s possible that LaRoche won’t be as good a defender at 2B, but unless he’s just totally incapable, the difference in league offensive baseline at the two positions will probably cover any glove runs he loses in the move.
by Vlad on Mar 21, 2010 8:59 AM EDT via mobile up reply actions
Great article.
An interesting look on Huntington’s introspection after the fact. This is one reason I have a lot of faith in his ability to continue his own development as a GM.
I respect NH
as someone who is growing into the job, making better and better decisions, while learning from his past.
Free your ass and your mind will follow.
by cocktailsfor2 on Mar 20, 2010 2:14 PM EDT up reply actions
I agree completely...
I especially enjoy his candor and ability to critique himself in the media. This is man who seems driven to succeed, IMO, and will continue to improve himself in addition to the organization. As a matter of speculation I can’t help but think that the trade he feels would have been better in hindsight was the rumored Ray’s package centered around Niemann and Brignac. I suppose will never know but I still believe the return we got will eventually be seen as a good deal for the Pirates.
I think NH is probably one of the most unconventional GMs I’ve ever seen. How often do you hear someone say “Looking back on it, I should have taken a different offer”? Most GMs are so stubborn and rarely admit a mistake.
Whether this is a good thing, I’m not sure. It seems like he can really set himself up for a public lashing, but then again, he could care less about what most fans say about him. I guess that’s the main reason why I like him, we used to see guys who would do anything to keep the fans happy, even if that meant abandoning their rebuilding plan. NH doesn’t care about the fans, or the national media, he just wants to win games.
http://www.points2shop.com/?ref=GJS867
Yeah,
if it wasn’t such a good article, I wouldn’t have tossed it up. The trade has been beaten to death, to be sure.
Free your ass and your mind will follow.
by cocktailsfor2 on Mar 20, 2010 2:27 PM EDT up reply actions
I'm even more sick...
of hearing about Sano. Huntington admitted he screwed up…that’s it, time to move on. DK’s coverage of Sano in the PG the other day seemed strange to me. Didn’t anyone else think it was weird that he requested an interview with him? Just seemed strange. I’m still trying to grasp how interviewing another team’s prospect, that was never part of the Pirate’s organization, is newsworthy (from a Pirate perspective) other than to rub salt in the wounds.
Nah
The guy’s a big deal by any standard (highest ever LA bonus for a non-pitcher), and there’s a Pittsburgh hook. I’m sure DK, having followed Sano for a long time before the signing, and having written so much in the immediate aftermath, was personally/professionally curious to meet the guy as well.
Beside, it’s spring training. What would you prefer? 600 more words on Delwyn Young?
I'd like to know more about our guys...
I’d like a story about Chase, or ZVR, or Zach Dodson, or Quentin Miller, or Jarek Cunningham, or Trent Stevenson, or any of the other players who will actually help bring championships to the Pirates. I wanted us to sign Sano but we didn’t. He is not a Pirate and from the minute he signed with Twins I could give a shit about him. He is no longer Pittsburgh newsworthy IMO.
In a city where calling the team 'dynasty worthy' is news worthy
any avatar of negativity that can be found WILL be used against the team. This includes: Sano, Weiters whenever he comes to town, and any player traded whom has a negative thing to say about the team (Sean “worse Spring than Brandon Moss” Burnett).
Well, that’s not a package to lose sleep over even today.
by Adam Reynolds on Mar 20, 2010 3:58 PM EDT up reply actions
I’m still not sure if the Brignac/Niemann package was even real. Even after MLB.com reported that as a done deal there were still reports coming out that said the Rays decided Brignac was off limits.
That shows how tough it was to get value, especially since Brignac isn’t really a great prospect.
by Adam Reynolds on Mar 20, 2010 6:11 PM EDT up reply actions
Speaking of trades ...
AP reporting Dioner Navarro badly hurt in home plate collision in game today.
Paging Ryan Doumit, Ryan Doumit, please report to Gate 32 …
Reports are that he will be ready for Opening Day.
Reportedly a “nerve contusion”…per Sportscenter. A nerve bruise??
Anybody
else think it’s wierd NH hasn’t had his contract renewed yet? Is there any way he’s not brought back after this season, no matter what our record is? On the flip side, if the big league team excedes expectations, he could have big time offers through out the league and we have to play a bidding game.
When it comes to actual Pirate fans, I’d have to say NH is the 3rd most popular person associated with the current team behind Cutch & Pedro.
Honestly
I just dont understand why we couldn’t have pried a better prospect away from the Red Sox. It seemed like their hands were really tied in trying to rid themselves of Ramirez while still getting a premier player back to try to win now. That was the only part of it that kind of puzzled me then and still now. I really liked the LaRoche and Morris aspect of the deal at the time.
What El Duce said...
and they paid every penny of Ramirez’s contract. The Red Sox made out ok but the real “early” winners were the Dodgers. Manny almost single handedly hit them into the playoffs.
By all accounts
they were the ones pushing to get rid of Ramirez. Still think we could have gotten some better upside prospects from one of the best minor league systems in the game. Not players who were basically pushed out because they weren’t good enough to be on the roster. They paid for Ramirez, but they also had Bay at a discount, and got 2 draft picks for him this offseason. Those picks are always factored into the value of a player.
I don't understand...
what you mean by they got Bay at a discount. I don’t remember us paying any of his salary. Also your assessment of Moss and Hansen are incorrect IMO. They weren’t traded because they weren’t good enough to be in the roster. They were traded because they had enough talent to replace them. Obviously neither has panned out but at the time of the trade there was a lot of optimism around Moss. Hansen was a bit more of a question mark. Tremendous talent and upside but poor command. And just because they were pusing to trade Ramirez doesn’t mean they had to give him away for nothing. I can pretty much guarantee that if we demanded Bard or Bucholtz instead of Hansen the deal doesn’t go through and Ramirez remains with the Sox. Sox gave up a ton in that deal. We got a decent haul at the time it just hasn’t worked out in our favor…yet.
I mean
They got Bay for 7.5 million with another year on the contract. An impact bat with a favorable contract. And obviously no one is going to act like Bard or Bucholtz was attainable whatsoever. But I’d much rather have rolled the dice with more lower lever talent with more potential upside. Hansen had been a disaster at the major league level in Boston. Moss clearly needed to get more full time at bats instead of sitting on the Sox bench for half a year. Thats not a spot for a young player to develop.
The relevant question isn't our preferences.
I’m sure we would’ve loved to have a better package on the table. The question is whether Boston would’ve been willing to trade the type of players you are describing. It’s impossible to know for sure without naming names, but on the whole I’m skeptical.
Fair enough...
I understand your position better and I would have liked some higher upside prospects as well. I just don’t agree with your position that Boston should have given up more because IMO I feel they gave up quite a bit. Obviously we disagree but I understand your position.
Well, they weren't willing to trade the guys they traded until literally minutes before the deadline.
At what time were we going to discuss these hypothetical “better upside prospects”?
Well
If you dont get the deal you want, then there is no point in settling for whats on the table. Having said that, I think (hopefully) this is lesson learned for Huntington.
"there is no point in settling for whats on the table"
There is if it’s better than anything you’ll be able to get in the future. Bay’s remaining service time was a diminishing asset, in that every game he played for us was another game during which a potential acquiring team would not have controlled his rights. As such, the natural tendency would be for offers to diminish in value with time, rather than increasing. And the package we received from Boston was significantly more valuable than the default position of holding him for a year and a half, letting him walk, and taking the picks.
Well then the lesson learned carries back to before the season as well. As I said in a post below this, I would have much preferred a quality over quantity type deal, more along the lines of Holliday’s deal.
Yes, you've said that before.
But I can never figure out who was supposedly going to be surrendering these players, and why they didn’t express interest in Bay at the time we were shopping him if they were so willing to throw top prospects at us. Or, for that matter, why a team would give Holliday-type talent up for Bay, when Holliday was a demonstrably better player.
If there was a better option available to us, then yes, we should have taken it. But I don’t see any better options that were available, and I’ve looked at this very, very hard. If you know of some, then please feel free to share them.
Well the Holliday deal wasn’t a deal done 10 minutes before the deadline. Obviously the Bay deal wasn’t all put together 10 minutes before the limit since thats unreasonable to assume, but it certainly looks like the type of deal that was rushed. This is where I say the lesson is learned.
Holliday is a demonstrably better player. But he also was an impending FA, while Bay had another year left on his deal at a good salary. Bay was also having a better year than Holliday was in the year they were traded respectively.
Bay was NOT having a better year than Holliday.
You need to consider both park effects (Oakland is a terrible place to hit) and defense (Holliday is one of the best defensive LFs in baseball, and Bay is one of the worst). If you go by WAR, for example, Holliday was worth more in just the portion of the season that he spent with Oakland than Bay was in the year as a whole.
I’m not sure why you’d consider the Bay trade to be “rushed”. They started negotiating weeks before the deadline – the breakthrough came late, but the timing on other teams deciding to meet our demands isn’t something we can really control.
Comparable players, but not comparable returns in my opinion. I’m not going to assume that there were better deals (even though NH basically said so in hindsight). Its just as wrong as you assuming that you knew of the other offers we didn’t take. But I’m sure you’re as tired of this as I am so I’ll just leave it at that.
He's saying that...
…Tampa’s package turned out better because Niemann developed into a solid mid-rotation starter, instead of having his arm fall apart (as was eminently possible, given his health record). Which doesn’t mean that we were wrong, from a process standpoint, to turn it down at the time.
But he also said
That he wishes he’d waited to the end of the season. That was the big surprise to me (and evidently is to you as well, since you’re still saying that was an implausible strategy, even after NH himself says it would have been preferable).
Kind of enjoying watching the NH defenders attack the man himself. “Don’t question yourself, Neal. You were right, you’ll always have been right.”
It would have been preferable in hindisght...
that’s a big distinction. He also said given the same information at the time he would have done the same thing over again.
Exactly.
Knowing in advance that Moss and Hansen would both be disappointments, he would’ve done things differently. But he didn’t (and couldn’t) know that at the time, so it wasn’t a failure of process.
I’m sure that with the benefit of hindsight, Mary Todd Lincoln would say that her husband shouldn’t have gone to see “My American Cousin”. But that doesn’t mean that the idea of going to the theater for an evening of comedy was, in and of itself, fatally flawed. It was more an issue of the execution (no pun intended).
To the extent that there’s a failure here, it’s a failure of scouting. Hansen coming down with a rare nerve disorder probably couldn’t have been predicted, but Moss doesn’t have that excuse. They need to figure out why their scouts’ assessment of him diverged so far from the reality, and how to prevent that from happening again in the future.
by Vlad on Mar 21, 2010 9:11 AM EDT via mobile up reply actions
Moss got hurt, too, of course. No one seems willing to believe that that might have been part of his struggles with the Pirates so far, but it very well could have. And even though he’s been horrible the last two years, CHONE still sees him as a (slightly) above-average hitter. And he’s just 26.
I agree...
though I think his performance this spring is leading people to believe that this is his true talent level. What scares me about Moss is that he seems to put an incredible amount of pressure on himself so I fear these extended slumps he gets himself into may be more of a mental thing vs talent level.
I'm giving Moss less I jury credit than Hansen...
…because his injury was less serious, and because he hasn’t looked appreciably better even now that it’s supposedly healed.
I could be wrong, of course.
by Vlad on Mar 21, 2010 12:56 PM EDT via mobile up reply actions
Er, less "injury credit".
Stupid midget keyboard.
by Vlad on Mar 21, 2010 12:59 PM EDT via mobile up reply actions
Ain’t technology grand?
Free your ass and your mind will follow.
by cocktailsfor2 on Mar 21, 2010 2:04 PM EDT up reply actions
Best may be overstating it...
but he is good. He has a career UZR/150 of +6.9 and (over +14 his best year in Colorado). Bay on the other hand has a career -7.9 and has only had one season where his UZR/150 rating wasn’t negative. The point was brought up about Holliday’s defense to show that Bay and Holliday were and are not the same player even the a lo Bucs fans want to view it that way.
I'd agree that he is good
I think competent may be a better adjective. He also has a pretty poor throwing arm. UZR doesn’t really mean much.
Poor throwing arm doesn't mean as much in LF.
With that arm he had 4 kills in 2009 and if you don’t like UZR the Plus/Minus system rated him as the third best defender in 2009. He was good for one run saved with his arm so even if it’s not the best he’s found a way to prevent it from being a liability. Plus/Minus hasn’t always graded Holliday well but he has been better than competent the last two years ranking 5th and 3rd in 2008 and 2009 respectively. Conversely, Jason Bay came in 29th and 25th the last two years.
At the same time, a poor throwing arm means about as much in LF as in RF. Plus/minus is the cousin to UZR. Producing ratings is not the equivalent of being better than competent.
No, it doesn't.
Guys run the bases counter-clockwise. As such, a poor LF arm is much less damaging than a poor RF arm, since the throw to get a guy going from second to third is much shorter. A RF with a poor throwing arm will be constantly exploited – just look at Matt Lawton the year we used him there.
Also...
…if you can’t tell that Holliday is a significantly better defender than Bay just by watching the two (without even needing the support of the stats Slick cited), then you aren’t paying attention to the game.
But Vlad, I saw Holliday drop a ball in the playoffs. And Bay didn’t have a single error all year. Therefore, Bay is the better fielder.
by MarkInDallas on Mar 23, 2010 6:02 PM EDT up reply actions
I wasn’t following the Bucs at the time; can someone recap the general feeling about the trade when it was made? As an outsider, I remember liking it for the Pirates and Red Sox, and having mixed feelings about the Dodgers’ end.
On a related note, it really chafes me when people criticize NH for not getting premier talent in any of his trades. No one remembers how ridiculously good LaRoche and Tabata were as prospects at the time, apparently.
I saw it
as a bit of a loss at the time. It seemed like the type of deal that was thrown together late as NH has said.
And the premier talent is a valid complaint. I remember how good LaRoche and Moss were as prospects. Thats why it would have made more sense to trade for guys who were still prospects. Both were on the fringe of breaking into becoming MLB players If we had acquired players like that a year earlier, the trade would have been a lot better received.
I was expecting more along the lines of the type of deal that the A’s got for Holliday.
I would say that the Pirates got more for Bay than the A’s did for Holliday. Wallace and LaRoche are roughly comparable as Top 30 prospects, and out of Peterson, Moss, Mortenson and Hansen, none is likely to amount to much. Where the Pirates come out ahead is that they got Morris, who still has a chance to be pretty good.
I disagree
Wallace was a much better prospect at the time of their respective trades than LaRoche was.
I guess
its all in what sources you use, but the preseason ranks coupled with the performances of the player up to the point they were traded should show that Wallace was the better prospect in my opinion.
"Wallace was the better prospect in my opinion"
Nothing wrong with having your own opinion of prospects, as long as you recognize and acknowlege when they diverge from the scouting consensus. Such as in this instance.
Law
Had Wallace in his top 25 before the beginning of 2009. Wallace did nothing over the course of 2009 to drop from those preseason rankings. LaRoche certainly was not a #31 prospect at the time of the deal, partially due to the injury, but also due to performance. I’m pretty sure the “scouting consensus” would side with me on that.
LaRoche had 59 bad ABs with the Dodgers in 2008, certainly not a large enough sample size to downgrade him as a prospect.
Tic toc
A prospect who misses half a season due to injury is downgraded as a prospect, because he’s now half a year behind his peers, and the next batch of prospects (some of whom will be better than he is) is half a year closer. Guys who tread water – even if it’s just for injury – fall behind. It’s the relentless nature of MiLB.
He wasn't downgraded as a prospect because he was injured...
He was no longer on the list because he had 223 major league AB’s in 2008 and no longer qualified as a prospect because he had graduated to the major leagues. Deadstar’s comments about his prospect status are misleading and comparing him to Wallace is apples to oranges. Wallace is projected to have a better bat but his defense is so bad that he is also projected to be a below average 1B who is likely better off as a DH. Andy is a better fielder at a tougher position. When it comes down to it I’d rather have what we got for Bay than what the A’s fot for Holliday.
The general feeling in the baseball community...
…was that the Pirates did well in the deal. There were several teams that called immediately after it was announced looking to see whether we’d be willing to move LaRoche, for example.
It was regarded as a much better move at the time than the Nady/Marte deal.
I never understood that take
Even setting aside the Bay deal, I thought we got a great haul for Nady, because he’s exactly the kind of guy you shouldn’t be able to get much for in this day and age. Marte’s a nice piece, but no Wagner or K-Rod. I felt that you’d have to basically value all the pitching at zero and treat Tabata as marginal to dislike that trade.
My impression at the time was that the last minute switch-up in which Yankee pitchers we were getting threw things off – almost that the emotional reaction was driven by that, rather than who we actually got.
I agree with that...
I really liked the Nady deal at the time. I would have traded Nady straight up for Tabata.
I think it was driven by two things:
1) A widespread overrating of Nady, where a lot of analysts kind of assumed that 2008 was his true level of talent, rather than a gigantic fluke. Nady was a high-profile Boras draftee and a fairly successful player on the Mets (in a part-time role) and he had that baseball player look, so a lot if casual observers just kind of seemed to skate over the fact that he was fragile and didn’t actually have much power.
2) An underrating of Tabata, who was seen at the time as something between a throw-in and a sucker’s bet after a pretty awful season.
The other point that’s worth remembering here is that the criticism that NH should have pursued more ceiling in his trades actually fits the Nady package better than the Bay one. Tabata was the only guy from the Yankees package seen as having a star-level ceiling, and the Yankees package was the only one to explicitly include a guy who projected as a role player (i.e. Karstens). Honestly, at the time of the trade, Hansen and Ohlendorf were seen as relatively comparable commodities: Righty college power arms who had struggled to break through in the bigs. And while there were some scouts who liked Ohlendorf as a SP, most saw him at that time as a future reliever.
by Vlad on Mar 21, 2010 9:28 AM EDT via mobile up reply actions
the BAY trade will go down as one of the worst in NH or FC’s tenure however long those will be… so far, got nothing to show for it, worse yet, it helped 2 of the BIG BOY teams, LA DODGERS & hated Boston RED SUX…
Or...
it will go down as one of the best if Andy and Morris come close to achieving their potential. Boston would have gotten as far as they did that year with Bay or Ramirez and so would the Dodgers if they hadn’t gotten Manny. So in the end, neither of those teams won the World Series (and would have made the playoffs anyway) since the trade was made so I you can say they got nothing to show for it. It’s all a matter of perspective. In the end, we still have a chance to show something from the trade.
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