Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 505: Dissecting Trade Deadline Day

Episode Date: August 1, 2014

Ben and Sam discuss the major moves made (and not made) before Thurday’s trade deadline.

Just so you don't ever know Watch each card play in the play store Wait until that deal goes down Don't you let that deal go down Good morning and welcome to episode 505 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, presented by the BaseballReference.com Play Index. I am Ben Lindberg, a writer for Grantland.com, joined as always by Sam Miller, Editor-in-Chief of Baseball Prospectus, who is still rounding

up the last of today's transaction analyses. Hi. You must be tired. It was a long day. Yeah. Yes, it was. How about you? What was it like for you? Not so bad. Jonah handled the quick reaction stuff, and i did kind of a a round up wrap up winners and losers type thing which will be up in the morning so i had i had some time more so than i did in the bp days and and then you did today when the goal is to get everything up immediately um and yeah i didn't have to worry about rounding everyone up and sending out emails to make sure everything was covered from the prospect side and the fantasy side and all the things that you had

to do yeah putting in arrows put in a lot of arrows arrows are important so many arrows i uh and now i have to write that's it's not so much that i am actually tired at the moment as um the the threat of tiredness is is looming over me because i still have to to write a couple more things before we can wrap it up well uh so yeah it was a busy day it looked like maybe it wouldn't be a busy day it it hadn't been a particularly busy lead up to the last day of the deadline. There were lots of teams technically in contention or having reasons not to sell. And it looked like maybe it would just be a slow, uneventful day. But it became clear early on Thursday when the Leicester Cespedes deal went down that it was not going to be a slow day and things continued to happen

throughout the day, culminating in the three-team David Price trade, but there were plenty of major significant moves along the way. Does it surprise you that GMs are such procrastinators? I mean, the last day, it's always the last day. It's like some college project where you had two weeks to do it and you ended up staying up all night the night before it was due to get it done. I mean, the last day. I understand that the deadline had some pressure to get things done, but you'd think moves would be slightly more evenly distributed than this. Would you? Well, I wouldn't because I know that they're not. But I wonder why they're not. Yeah, well, if you have even one team that is uncertain about whether it is a seller or not, then you have kind of everything.

It's not hard for that one team's uncertainty to make everything have to wait. Because nobody wants to buy the only third baseman on the market and feel like you're overpaying for the only third baseman or the only starting pitcher or whatever. You can always convince yourself that, oh, well, there's two, then i'll be able to bargain shop or play them off on each other or whatever the case may be so i don't even know where ben i just realized i have the wrong headphones in

that means that uh my sound might be 90 as good as it normally is i just realized i didn't even need to mention that now everyone's to be focusing on your voice. Yeah. It sounded pretty normal. Okay. All right. So I don't know where to start. We're not going to talk about every trade.

As we just discussed, you can go read about every trade if you'd like at Baseball Perspectives or you can read at Grantland or you can read it at many of the other websites that talk about baseball. or you can read it at many of the other websites that talk about baseball. But we'll talk about some of the notable ones, I suppose. Is there anywhere you want to start? Not at all. Okay, so I guess we should... Christenorfia. Yeah.

Wait, what? I like the Mariners moves. Mariners moves were among my favorite moves. But we won't start there. So I guess we should start with the A's. And trading Cespedes, trading for John Lester for two months of Lester. They traded eight months of cespedes and uh they also got johnny gomes and then they made a separate trade in which they sent tommy malone who had

asked for a trade to the twins for sam fold who was an an athletic earlier this year and then was dfa'd because they didn't have a spot for him at the time and and now they do so they'll be cobbling together left field production like they do at a lot of positions they they traded the closest thing they had to an archetypical slugger a middle-of-the-order bat a guy who's been hitting number three for them for the last six weeks or so. They traded that guy for Lester, and they'll replace Cespedes with, I suppose, some combination of Gomes and Steven Vogt and Fold and Josh Reddick and who knows what else.

All of the typical Oakland spare parts that fit together in a way that makes them more useful than they would be on their own. So they get, I don't know what percent of cesspitous they get out of those guys, but probably a pretty high percent. And of course they get Lester, who now gives them what was clearly the best rotation in baseball for a period of several hours. Maybe it still is, but it's a rotation that gives you the impression that Billy Bean is doing all he can not to leave anything to chance this time. Yeah. I have to admit, I'm not smitten with this i i don't have an issue with it um it's just that like uh i don't know i as you know i i always uh try to avoid getting too

hung up on the particular way that a good team is built. I don't particularly care if a team is great offensively or great with pitching or balanced or anything of the sort. And it seems to me that the reaction to this whole thing is mainly focused on the idea that you need good pitching, especially in the postseason, and that's why this is such a great move. And, I mean, it's not all that. It's partly that Leicester is probably better than Cespedes. But, I mean, it seems to me clearly that the A's traded

their, you know, they created a weaker spot in one part of their team in order to get stronger in another, and I'm not sure that they weren't actually deeper at starting pitching than they were at the outfield, particularly with, you know, Coco Crisp seeming to miss two games a week and one week a month at this point, and Craig Gentry being somewhat uncertain, somewhat uncertain with his broken hand. And, you know, to me, to me, the difference between Cespedes and a fold Gomes platoon, it's, there's a, there's a gap there that's probably smaller than the gap between Lester and, and Jesse Chavez or Jason Hamill. But it's not a huge improvement to me.

It feels like Cespedes is pretty good. And then you have the fact that next year they won't have Cespedes or Lester. And so I'm not sure that what I would think is, you know, it's an upgrade this year. And if you're going for it this year, then I guess you can justify it as saying, well, it is in fact an upgrade. But to me, it's not quite as much of an upgrade as I would want, considering Cespedes is, you know, pretty tremendously valuable next year at $9 million. And I would think the A's are going to be good again next year. Yeah, I would think the A's are going to be good again next year yeah I would think so too I guess it depends

how worried you are about what Chavez and Hamill have done recently because Hamill has been bad since the A's traded for him in only four starts or so but he's been pretty atrocious and

Chavez has also been bad in July, and there was some concern about him running out of gas and not having the stamina to succeed over a full season. And so if you think, and maybe this trade is a sign that they think that those guys aren't so great, I mean, then you're talking about Lester, because a fourth starter will pitch in the postseason probably, or it's probably an advantage to have him pitch in the postseason.

And I think I'll write about this for next week maybe, but it's something that we talked about online recently, just the idea that maybe having a top-heavy rotation isn't all that beneficial. It seems like it should be because it doesn't matter who your fifth starter is in the postseason. You can concentrate your innings among your top, say, three starters and your top, say, three bullpen guys,

and those guys can pitch a higher percentage of your innings. And so it seems like a team that is top-heavy in its pitching staff should get a bigger boost from the playoff format than a team that is a bit more well-balanced but doesn't have as many aces or relief aces. And yet I'm not convinced that that's true, and one reason it might not be true is that these guys then have to pitch on short rest or have to pitch back to back to back days if they're

a reliever. And maybe they're not used to doing that. Maybe that's hard to do at the end of a long season. And so maybe you give back whatever advantage that you gain from that top heaviness in those guys not being as effective as they would be on short rest. And so that's a theory. And so the A's now can go into the playoffs with the best of both worlds. They have the deep rotation that also is entirely composed of top of the rotation guys. Now they can,

they can start four starters who are all really really good they don't have to give hamill a start in the playoffs or alternatively push their number three guy or whoever to start on short rest so they have that luxury now and of course uh whoever's not in the rotation i mean maybe chavez goes to the bullpen and they have this incredibly deep bullpen already. And so it's, it's good pitching. I think the idea that pitching matters so much more than everything else in the playoffs is sort of overblown, but at the same time, they, uh, they have a pretty enviable combination of depth and ceiling. Yeah. Clearly what matters more than anything else in the playoffs is Pretty enviable combination of depth and ceiling.

Yeah, clearly what matters more than anything else in the playoffs is Johnny Gomes. That too, the chemistry. I actually do. I can't help but sort of love it for the Johnny Gomes factor. As you know, I am interested in and intrigued by the Johnny Gomes 20-win swing theory. Yes, although he had a quote recently about chemistry, right? I saw that quote, yeah. He said it was the icing on the cake, but not the cake itself. Yeah, he doesn't, I mean, he doesn't, it doesn't matter what he, look, it's like, I don't know what the back of my head looks like. Other people do, but, you know, so I'm not the best person to necessarily describe everything about me.

You would be better at describing what I look like from behind than I would. And maybe we all observing Johnny Gomes and his teammates observing Johnny Gomes, maybe they are in a better position to describe what Johnny Gomes is like than he is. Maybe so. Those guys, they worship him. I think that if nothing else, you might get a two-month placebo effect. Last October, everyone was mad that Johnny Gomes was playing all the time instead of Daniel Nava. So we'll see whether they stick to the strict platoon or not.

So we'll see whether they stick to the strict platoon or not. And then the Red Sox side, that was our whole show yesterday, which, as I feared, was quickly kind of out of date by the time people listened to it. Yeah, not really. Not even slightly out of date. Yeah, out of date in that we didn't know what was going to transpire, but we talked about the motivations and everything. So they did go through with the Lester trade.

They did go through with the Lackey trade. They also made other trades. They traded Andrew Miller to the Orioles. They traded Steven Drew to the Yankees. So they were sellers but not in the classical sense. They traded guys who were approaching free agency to teams that are better positioned to make the playoffs in 2014. In that sense, they are sellers, but they are not really typical sellers in the sense that they, except for the Miller deal where they got Eduardo Rodriguez back, they didn't really get prospects they got major league guys um they got kelly johnson for some reason i'm not clear on what the purpose of that is but but they got cespedes and they got alan craig and they got

joe kelly and these are clearly moves made with 2015 in mind, I suppose, and you can see how you can envision the Red Sox contending team coming together. I mean, Craig certainly has his question marks at this point, but they added outfield offense, which is something they've lacked this year, and as we talked about yesterday, they don't have a ton of financial commitments, But they added outfield offense, which is something they've lacked this year. And as we talked about yesterday, they don't have a ton of financial commitments, and they have plenty of mid and back of the rotation guys from their farm system who seem ready to take over those roles. So it seems like the only thing that they really lack that would make them

among the favorites heading into next year would be high ceiling starters, top of the rotation starters. And I guess some of those guys are available this winter, whether it's Scherzer or whether it's Lester. Maybe they'll actually pull off the trade Lester and re-sign Lester gambit. Actually, I saw a tweet from someone, I think, who does the Red sox post game stuff on nesson who said that a a red sox source told him that the team wanted to trade lester to a team that they didn't think could resign him uh in preparation for making an offer to bring him

back this winter um so maybe maybe that's a thing yeah uh we have them incidentally a our playoff odds have them as a sub 500 team true talent team before these trades so uh they are not quite the rays where we think that they have underperformed in an exceptionally fluky way. The system, you know, it didn't love the Red Sox even last year. It liked them. I think it had them at like 85 wins, and it didn't. And even the Red Sox internal system had them at something. Yeah, that was from the Alex Spear essay in the annual. Yeah, so it's not quite clear that they have a definitely

front-running team, but they should have plenty of flexibility to have, you know, to make a front-running team. I guess, I don't know, it might depend on how many teams they're bidding against. If the Yankees and Dodgers are

overextended, and if the Cubs decide to wait one more year, then it becomes a much easier job for the Red Sox this offseason. And speaking of the Yankees, I like what they did. I like what they did a lot. Yeah, I do too. They were in this position where their playoff odds were like 15% or something. You know, for the Yankees, good enough that they might as well go for it. Their playoff odds were like 15% or something.

For the Yankees, good enough that they might as well go for it, but not so good that they should trade everything that's in their farm system, which they have a few appealing prospects. And they have to at some point find a way to graduate something more valuable than a bullpen guy or a back of the rotation guy, which is all their system has really produced since Brett Gardner. And it's tough to make a team entirely out of free agents. So at some point, they have to find a way to graduate someone who can contribute, so it probably made sense for them to hang on to as many prospects as they could while giving it a decent shot for this year, and I think they pulled that off perfectly. They added Drew, who is good.

He's going to have to play second base for the first time in his career because, of course, Jeter is an immovable object at short. But they added Drew. They added Martin Prado, which was a nice move too, who gives them a lot of flexibility. And they added Chase Headley earlier in the month. They added Brandon McCarthy earlier in the month and they didn't really give up a whole lot. They gave up guys like Fidel Nuno and Peter

O'Brien and all these marginal prospects at best. Rafael DePaul I guess is a little bit better but nothing that really hurts and it costs them money of course, but that's what they have at their disposal.

So I thought they did an excellent job. Yeah, it's almost incredible, the bucket of slop that they sent out on the rest of the league. It's really incredible that they convinced... A lot of these guys, it's sort of incredible that they convinced, like, a lot of these guys, it's sort of incredible that they convinced anybody to take them in any context. And that that's all they gave up is pretty good.

Although, you know, it's not like they added a bunch of all-stars. I mean, Brandon McCarthy, who we like and who seemed to be pitching pretty well before he got traded and who has been pitching well since he was like one in 42. And, um, of course, uh, Steven drew is,

is doing worse than Kelly Johnson. I think thus far, he's hit more or less like Steven drew in July. He was awful in June. And Chase Headley was, uh, nothing but memories at this point. And,

uh, who's the last one? Prado. Oh, yeah, Prado's been replacement level and is, what, signed for three more years? Something like that? I think two more. Although, I mean, two more at 11 million per, which is fine.

I like it. I like it. I'm just saying that if you chose to make the opposite argument, if your hot take was, look at those Yankees, there they go again, that it would be pretty easy to make, you know easy to choose a few details about every player that explain why they were available for a hefty discount. Yeah, it's not ideal to build a team the way that they've built a team, but with the constraints that they are operating under as far as lack of homegrown guys. I mean, it would have been nice if they had started the season with Stephen Drew.

And I know they talked about it, but that didn't happen. So if they had had some of these guys to start the season instead of Kelly Johnson and Brian Roberts and all these people who really, there was just no way that that would work. In a way, it almost worked better than they could have expected, that Roberts stayed healthy and Teixeira, when he's played, has been productive. They've almost gotten lucky, even though those positions have been pretty unproductive. But right now, they have something that looks kind of like a contending team's lineup. And they're a team that is, I think, 30 runs under 500 run differential-wise.

So I wouldn't get my hopes up. But I thought they did as well as could be expected. Yeah, I like that. I agree. I think if they'd started the season with this infield, it would have been pretty hot. Yeah, okay. All right, so we should discuss the big deal, the three-team trade.

This was surprising. It was surprising to me. It seemed like it was surprising to Dave Dombrowski if you read his comments about how this deal had barely been discussed. He thought there was a zero percent chance that it would happen or close to zero percent when if someone had asked him, I think Wednesday morning, he said, and then it kind of resurfaced a little on Wednesday and then just got done more or less in a day. And I didn't see this coming. I expected that maybe the Tigers would make a move for a lefty reliever or something.

I did not expect them to add an ace. And they did. And now they also have a super rotation. And I guess you can, I mean, they gave up a good deal. It's not an unqualified win. I mean, I think they gave up Austin Jackson, and they're going to make do with Rajai Davis and Ezequiel Carrera platooning in center, which is a downgrade. And it wasn't

like they upgraded from replacement level to price. They had a fairly deep rotation as it was. So instead of Price or instead of Porcello or Smiley or maybe Verlander, if he got his act together in the second half, they will be starting Price, and that's obviously an upgrade. But he's going to be expensive next year, and Smiley is cheap and under team control for a long time. But I guess the question is whether that really even matters if you're the Tigers and you're trying to win this year

and you're trying to win next year and you're trying to win next year and you will have Price next year and you're better and have a better chance to win this year with Price. So it came at a cost, but I guess a reasonable cost. Yep. I wish I had more to say. I just wrote about this, like just finished right before we wrapped up,

and I don't even remember what I wrote. Like, it's been a long day. Yeah, so the Tigers, it's, okay, so here's what's interesting about the Tigers. The Tigers have just seemed to have an unlimited capacity to add impact players for the last few years. And it's weird because they don't ever seem to run out of space. They just add impact player after impact player after impact player. And you never hear them worrying about the luxury tax.

And you never hear about how they have six unmovable contracts, and they're like sort of sneaky huge. But yeah, this is obviously like, I didn't expect anybody would get david price without having some sort of cringy what did we just do kind of feeling um and they don't have that at all there's i i don't i won't miss smiley like if i were the tigers i wouldn't miss smiley at all i think that's a perfectly replaceable part. And David Price is incredible. So it's sort of shocking that they were able to get a guy who is somewhere between the second and seventh best pitcher in all of baseball for not that much.

And really nothing that's going to... Even if you can make the case that Jackson and Smiley are really valuable and the cost control or whatever, there's no way that in six or seven years anybody holds this trade up as an example of a disaster trade. There's no chance that they gave up Jeff Bagwell or John Smoltz to do this it's like the the downside is is really sort of shockingly small for this trade yeah and so we'll we'll talk about the other sides of the trade the the side that people are probably less interested in is the mariner side i thought the mariners did a good job at the deadline, both in acquiring Jackson to play center and in acquiring Chris DiNorfia to, I don't know, place outfield corners, platoon with people. Both of those guys

are upgrades. The Mariners have had really, really awful offense from their whole team to an extent, but particularly from their outfield. They were getting nothing out of guys like James Jones and Andy Chavez. So this is an upgrade. If anything, it makes their defense better, which is amazing because they have the best defensive efficiency in the majors already. And they gave up Nick Franklin, who very, very clearly was not playing any sort of role for them. I'm sort of surprised that they were able to get much for him because it seemed that they very clearly telegraphed that he had no future in Seattle. They've been moving him to all sorts of different positions.

They signed Cano. They've been playing him to all sorts of different positions. They signed Cano, they've been playing Brad Miller, and even Chris Taylor instead of Nick Franklin. So maybe they handled him strangely, but if you accept that he just wasn't really going to be a player for them, I thought they did a pretty good job getting Jackson, who's a big upgrade, and D'Norfia, who's a decent little buy low. So that's the Mariners' side. Yeah, the Mariners, I think that as far as a single trade that I like the most, any one team, any one haul, I feel like Franklin for Jackson might be the single cleanest, coolest move any team made today.

Yeah, in my post I think I ended up writing the most about the Mariners and the Yankees, even though they didn't make the highest profile moves. So the Rays, it sounds like from what you've said about Franklin and Smiley, that you are underwhelmed with the raise return for Price? I don't know that I'm... Underwhelmed isn't quite what I would necessarily say. I'm sort of saddened by it more than anything, just because I feel like it's a move

that helps them for the next couple years, and they're going to be kind of hanging on by their fingertips for the next couple years. And they're going to be kind of hanging on by their fingertips for the next couple years. I think they should be good enough to compete in 2015 and probably in 2016. And Smiley and Franklin are kind of helpful for that because they're major league ready right now. Smiley is practically a veteran. Franklin, if it's not coming now, it ain't coming. It's good for those couple years, but there's just such a looming sense of disaster, it seems like, around the Rays beyond that. They haven't had successful drafts for more than a half a decade. They didn't really get the kind of haul from David Price that you can build seven or eight years of a franchise around. And I'm not sure

that they, I mean, maybe that would have been the wrong move. First of all, maybe that wasn't available to them. It's quite conceivable that there was no offer out there that would have been the wrong move. First of all, maybe that wasn't available to them. It's quite conceivable that there was no offer out there that would have done that. But generally in history, we see that ace pitchers who have some club control left, who get traded, bring back some pretty impressive hauls. The kind that you can build around for six or seven years. And they didn't do that. Instead, they got two pretty good guys who will help for the next couple years. Smiley will get traded sometime in 2017. So he's already practically gone.

The Rays will barely get to know him. And around that time, I could see the franchise really falling into a sort of few years of disrepair. And I don't think anybody's eager to see the Rays be bad again. Maybe they are. Some people probably are. Some people. Yeah, I kind of wrote that, I don't know, on its own merits, it's not awful. It's maybe sort of a letdown just because the price sweepstakes has been going on for so long

that you expected that when it finally was resolved, somehow there would be a big name involved and maybe. And of course, big names have been rumored to be included in those trade talks at various times. And we saw the Rays get Myers the last time they made a major pitching move. So there was maybe an expectation for more or maybe just like a necessity for more that you have to hold the Rays to a high standard in these moves because they kind of need to hit a home run every time. And this time they maybe just sort of, I don't know, doubled or something. Yeah, the package they got back is a lot like, to me, it seems like a lot like the package they got for Scott Kazmir. It's three similar types.

Smiley is more advanced and has more service time than Alex Torres did. But you're talking about three fairly similar types. And Kazimir at the time wasn't that good at all. And it was just sort of a surprise they could move him for value at all. He cleared waivers for Pete's sake. Whereas Price is the most desirable, desired traded pitcher in like three or four years. So it's sort of surprising just to see the surface similarities between those moves. And maybe, like I said, maybe it's just that there's no Tony Regan's anymore. I trust that the Rays got the best move, the best package that they could.

They are certainly aware of what they need and of what was out there, and I don't intend it as any sort of criticism. I really do believe they got the best that they could get. It's just a little disappointing because it's kind of fun to watch the Rays pull off a heist. That's a thing that we've grown used to and that I always sort of feel slightly giddy, even though I don't have any rooting interest in them, just to see these smart underdogs do smart things that make them not underdogs anymore. This one, I don't have the feeling that this ends up with a World Series for them or anything like that. A little sad is all.

I don't know. Maybe we don't pay enough attention to the money Price is making. He's making $14 million now. We figure he'll make, what, in the $20 million range next year. It's hard to offer a whole lot of surplus value when you're making $20 million, especially given that he's a pitcher and who knows he could get hurt if he's, if he's healthy all year and, and is great, then,

then he'd be worth more than 20 million. But once you build in the risk that he won't be healthy, maybe it's not all that much extra value. So maybe that's part of it is that we're looking at price and we're looking at his stats and not so much his salary. So I guess we can just briefly cover the Cardinals' trades. It's not all that fascinating. They needed rotation help. Shelby Miller has been shaky.

Michael Waka's hurt. rotation help. Shelby Miller has been shaky. Michael Waka's hurt. So they traded for Masterson and Lackey, which I guess how good that is sort of depends on whether they actually get Lackey at league minimum next year, whether they have to give him much more than that. That will kind of determine maybe how good a deal it is. And then they traded Kelly and they traded Craig and now they have a place to put Oscar Tavares. And I don't know, on the whole, it probably makes them better for now. They gave up some stuff, but nothing crippling.

Not really moves that fascinated me. Yeah, how much do you think they should be terrified of john lackey's uh opinion about his own contract uh i heard a lot i felt like that came up a lot today well because he's he's what he's threatened not to play right so and the more and the more it comes up the more it starts to sound like an option. And the worst thing is that this becomes like a debate about whether he should or whether he could. You don't want it to even be seen as like, oh, well, there are two routes he could take here. But it seems like it's getting more and more like we're waiting to see what he'll decide, which kind of dooms them.

If he thinks he has a choice. So what do you think they'd do? Like let's say Lackey, what does Lackey do? What is he threatening to do? Is he threatening to retire? Is he threatening to just hold out? I think retirement is... Remember holdouts, Ben? Do you remember holdouts?

I've read about them. Man, back when I was a kid, there were just always kids, always players holding out. That's like spring training. Guys would just not come. Like Ricky Henderson would just show up a few weeks late every year. Hold now. Yeah.

So I don't know. I mean, I guess they can't really have talked to him about it before trading him, right? I mean, they must have just kind of been going in hoping for the best, maybe sort of feeling people out, but I guess they probably couldn't have talked to him directly about it. So I don't know.

Maybe they make some kind of middle ground offer and try to look like nice guys about it or something so that he doesn't demand full market value and just appreciates the gesture, maybe that would be a good way to go about it. I would say that that'd probably be a better way than trying to get every last penny out of him and having it backfire.

But it's sort of a shame from the team's perspective that you can't make the most of it well and it's almost like you like and i wonder if they just trade him and like if everybody just keeps trading him around and trying to like squeezing you know 70 cent like basically like a guy you know owes you money but you're never going to collect it from him. He's never going to pay you. So you sell the debt to somebody at 60 cents on the dollar and then 30 cents. And eventually there's some collection agency that is only, you know, that is only paying a nickel on the dollar for it and he takes you to court.

Yeah. So I don't know. We'll see how that works out. But that, I guess, is the most interesting aspect of these moves. And the really interesting thing to me, as I mentioned on Twitter, was that these were the two teams that we thought would not be making moves for rotation help prior to the season when you did your pakoda ranking of each team's rotation depth the a's were number one on that list the cardinals i think were number six on

that list and between the two of them they traded for five starting pitchers in july kind of incredible although they traded they traded two away as well yes that's true. Alright, so I don't think we need to talk about any other moves, really. I like the Gerardo Parra trade for Milwaukee because I like Gerardo Parra, but anything else you can read about. I guess the only other thing of interest is maybe a couple teams that didn't do anything. Most notably the Philliesies who got a lot of grief for not doing things and i can you can kind of explain away certain players that they didn't

deal for example chase sutley certainly sounded like he didn't want to go anywhere jimmy rollins said some stuff about not wanting to go anywhere and they're both 10 and 5 guys and he didn't want to go anywhere. Jimmy Rollins said some stuff about not wanting to go anywhere. And they're both 10 and 5 guys. And they didn't have to go anywhere if they didn't want to. And, you know, Ryan Howard, you weren't going to get anything for him. And Cliff Lee's elbow probably scared everyone off, rightfully so, because he was forced to leave his start immediately after the deadline. So maybe there weren't quite

as many movable parts on the roster as it seemed like there were, but there were still guys. There were still Marlon Bird and A.J. Burnett and Papelbon. And this is now the second straight deadline that the Phillies have done nothing, just nothing at all. And it's pretty perplexing. And you read Ruben Maro's quotes after, and he sort of made it sound like the onus was on other teams to make offers that overwhelmed him more so than the onus was on him to do something to get the Phillies out of this rut. And he said something about how he thinks prospects are overrated. And he's not that excited about prospects. I don't know.

Which is weird because he has managed to trade a lot of players for a lot of prospects in the past. It's not as though he traded Hunter Pence for prospects. He traded Michael Bourne for prospects. Maybe that's why he doesn't like it. He hunter pence for prospects he traded michael bourne well maybe that's why he doesn't like because he traded cliff lee for prospects the trades he made in 2012 he traded tommy and chad qualls and victorino and pence and i don't know if there's really anything left over that's helping the phillies from those trades. So maybe he's been burned by trading before and he's not going to do it again. I don't know. It's not totally surprising based on their history,

but you would have thought that somehow, some way, something would get done there. But no. And then the only other team that i thought i was surprised didn't do anything i mean you could you could be semi-surprised about the dodgers not adding a reliever or the giants not adding a second baseman or or maybe the pirates not doing something um i thought the blue jays not doing anything was sort of surprising, just in that they were, I think they were the team with the highest playoff odds that didn't really make a move other than the Danny Valencia trade. And they had something like a 60% chance of winning the wildcard.

They are currently in possession of a wildcard spot, but only like a 40 chance in the al east and so they're in a position where every win would make a pretty big difference to their bottom line and they just didn't do a whole lot and they've they've got guys coming back like lind and incarnation and laurie and so you could see why they wouldn't have wanted to make a big move for a position player although maybe like an astruble Cabrera or something would have made sense. But a pitcher, a starter, probably would have been nice just in case guys like Hutchison or Stroman run out of steam

or just the fact that they're starting J-Hap all the time and it's quite possible that they could miss the playoffs because of one J-Hap start instead of a start by someone else. So I don't know whether it's that they didn't have a lot of payroll room or what. Anthopolis has consistently said that that hasn't been a problem. But I'm sort of surprised that they didn't do anything. Maybe they'll do something in August. Were they rumored? Were there hot rumors about the Jays?

There were Cabrera rumors. There were nebulous pitching rumors. I don't know that I heard a lot of specific names, not that I was paying particular attention to Toronto rumors. But yeah, there were rumors. Great. All right. rumors but yeah there were there were rumors great alright we did a decent job

so read our stuff if you want to hear more about what we think about trades please send us emails for next week at podcast at baseballperspectives.com please join our facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild. Please rate and review us on iTunes and subscribe to the show on iTunes.

And please support our sponsor, Baseball Reference. Go to baseballreference.com. Subscribe to the Play Index using the coupon code BP to get a $30 discount on a one-year subscription. And by the way, if you didn't see it, I posted a link in the Facebook group. Russell Carlton wrote a long, unfiltered post at BP, free for non-subscribers, about the question we talked about on Wednesday's listener email show, whether it's more likely to have a five-home run game or a five-strikeout inning. He did all the math, and he came to a conclusion. And it's more likely to have a five home run game or a five strikeout inning, he did all the math and he came to a conclusion.

And it's an interesting read. And I was also surprised to see that there was a five strikeout inning in the minor leagues this season. Did you read about that? The first time, like Mark Montgomery did it a few years ago, which I guess the likelihood of a catcher throwing it away is so much higher in the minor leagues. Yeah, you'd think it would be, and it's also still surprising. There's also what? I mean, this doesn't... By Russell's math, it should happen like every couple universes.

It should just happen virtually every... So what I'm going to say is not actually interesting, but there's like eight times as many games, right? Yeah. If you count all the minor leagues down to Dominican League. But eight times is not nearly enough. It should not have happened twice, unless it's just that catchers are bad.

Pitchers are wilder. Well, and pitchers are wilder. Catchers are worse. Catchers are worse at catching, worse at throwing, and the hitters are more likely to swing at a stupid pitch. Yes, good points. Okay, so that's it for this week. It's not quite the end of this week.

I wonder if players are also more likely or less likely to run. Because I notice a lot of batters who just don't run. Yeah, maybe in the minors, players are more motivated. Not sure. Okay, so that's it for this week. Have a wonderful weekend. We will be back on Monday.