Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 82: The Marlins-Blue Jays Blockbuster

Episode Date: November 14, 2012

Ben and Sam break down the Marlins-Blue Jays trade from every angle, or at least all the angles that occurred to them at the time.

Default got pretty quick. A couple days ago we was a b**** in the town, now we're a piece of s***. That's, that's, I don't get it. Good morning and welcome to episode 82 of Effectively Wild, the Baseball Prospectus daily podcast. In New York, New York, I am Ben Lindberg and joining me as almost always is Sam Miller in the Honda Fit in his garage in Long Beach, California. Hello, Sam. Hi, Ben. So we had planned, as we told you, to do a listener email show, but the universe intervened and supplied us with a pressing topic.

I mean, if people had presciently emailed us about a trade between the blue days and the marlins no one asked us what our thoughts on on a 10 player blockbuster would be exactly so it's your fault i'm disappointed in our i'm disappointed in our listeners um so we will still we will still do a listener email show tomorrow. So if you have questions or comments that you want to be addressed on the show, email us at podcast at baseballperspectives.com. But for now, we figured more people would probably want to hear us talk about the trade that happened between the Blue Jays and the Marlins.

I count 11, by the way. Oh, is it 11? Okay. I don't even know where to start with this trade. I guess we can just read out the trade for those of you who may have gone to sleep at about dinner time and missed everything that happened last night. The Blue Jays and Marlins made a gigantic trade. The Marlins traded Josh Johnson, Mark Burley, Jose Reyes,

Emilio Bonifacio, and John Buck, as well as $4 million. Two of the Blue Jays for Younel Escobar, Henderson Alvarez, and Jeff Mathis, of course, and three prospects. Did I get everything there, I think? So, I don't know. Where do you want to start with this thing? Well, it seems to me that the consensus, as far as I can tell, is that this, more than anything, is an indictment of the Marlins as an organization and that they should be ashamed of themselves and that baseball should contract

them or dispose of Jeffrey Loria or something because this is not a reasonable way to run an organization. And so I guess that's probably the best place to start. Do you consider this to be a dark day for Miami? Not exactly. I kind of liked Zach Levine's take on it on Twitter, which was that it's hard to fault the Marlins for this specific move or that this specific move makes sense. The fact that they're in the situation where they're making this move is kind of a dark mark on baseball and is not good for the game, I would say. But this specific move, it seems like the Marlins probably were not going to be competitive with the players that they had, although with the second wildcard and everything, you never know.

But, I mean, they kind of started a fire sale last year, so at this point, why not finish it off, I guess? If you have all the back-loaded contracts and you're not going to win, you might as well just kind of do the whole thing, just go all in on it. It's kind of an awesome trade it seems to me on paper. If this were the Red Sox and the Dodgers, for instance, who made a sort of similarly shocking move if a bit different in the texture of it, I don't know that there would be all that much of a freak out. I mean, certainly the Marlins gave up a lot of famous players, but I mean, sort of the first rule of free agents is that you sign them because you want the first year and then every year after that you take on because you have to in order to get that first year. And if every GM could trade their free agent signings after one year,

I think they would all be super thrilled with that. Now, Reyes and Burley both more or less lived up to kind of expectations, although I guess you could say both were a little disappointing. But it's not like either one fits into that kind of like instant sunk cost category that a lot of contracts do and that you know maybe theoretically um or i should say arguably um albert foolholes and cj wilson maybe do uh two guys who the marlins wanted to sign last offseason but couldn't partly because they wouldn't give them no trade clauses. But anyway, I think it is the case that they got the best year of those contracts. I don't think either one of those deals has a lot of surplus value in them.

think either one of those deals has a lot of surplus value in them. They're trading Johnson one year before free agency and he's coming off of a pretty poor year and they're getting pretty well stocked up. It seems to me that this is on paper is a very good move. If it were any team but the Marlins, I think it would probably be a very defensible move. And I think there are certain teams that, um, I think if they had made this move, people would be probably bending, bending over to praise, uh, for it. But I mean, the fact is that the Marlins come into all this with a lot of baggage and the baggage is that, uh, nobody believed them last off season. And there was this fear that something like this was going to happen.

And they had to sort of reassure the public that it wasn't, that they were investing in the team, they were investing in the park, they were investing in everything. They were in the New Yorker, for Pete's sake. They were on Showtime. They were going to be big time. And there was a sort of prove it kind of demand from the public, and for them to not even make it 12 months before confirming all of those sort of worst ideas about them is pretty spectacular. And I think that the idea that, I don't know if Jim Bowden is right about this, but he tweeted that, and he's not alone.

I think other people have brought this up, but the idea is that now no free agent, that they can never get another free agent, another big time free agent. And I don't know that that's not true. I mean, I think that is, that might be sort of the extra factor to this that makes it a kind of terrible baseball move in addition to a terrible PR move. I mean, you do need to sign free agents from time to time. And I mean, I wrote about how the Angels got C.J. Wilson and Albert Pools for ESPN. And I don't remember nearly as much as I should have from that time because these things fall out of my head about four seconds after I finish writing about them.

But I do recall that CJ talked to Tori Hunter the night that he signed his deal with the Angels and was trying to sort of get advice from him. And one of the things Tori Hunter told him is, hey, look, they're the Marlins. They could trade you tomorrow. And that was a factor. I mean the Marlins offered him more money and more years and this is – they were already sort of fighting against that idea. expect that they could never sign a free agent again. I would think, I mean, do you think that the Marlins' ownership and executives kind of saw this possibility coming and just went for the blanket ban against no trade clauses just to say, well, we'll try this for one year and

if it doesn't work out, we can blow it up very easily um or do you think that they were actually committed and believed that it would work and that this was more of a i guess kind of an escape clause for them uh i don't know do you i mean do you think that they went into it saying we'll give it six months and if it is a disaster, we can just get out of it easily? No, I don't think that it was quite that clear in their minds. I mean obviously I don't know. But I don't think that it was probably like that. But I mean a no-trade clause has a probably – I think that every front office knows more or less what the financial value of a no-trade clause is. It's like in Monopoly, you know roughly how much a get-out-of-jail-free

card is. It's worth $50, right? And so, I'm sure that there's been some math done to figure out essentially what a no-trade clause is worth in a contract negotiation, how much money you give up or whatever. And The Marlins were essentially saying that that calculus did not matter to them, that they were not giving it no matter what. Pools and Wilson could not take less money for a no-trade clause. They were very clear, they do not do it, it is a policy they have. That, to me, says that even if they don't plan on trading them from the day they sign them, they're less committed to the idea of keeping those players than another team would be. I mean, it tells the players something about kind of where the club's priorities are. And this club's priority is clearly to be able to break down and move, when they're ready to. Yeah. Before we started recording, I went on the radio with Dave weekly,

who is a sportscaster on 98.7 in the Tampa Bay market. And as a podcast listener and very kindly promoted the podcast. And he asked me what I thought the Marlins could do to kind of placate their fans or restore faith from the fan base and I I don't know that there is anything they can do right now or even how many fans they have left but the one thing I mentioned was extending Giancarlo Stanton uh and of course he did you you saw his tweet earlier tonight uh last night, where he said, all right, I'm pissed off with four exclamation points, plain and simple.

So that kind of makes you think that there's possibly no way to keep him in Miami, or at least that it will be much harder than it would have been before. Well, even if they had, so what? Right. You could have signed into a 10-year deal and traded him in four months yes right uh i think i think the whole team around him at this point i think there's i think there's one thing that they can do and that's just that's to win 95 games and make the playoffs i mean i ken arneson just tweeted just before we started recording uh something along the lines of uh whatever people were saying about the Marlins.

I think somebody had tweeted that no Marlins fans should go to a game next year or something like that. And people were saying the same thing about the A's last year, which, you know, the A's hadn't competed for like four or five years. And they seem to constantly be building towards something and then selling off just before they got there and so they traded geo gonzalez and trevor cahill who were their two most famous players um for prospects and i think there was a a similar backlash not not as much because the a's aren't the marlins but a similar backlash to this sort of idea that they aren't committed to winning as much as they're committed to whatever. I don't know. I don't even know. I mean, I guess with the A's, the idea was that they were sort of

self-sabotaging in order to get a new city. But anyway, the A's undid that damage by winning. And you can't just win. I mean, the Marlins can't just say, OK, so that's our plan. Now we're going to take this team and we're going to win. But if it happens, I think that there will be a lot of sins forgiven because winning makes it look like you had a plan and losing makes it look like you don't have a plan. So how or when could that happen at this point? You have a team that has something like $13 million committed to the payroll next season, mostly Ricky Nolasco with, I guess, Younel Escobar making some money now. And, I mean, there's just nothing else on the roster right now.

The prospects they got back, I guess, are good prospects, but they kind of aren't either the blue chip sure thing a couple years down the road or the ready right now kind of average contributor they kind of fall somewhere in the middle where they're not necessarily ready to step into a job and be an average player right now but they're not necessarily sure things down the road either. At least it's not like, I mean, with some fire sales or some money dumps, you can kind of look at the prospects that a team got back and say, okay, well, this guy will be starting at this position next year, or this guy will be the centerpiece of the franchise for the next however many years.

Jeff Mathis will be the centerpiece of the franchise for the next however many years. Jeff Mathis will be the centerpiece of the franchise. Right. So they didn't get that kind of package back, and probably they shouldn't have gotten that kind of package back considering the contracts that Toronto was eating there. But I don't even know what their timeline is right now for competing. It's distant. I mean, it is distant, but again, you would have said the same about –

I think you probably would have said the same about the A's last year. I don't think – I don't know. To me, I didn't think the A's certainly had any chance in 2012, but I probably didn't think they had much in 2013 or even 2014, in particular with the way that the rest of their division had strengthened themselves. So, I mean, there's always an unpredictability to it, but yeah, I mean, this is a pretty garbage team right now. And so, yeah, I don't have a plan for them, certainly. If they somehow are that team next year, it will help. They probably won't be that team next year.

They're probably going to be terrible next year. All right, so we covered the depressing part of the deal, I guess. No, wait, wait. One more thing. I just want to ask one more thing about that. We kind of talked about the Yankees a week ago and whether they have an obligation to spend their money as, you know, to spend all the money they have to put a product on the field. And that will come up a lot, I think,

in the next couple of days where people will debate the obligation a team has to its city. Yeah. Do you buy that? Do you think that a team has an obligation to their city? Do you buy that? Do you think that a team has an obligation to their city? No. I mean, I just kind of look at it as a business, and if they want to make a profit, they should probably try to win. I don't see it as an obligation, really, although maybe the publicly funded stadium aspect kind of makes more of an obligation to put some presentable team on the field. One thing I wanted to bring up was that I wonder what the backlash will be

from the Players' Union or from, I mean, it was I think in January of 2010, the Players' Union put out a pretty strong statement about the Marlins not spending. And the perception was that they were just kind of pocketing their revenue sharing money and not really making a good faith effort to compete. And now you have a team that's basically is paying Ricky Nolasco next season, and that's about it. I mean, presumably they will add some payroll before the start of next season, but it will be a massive cut and you'd have to think that they will be one of the lowest, if not the lowest, payrolls next season. So I wonder whether they can get away with this. Last time when they weren't spending and they were chastised for it, they kind of had to spend some money just to show that they were trying to win

or just to placate the players' union to some extent. And I wonder whether they will have to do that again now. Although just spending money for the sake of spending money when you've just traded all the money that was committed seems like a bad idea too. I mean, if they were just to sign a, a free agent or two right now, maybe their payroll would be more respectable in some sense,

but the team probably wouldn't be a whole lot better. The outlook wouldn't be much better. Um, so I don't know what they do. Um, I think that the publicly funded stadium doesn't change the, the ethics at all. I think that's a decision that public officials make and that the club is in their best interest to try.

Even from a competitive standpoint, it's in their best interest to try to get the public to pay for it. It's not their decision and blame the representatives. I do, though, think that, and I don't know that there's a, I think that it's sort of a more of an ethical issue that there are a lot of places to make money. If you've got a half a billion dollars in capital that you control, there are just so many ways to make money in this world that to go and step all over a community's baseball club seems to be the wrong way to make money. It seems like a particularly kind of sleazy way to make money it seems like a particularly kind of sleazy way to make money or maybe not sleazy but sort of jerky way to make money um i think that you buy a club because you want to have a club and you uh want to treat it like

a thing that you love um the same way that all of us would if we could own a club so yeah i do i do think it's a way to get rich. It's more of a thing you do when you've already gotten rich and you want to enjoy your money. Yeah. And I think you should enjoy it. I think... Screw the bottom line. All right. So Toronto now is going to be some people's picks for the AL East next year, which is new. That's new. Do you think that they are an elite team? I don't know that any of the AL East teams right now is necessarily an elite team. I mean, maybe relative to the other teams, but not in –

I wouldn't expect any of them to be any kind of powerhouse like I would have maybe in the past few years. But I mean, I don't know. It's so early and this is so new that I don't know what I would project the Blue Jays to do next season, but I think that this move probably makes them as good a pick as any other team in the division, I guess, or close to it. I don't know. What do you think?

I don't know. I would have to – it's new. You're right. It's like you say. It's new. I haven't really had a chance to get accustomed to this roster. It doesn't strike me as a particularly strong team. No. And it doesn't strike me as a – I they got three i mean i don't know but basically they got three guys right and reyes is really good and johnson might be but i don't count on him for anything right now and burley is a number three starter um so i don't know how much i think that

i mean what did they win last year like 70 games uh well they had so many 73 and yeah they had so many pitching injuries and if you're gonna try to fix a team that has had pitching injuries, I guess you can't do any better than Mark Burley, who has basically never missed a start in his career, or so it seems just glancing at his extremely short injury section on his BP player card. You know that he will pitch, or you can be as certain that he will pitch as you can with any pitcher. I don't know how well his approach translates to a better hitter's park and the AL East as opposed to the NL East, but you can certainly count on him to be there. I don't know. I mean, it seems like maybe the Jays felt that this was the start of their window or a good time to strike in that they have,

not that there's really any urgency because they have what is generally regarded as the best or one of the best farm systems in baseball, but there doesn't seem to be an unbeatable team in the AL East right now. They have Jose Bautista for not all that much longer, and maybe they want to do some things while they can still count on him to be productive. And probably they expect just from better health to be a lot better than they were last year. Because I think, I mean, people expected the Jays to compete last year is my general impression, or at least to be a pretty good team. Certainly not a 73-win team.

So maybe this was a good time to strike and that this would make the difference. And that maybe they would be, not that we talked about them in our discussion of the teams on that sort of 85 to 90 win bubble recently, but maybe they are one of those teams. I guess I'm probably not as familiar with the Blue Jays as I am with some of our more American teams. It's probably now that Jeff Davis is not on the team anymore. Jeff Davis is not on the team anymore. No, really though, the Blue Jays, it was easy for them to start to get lost to a lot of writers last year. Basically, what I know about the Blue Jays is they were supposed to be pretty good, and then they got a lot of injuries and they were bad.

But to be honest, I can't really tell you. I mean, Batista missed like a third of the season or 40 of the season that's a huge injury right that's a huge one and I know Mauro missed like two months or so which is pretty big because he's their best pitcher and so those are two those are two injuries I mean that's probably six wins or so that you give up but they were I can't think of any other really key injuries, and I'm probably just blanking on which injuries those were. Just glancing at their stats,

it looks like they have fairly full playing time numbers for most of their main guys. And they had the second worst offense and the third worst pitching staff in baseball last year. Reyes doesn't really do much to improve the offense when you consider that, you know, you know, you know, Escobar, I guess, you know, Escobar is a is a worse hitter, but he's a better defender. So, I mean, you know, Escobar is a kind of an underrated.

He's a three win a year player as it is. So it's not like that's a massive upgrade. And the pitching is huge because their pitching was terrible but their hitting was also really terrible so i guess i would probably um accept that they um that that they're better than i'm giving them credit for now and once i look at it more i'll probably see it but it doesn't they don't blow me away yeah uh and you figure they're probably not done at this point um because i don't know they might be they just took on how much did they just take on they took on yes it's 40 50 50 some million just for next year 60 some million yeah uh so i don't know what their what their payroll is or how much spending

room they have left but clearly they are going for it now so yeah maybe i will make some moves that a team that is going for it will make sort of you know complementary supplementary moves uh and they are i hope they do that's a team i can root for yeah and and they had already signed as tourists and bonifacio is a useful player um so they get some some good things in this deal and and i would I don't know, I would kind of expect that maybe they would go for a veteran manager now. Or maybe it's more likely that they would go for a veteran manager. Ozzie Kean. Right, yes.

But just the fact that they do have all these veterans and that they are a win-now team, maybe to a greater extent than they were before this trade, maybe makes it less likely that they go with one of those managers who's just good at working with young players and developing people and then gets cast aside when a team is actually good again. Yeah, I generally have thought that Anthopolis has done a very good job during his time, but mainly he's been in tinker mode, and I've liked his tinkering. And so now he's finally got a team where he's added enough sort of star power that the tinkering kind of – like the stakes of the tinkering go up.

And there aren't really many GMs I'd rather have making those final tinkers. Yeah, and I think I might write something about that because I've been meaning to write something about all his tinkering he is uh the blue jays have made the most transactions of any team since he took over and also in the last year or so they have made by far the most moves and most of them were minor moves and lots of reliever moves and there were no previous moves on the order of this one, of course. But yeah, maybe he has kind of set himself up now with all those preparatory moves to seal the deal with this one, although there's still a lot of uncertainty about how they will do.

One last question. Obviously, he'll have the park factor on his side and the league factor on his side. But who – I should have said who I'm talking about before I said that. Who will have a lower ERA next year, Henderson Alvarez or Mark Burley? I guess I will go with Burley probably. Oh, I go with Alvarez. Yeah? Definitely. I go with Alvarez. Yeah. Definitely. I go with Alvarez for ERA.

Yeah. I don't know. I can see it. But Burley will make more starts. Burley will make more starts and I would probably go, probably would go with, probably would go with Burley for an adjusted stat. All right.

Okay. That was that. Well, I guess we're done with that. So send us your questions for tomorrow's show at podcast at baseballperspectives.com, and we will answer them unless there is a 12-player trade that is made at some point today.