Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 126: Justin Upton is Actually Traded

Episode Date: January 25, 2013

Ben and Sam analyze the Justin Upton trade and Arizona’s offseason.

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Hi. Hi, Ben. Hello. Welcome to Baseball Perspectives' daily podcast, Effectively Wild. Thank you. I don't know what number we're on because I can't actually, I tried to check the site. 126, I believe. Uh-huh.

We'll never know. If we had not done a podcast, we would have ended the week on a multiple of five. It's not too late. People don't know. People don't know that we're talking right now. They don't have to know. Yeah, let's keep going uh so it turns out that justin upton um all the theories for

that you offered for why kevin towers was shopping him or why we were hearing so many trade rumors really just came down to the diamondbacks didn't like the cut of his jib. Yeah, do you believe that? Yeah, I do. I really do. It seems like it was always the most likely explanation. And I would think that even if it's not what started the thing, even if maybe the first time they floated him out there was totally innocent, my guess is that that's the sort of thing that would cause some tension between a club and a player anyway. And so things probably got worse.

That's my guess, sure. Let me read from Ken Rosenthal's article for people who haven't. Kevin Towers said, We never had to kick him in the rear to play. Speaking of Upton, he wanted to be in the lineup even when hurt. No negatives. And then Towers, though, did not dispute the perception that the Diamondbacks were trying to add, quote unquote, grinders. Specifically citing Prado and one of the top prospects in the deal, shortstop Nick Ahmed, as players who fit the mold.

That's the way Gibby played the game, Towers said. Look at our coaching staff. That's the makeup of our coaching staff as well. That's how we won the NL West in 2011. Justin was part of the 2011 club. Different clubs like to look for different intangibles in players. We kind of like that grinding, gritty player. Hard-nosed.

I'm not saying that Justin isn't that type of guy. Lipsis. I don't know if he actually said ellipsis, but that's how Ken Rosenthal transcribed it. The different clubs look for different intangibles is great. It's a great way of expanding all the possibilities for nonsense that you could say about a team. I not that towers uh is saying nonsense but um if you want to say nonsense about a team that line will come in very handy for you someday because if if if if

different teams are looking for different intangibles then sure anybody could fit in any team for all you know thank you because Thank you, because of his intangibles. We're not here to talk about the Justin Upton trade, though. We're not? I don't think so. No, I don't want to talk about it. Oh. I thought we were going to do our final email show of the email season.

That was the plan before the Justin Upton trade. I assumed you would want to talk about the Justin Upton trade. We've talked about Justin Upton trades about nine times. We certainly have. So I don't know. Do you have anything you want to say? Well, I don't know. Do you like the trade?

Just a yes-no for Arizona? I guess I think that it's a really good trade for Atlanta, and I'm not sure that Arizona had a choice. And I'm not sure Arizona... Because they left themselves no choice? Partly because they left themselves no choice, but I mean, if they just didn't, if they just don't like the guy, if they just don't think he's a good ball player, if they don't think that he's good for the team, if they don't think he's likely to bounce back, I mean,

I'm assuming that they acted rationally based on their opinions. And I can't argue with their opinions. So, I don't know. I mean, it seems like they could do better. And they did do better three weeks ago. And that fell apart. I guess I didn't, the only thing I said about it on the Twitter was I alluded to the idea of trading a guy too early instead of trading him too late and with Upton it seems like they probably traded him too early and too late. If they traded him a year ago, it would have been a lot bigger return and my suspicion is that if they traded him next year, it's possible that they would have gotten a better return, and they didn't either. I mean, if he has another bad year, it will knock his value some,

although I'm not even sure how much it will knock it, to be honest. I mean, if he replicates his bad 2012 season, I don't know that it does anything to his value compared to where it was this offseason. Yeah. I mean, there are certainly people who think he will immediately be one of the best players in the game again, that he was playing hurt or that the change of scenery will help him to moving to a more supportive staff. supportive staff. But if, I mean, how much of a role does this grinder thing play? I mean, if it's that they don't think he will ever reach his full potential in Arizona, that's one thing, I guess. Or if they just don't think that he's as good as his early career suggested he was,

then I guess it's defensible. If this gritty thing is actually driving the trade, man, I don't know. I mean, it's not as if they, and maybe they were just not wanting to trash a guy on his way out, but they were not saying that he was some kind of clubhouse cancer or some sort of pariah or something. He played hard and yet didn't play griddly or grindily. I mean, the way Kevin Towers frames it is it's as if he is, I mean, it's as if he's starting from what Kirk Gibson wants or what kind of player Kirk Gibson prefers to have or what kind of player he was and structuring the team around that. And doesn't it seem strange to build a team around a manager and a coaching staff well if you think that you're going to get roughly equal value in a trade right then then it doesn't because i mean if you're basically just um you know if you're swapping

you know one car for another car and they're equal value uh then sure you pick the car that you like more. If they actually felt like this was a fair return for Justin Upton, then no, I don't mind them making that preference. The problem is that in most transactions that you make in life, you lose a little bit. There's fees and services charges that you have to pay or you don't quite find the perfect buyer for you. And so each move, you usually lose a little bit of value on the move. And so that's, I think, why there's generally kind of an inertia to the team that you have.

You don't want to have to turn the whole thing over, right? So you make what you have work. My suspicion is that it got away from them. Early on, they really thought, well, we can trade this guy for a boatload of value. By the end, it got to where they sort of had to trade him. And the course that that took to get there was like two years and it was incremental and it just sort of got away from them. And so they didn't end up getting as much as they would have hoped to. And that's probably a lesson. I mean, I think if you're a team and you have a valuable 23-year-old, you should probably not really take offers for him.

Obviously, you listen to anything, but I think you need to really present yourself as being committed to that player. Don't let these rumors get out. Don't let the idea that you're listening get out. Just say what 29 other GMs say, which is he's untouchable. And, you know, there's really no harm in saying that, and there can be a lot of harm in not saying that. Okay, last thing. I think I saw a tweet by Joe Sheehan who said something to the effect of the Diamondbacks would be better off today if at the start of November,

Kevin Towers had just gone on a six-month cruise to see the world and not done any general managing. Do you agree with that? Because it's been a weird off-season. Yeah. If you take their moves individually, Yeah. If you take their moves individually, most of them probably didn't didn't have the greatest public reaction. It seems like the tide has sort of turned against Kevin Towers being a good GM, which I mean, I think he he entered the offseason with a fairly strong reputation, right? He wasn't anyone's, like, sabermetric darling.

No, very strong reputation. Yeah, he'd been a GM forever and was known for being pretty good at it. And he's made a series of moves that I guess have been confusing, of moves that I guess have been confusing, taken individually or taken in concert, whether it's the Bauer trade or this trade and all the lead up to it, or I guess the Chris Young trade, Cody Ross signing, Heath Bell. I guess people liked the Brandon McCarthy move, but other than that, it seems like not so great looking at them either one after the other or together. Presumably he has a plan. He is not just making a bunch of silly decisions and ill-considered decisions. But do you agree that they should have sent him on a world cruise?

Well, I mean, every team is better or worse. You know, the 15 teams are better and 15 are worse, basically, than they were in November. So I don't think that's saying a whole lot to say that the Diamondbacks, you know, had a below-median offseason. But, I mean, yeah, no, I think generally the moves have all been, they haven't been my favorite. And it doesn't, it actually makes me, I mean, I think I liked Kevin Towers coming into the

offseason and I assume that, you know, he continues to be the same human being. Right. So, you know, it kind of makes me question, it makes me question a little bit what my biases are that makes me dislike these moves so much because I don't think Kevin Towers is probably going to make a habit of making self-sabotaging transactions. I think with Bauer and Upton, there might be a trend there, a little bit of a trend there. I don't think I ever mentioned this with the Mets, but I sort of felt this way with the Mets and Ari Dickey, where a lot of times when a player and a club have conflict, a lot of times the blame gets placed on the

player for he said something wrong at a Christmas party or he doesn't have enough grit or whatever. But the fact is that these guys, the players are essentially, a high proportion of them are sociopaths. They're not chosen because they're great people or because they're super mature or because they majored in philosophy at Yale and are super well grounded. A lot of them are really kind of crazy and it is the job of the front office to be the adults in this situation. So I think that if the personality conflicts with Bauer and or Upton, and who knows, I don't know, maybe other guys too, are forcing them to make personnel moves, that's sort of a

systemic problem in the front office. That might not be the case, but that's sort of something I would be aware of. Right. I mean, you want a manager who can integrate a wide range of personalities on a team and have them all work together and pull together. And presumably there are some guys who that just doesn't work and they just have irredeemable makeup and they can't play well with others. And it's not the manager's fault. But when you start to see a pattern or I mean, I don But when you start to see a pattern, I mean, I don't know if two moves makes a pattern, but coming so close to one another, it seems to.

When you have a team that seems to be saying that we just didn't want this type of player or it wouldn't have worked and is choosing the manager over the talent, then it's perplexing. It is perplexing. So they won the division in 2011. They did not win the division last year.

They were, I don't know exactly, they were around 500 or so. Do you feel like this offseason, do you have a sense of what direction they're going are they trying to do you feel like they're trying to win in 2013 or are they trying to this actually these all kind of feel like it's weird because they actually feel like one year moves they all feel like one year moves make them worse in the like Prado is I mean I guess they'll you know as every team tries to do when they trade for a player without fail they'll try an extension but Prado's one year um uh and I don't feel like whether they're able to resign him I feel like that's sort of divorced from the merit of the trade, right? Well, I mean, I don't...

Sort of. It gives you a better chance to re-sign the guy, presumably, than you would have had had he been on the open market. Yeah, I haven't seen a study on the discount that clubs get in such a situation. And I think that there probably are clubs who have studied this and know a dollar value that you get. I mean, when the Phillies, for instance, traded for Roy Halladay and then instantly signed him to a three-year, $60 million extension that was like probably $30 million below market value and like four years below market value, that, I mean, it's hard to totally separate those two things, right?

I mean, the only team that got to do that. Um, but on the other hand, there's separate moves and Hallett, there was no guarantee that Hallett would sign that extension. So I, I don't really know. I don't want to divorce them completely. Um, but on the other hand, I think that most of the time when a club trades for a player, they say that they're going to work on an extension and they certainly hope to keep them around. And then, you know, like I saw this with Grinke and the Angels.

There was just there was not one ounce of relationship built that would have suggested that they had any extra opportunity to sign him than any other team. So it basically like it felt to me like um uh i don't know it felt fake it felt like pr more than anything or i don't know maybe it felt like false hope or false optimism but not a not a real asset i don't feel like the angels got that asset and i don't know about the diamond bags i mean a year a full year is a little bit different um the giants for instance uh didn't sign pagando an extension before he hit free agency, but they did re-sign him one year after they traded for him, and I think they got a below-market deal on that.

I mean, not significantly, but somewhat so. Yeah, I guess it's not a move that makes Arizona significantly worse, if at all worse, for this season. significantly worse, if at all worse, for this season. I mean, I guess it would if Upton would have become a superstar if he had stayed. But if he wouldn't have, then the upgrade from who would have been playing third base or who would have been playing where Prado will play to Prado is probably more sizable than the downgrade from Upton to the next outfielder, I would guess, since they have such a surplus of outfielders,

which they have kind of created themselves. So I guess that difference means this isn't a huge impact on the Diamondbacks' win total in 2013. It's just kind of beyond that that is the question. Yeah, well, that move specifically, I think that you can make the— that's actually kind of why I think that they're playing for 2013, because I think that you can make the case that that move makes them stronger. But the Chris Young move was sort of not that. And I think the Bauer move was kind of not that.

Bauer probably has more value this year than Gregorius does. And I'm trying to even remember, was Heath Bell part of the Chris Young move? Yeah, right? Let me look. Yeah, yeah, that was a three-team thing he was involved in. I'm sure this was reported, but do you remember how much money the Martins were eating of Bell's contract? I do not remember. But it was weird that the Diamondbacks got Pennington in that trade,

who seems like he would probably be better than Gregorius for this season, I would think. I mean, he's the same type of player, right? And he's a guy who, if you believe defensive metrics, has been a fairly valuable player even when he doesn't hit. And then they replaced him or at least supplemented him with kind of a younger version of him. I guess a more promising or talented player but another guy in the same mold of a defense first player who doesn't hit all that

much or hasn't hit all that much so they took on 13 million dollars of heath bell's contract for two years which seems like probably the worst move that they've made yeah I mean I don't know it's still kind of a pretty good team like I mean there's certainly enough team there that that they could win the division there's absolutely no reason to think that they're like out of it they've got they've got seven pitchers plus Delgado, and they're good pitchers. It's a good team. I mean, it's not a great team, but it could be a good team. Yeah.

Well, all right. You could have a good team, Kevin Towers. Seriously, I think this is actually – I think that they could win this division, and it's going to foul up all the narrative because then does Kevin Towers... I mean, what if they win the World Series this year? It'll be the worst chemistry thing of all time. Oh, man. We'll have to hear about that all year.

I wonder if they're influenced at all by the Giants having won the World Series. I mean, I haven't heard a team credit their success to chemistry more than the Giants, like, ever. I mean, that is, like, just such a pure chemistry story. And I don't know if it's true or not, but, I mean, that was just, like, such a chemistry narrative, especially in the second half after they got Scudero and everything. And, you know, I wonder if the diamondbacks are influenced by that at all. If, if they think, I mean, like after the, the raise, you know, in 2008, uh, had that great turnaround with their defense and then everybody wanted to, you know, like upgrade

their defense. I wonder if this is Kevin towers wanting to like upgrade his grit because new grits, the new money ball or whatever. Uh, and I mean, you know, before the Giants, it was the Cardinals, and the Cardinals were always gritty. I think, in fact, I think Marco Scudero was on that team too. He's technically under contract with the Red Sox, but I bet Marco Scudero was on that team.

All right, well, we ended up talking about the Justin Upton trade. Yep. I don't know how many of you heard the podcast yesterday because it wasn't available for hearing for a large part of the day. But we talked about our plan beginning Monday and really for the next six weeks. And I guess I will mention that again in case you didn't hear it. We are temporarily between now and I guess the first week of March or so abandoning the one topic, two topic format that has gotten us this far. And we are moving to a team preview format where Sam and I will be talking to one Baseball Prospectus author each day. Once in a while, it will be one of us, but usually it will be someone

else who wrote about a team in the annual in Baseball Prospectus 2013 this year. And we'll be talking to us and previewing that team season and recapping its offseason and talking about its outlook. And we will be pairing those interviews with interviews of non BP writers, beat writers and reporters, which will be done by our new intern, Pete Barrett, who has been hard at work lining up people. So it will be one team per day of five teams per week, six weeks, and we will talk about that team from a BP perspective and a non-BP perspective and hopefully not repeat ourselves and cover everything in an interesting way. And you can continue to email us at podcast at baseballperspectives.com.

We don't have dedicated email shows built into this schedule, but maybe we will take a question now and then if we get a good one and tell us if you are enjoying the format or if you wish that we would just go back to rambling aimlessly again which we will eventually um i don't i don't know that i want them to to tell us to be honest i mean we're basically committing to yeah i mean we're gonna do it anyway this is yeah so it's like if we get a haircut and you just walk up and say your haircut sucks well i'm stuck with it for a long

time so i'd rather you not tell me that yeah okay well tell us if you like it uh tell us tell us that you like it just tell us that you like it yes we like those emails where people just say good job i don't have a question or anything you're just it's just a virtual pat on the back. We send one to each other every day. Alright, so we're done. We will be back with the first of those 30 team preview shows on Monday.

Have a good weekend and we hope the site will be fully functioning again and apologize for the fact that it has not been for the past couple days. Talk to you Monday.