I was reminded of Austin Nola's existence tonight, as he finished second in the Mariners franchise home run derby (almost knocked out in the first round by Ichiro, but the ball landed at the fence). He was part of a deadline trade in 2020, where the Mariners gave up him, Austin Adams and Dan Altavilla for Ty France, Luis Torrens, Taylor Trammell and Andres Munoz. A rare trade the Mariners won. Interestingly, the now-retired Nola is the Mariners bullpen coach (where he isn't doing a great job with the three-time All-Star he was traded for).
Let’s see - last year in the playoffs, Skubal started 2 games against the Mariners, including the deciding game 5. The Tigers lost both games 3-2. Good pitcher, but not dominant. And Cal Raleigh was not the difference maker in those games. And Skubal is coming off a major injury. Seems like most are thinking Skubal guarantees victory this year. He does not. He’s good, but not great.
No one player could possibly guarantee a World Series. Otherwise, Ted Williams, Barry Bonds, Willie Mays, Walter Johnson, Ernie Banks, Junior Griffey, Carl Yastrzemski, Ty Cobb, & Hank Aaron, combined would have more than 3 trophies to show for their careers. That said ...
"Good, but not great." "Good pitcher, but not dominant." Subjective terms rather than objective and quantitative so YMMV. But if the two-time reigning CYA winner who is pitching at essentially the same level this year isn't "great" or "dominant" then I'm not sure what could be.
Well I’m not sure he is pitching at the same level this year. He has had a serious injury.
Last year his team didn’t win either game in the playoffs against the Mariners.
Who I’d pick over him to win a game. Randy Johnson, Pedro, Seaver, Gibson, Schezer, Clemens, Maddux just to name a few. Those were great and dominant pitchers. In their primes they were dominant. I just wouldn’t associate the word dominant with Skubal.
I think if you are going to compare the Dayton Moore Royals to the Brewers, the better comparison would be 2015 trade deadline. The Myers trade you are thinking of, which did end up to be a very good trade, came at the end of 2012, with the Royals having just completed their 9th consecutive losing season.
I find the 2015 Royals closer to what the Brewers are now. The Royals had the incredible playoff run all the way to game 7 of the World Series the year before, and had a good team that was bound for another post season. But they went out at the trade deadline and addressed their weaknesses by trading highly ranked prospects to get Ben Zobrist and Johnny Cueto to make themselves better.
The Brewers are a good team and organization who have already been in contending mode for some time. They have had a winning record every full season since 2016. They have been in the playoffs 6 of the last 7 full seasons. This team, on paper and by record, is better than any of those, and this year might be their best chance.
But they, unlike the Royals, chose to keep playing the long game. Consistency like the Brewers, especially without a high payroll, is something to be admired. But flags fly forever, and they chose future years over maximizing their chances for getting one of those this year.
Hi Joe - Eyanson was Keith Law's 41st ranked prospect at midseason, there were some concerns about a velo dip but I still think he could turn out well for Baltimore. He's a freakish athlete for a pitcher (google "Eyanson double play" if you want to see a video of that athleticism in action). I too admire the Red Sox for going all in and this isn't a rental either, and they certainly have the wherewithal to extend Adley (like they did for Crochet). As for the Brewers and Skubal, the Brewers were from what I have read willing to include Luis Pena and another top 100 overall prospect, but that prospect would have been a position player and the Tigers valued getting a controllable pitcher in return and got one in River Ryan. Ryan, who is himself a midseason top 70 prospect, cost the Dodgers basically nothing- he was acquired from SD for Matt Beaty! So it appears that Pena and Logan Henderson would have gotten it done for MKE, and Henderson is where they drew the line (not on Made who I expect the Tigers didn't really think they had a shot at).
Just getting this on the record. I suspect Hoosiers will be one of the movies. Gene Hackman was an absolutely horrible game coach. Finishes up a game with four players? Early on when they are horrible, the only good basketball they play is when the players ignore his four passes rule? And in the final game, Jimmy Chipwood has shot approximately 90% from the field as far as we can tell, so we’re going to use him as the decoy?
Shouldn’t there be some way to qualify this using war? Like on average, how much war does the numbers one, two, three etc. prospects produce over their next 1, 2, 3 etc years of team control or whatever it is? And then compare that to how many starts the rental should get etc. I know war isn’t everything, but I think there’s a way to quantify a lot of this. I would be shocked if the best teams aren’t doing something like this analysis.
I can't figure out a way to post the charts from the series, but to summarize, the median career bWAR for the top 100 prospects (from Baseball America) in any one year:
Later he breaks it down by pitchers vs position players with the conclusion, "Not to put too fine a point on it, but over this sample at least, you’d have been better off with a position player ranked from 11-15 than with a pitcher from any of the groups, including 1-5. As far as players in the same bucket go, the position players had better results in every single group, often by a hefty margin."
This is for everyone on the BA top 100 from 1990 to 2012. So it could be that more recent prospect rankings are more accurate. And it is the entire career, not just the six years of team control. But a nice starting point for your question.
I know there are always exceptions, but my takeaway from this is if you don’t get a top 15 prospect just keep your guy and try to win that year. I don’t know comps but 5.7 career war sounds like a journeyman to me
Did more research. Baseball Reference lists all players by war. The list goes to 999. The lowest tier is 20-21 war. Active players in this tier include Gleybar Torres, Randy Arozarena, Max Kepler and Tommy Edman. So solid players but nobody you would regret trading. And like you said this is career war not just until free agency
Yep! To believe otherwise one has to either assume one’s own talent evaluation / instruction is significantly better than the norm or one has to value the cost savings over the possibility of winning.
I wouldn't have offered Jesus Made for two months of Tarik Skubal, but I'd've had to consider offering him for that plus also two months of Casey Maze. (Like, if you're going all-in, go ALL-in.) I wonder if the Tigers would've been interested. That said, the Dodgers just lost their fifth straight game last night, with Skubal starting. You figure they *might* have the graciousness to time it for the playoffs, right?
On a different note- Dodgers are right now down 6-1 in the 7th against the Cubs and current real life Superman PCA (2 dingers and a double so far) maybe on the way to losing six in a row. Are they just rope-a-doping everyone? Get the slump over early in August? Getting hungry for September?
A couple of random pitcher trades for some context.
Trade deadline 1998: Seattle parts with Randy Johnson sending him to Houston for Freddy Garcia, John Halama, and Carlos Guillen. In his fractional year in HOU, Johnson was great: 11 starts, 10-1 record, 1.28 ERA. He starts twice in the playoffs, allowing 4 runs, 3 earned in innings (1.93 ERA) and a 17:2 strikeout to walk ratio, but loses both starts as the Astros can't hit Padres pitching. Garcia, Halama and Guillen were all at least solid contributors for several years in Seattle.
Midseason 2008: Cleveland ships CC Sabathia off to Milwaukee. By memory, the key player going back was thought to be Matt LaPorta, but it turned out that the PTBNL, Michael Brantley was the best of the bunch. Brantley had several All Star seasons playing for the CLE franchise and even had one MVP quality season as well. Sabathia was fantastic for the Brewers, 11-2, 1.65 ERA in 122 innings, leading the league in Complete Games and Shutouts even though he spent half the year in the other circuit. He famously took the ball on short rest down the stretch even though he was risking his big payday yet to come. In his one post season outing, he got rocked by the Phils.
I can't speak for others, but were I a fan of the Astros or Brewers, I wouldn't be upset about losing some really good performers for the two and three month rentals they each acquired. Even though, in hindsight, we know it wasn't enough to result in a WS trophy. And that is why I wish "my" club had been all in to get Skubal instead of piddling around getting Mahle this year. When a team is in contention and a possible HOF talent is available, pay the price to rent him. Maybe you give up Freddy Garcia or Michael Brantley but the return on that investment is worth it.
To me, it would clearly have been worth parting with Logan Henderson - yes he looks like a very nice young controllable pitcher but he's had some injury history and the Brewers seem to have a pitching factory - I realize they are injured now but look what the Brewers did with Quinn Priester and Kyle Harrison. It's just incumbent on the scouting and pitching department to draft, sign and develop their replacements. I'm sure that was some of the thinking in the Red Sox front office around the Adley trade - we drafted Eyanson and Witherspoon last year, we may have replaced them in this year's draft and if not we'll get it next year. Getting Skubal would have been the Brewers best chance at a WS championship since 1982 - and flags, unlike top ranked prospects, fly forever!
I have no meaningful opinion on Henderson. I'd just be scouting the stat-line or plagiarizing a Baseball America report. So this is a more generic comment not focused on him: TANSTAAPP. If a good but not outstanding pitching prospect can bring you a CYA winner near the top of his game, do it. Heck, even the outstanding pitching prospects flame out with regularity.
I'm reminded of Bill Veeck's story of pay 100k for a pitcher from the St. Louis Browns, and he did it because he needed him to win the pennant. And they did.
Most Veeck stories have a bit of fluffery to them, but this one seems to mostly check out. He did buy Sam Zoldak from STB in mid season 1948, his one pennant winning season when the Browns were in existence. And Zoldak did cost $100k plus Bill Kennedy (^). But I'm not sure I'd say that Zoldack was the key to the title. I'm thinking that Lou Boudreau, Larry Doby, Bob Lemon and the like may have been a bit of a bigger deal.
(^) From Kennedy's SABR bio: "Any pitcher who strikes out more than 450 batters in a single season is going to attract attention. Left-hander Bill Kennedy is credited as having struck out 456 in 280 innings of work for the Rocky Mount Rocks in 1946.1 Yes, it was Class-D baseball, but it was still quite an accomplishment." https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/Bill-Kennedy/
Zoldak had a pitching bWAR of 1.9 in his half-season with Cleveland in '48. The guy he mostly replaced in the rotation, Don Black, had a -0.5, an ERA of 6.50 at the time of the trade, and got knocked out in the first inning three times that year. So definitely an upgrade.
"Rotation" though is a misnomer. Zoldak was a swingman used by Cleveland as both starter and reliever. Black got several starts post trade as did Gromek and - my favorite Cleveland mid-season acquired pitcher that year, Satchel Paige. Everyone on the staff was expected to pitch in relief, including stars Feller, Lemon and Bearden and virtually all of them got starts as well.
Since the club won the league by only 1 game, anyone with a positive contribution could be said to be the key to winning the title. Including, of course, Zoldak. But I take with a massive grain of salt any comment Veeck made about a factual situation.
Sidebar: my Father-in-law was born in '39 and grew up in Cleveland. He served as a baseball salary arbitrator in the 90s and 00s and was questioned about his fandom. His response was that he could tell the inquisitors all they wanted to know about the '54 Indians, but after that things got rather hazy.
I liked you on Decades of Sports. I wish the show on the sixties devoted more than a still picture of my Texas Western Miners, and I couldn’t figure out why they showed the episode on the seventies first. As for baseball I am so glad the Nationals did not trade Crews or Wood.
The Rutschman trade certainly has garnered a wide array of responses. I saw one analyst with an A grade for Boston and another with a D. I think Joe is spot on that most of the trades involving established players for prospects wind up benefitting the team that got the established player(s). And even the 1987 Tigers got a huge lift from acquiring Doyle Alexander for future Hall of Famer John Smoltz. Time will tell which team “won” the Rutschman trade.
I guess I'd quibble a bit. A GM - and the organization - has some control over whether a deal works out. Is the acquired player used in the role to maximize his talents and, for pitchers especially, minimize risk? Does the player development part of the front office work well? These aren't Strat-o-Matic cards where talent is fixed and outcome, around that talent level, is purely chance.
I was reminded of Austin Nola's existence tonight, as he finished second in the Mariners franchise home run derby (almost knocked out in the first round by Ichiro, but the ball landed at the fence). He was part of a deadline trade in 2020, where the Mariners gave up him, Austin Adams and Dan Altavilla for Ty France, Luis Torrens, Taylor Trammell and Andres Munoz. A rare trade the Mariners won. Interestingly, the now-retired Nola is the Mariners bullpen coach (where he isn't doing a great job with the three-time All-Star he was traded for).
Mike Krukow announced he is retiring after the season. Please do an emergency Poscast with Kruk and Kuip. It would be amazing.
I'm surprised Joe hasn't written anything yet. Lewis Kalb too!
Let’s see - last year in the playoffs, Skubal started 2 games against the Mariners, including the deciding game 5. The Tigers lost both games 3-2. Good pitcher, but not dominant. And Cal Raleigh was not the difference maker in those games. And Skubal is coming off a major injury. Seems like most are thinking Skubal guarantees victory this year. He does not. He’s good, but not great.
No one player could possibly guarantee a World Series. Otherwise, Ted Williams, Barry Bonds, Willie Mays, Walter Johnson, Ernie Banks, Junior Griffey, Carl Yastrzemski, Ty Cobb, & Hank Aaron, combined would have more than 3 trophies to show for their careers. That said ...
"Good, but not great." "Good pitcher, but not dominant." Subjective terms rather than objective and quantitative so YMMV. But if the two-time reigning CYA winner who is pitching at essentially the same level this year isn't "great" or "dominant" then I'm not sure what could be.
Well I’m not sure he is pitching at the same level this year. He has had a serious injury.
Last year his team didn’t win either game in the playoffs against the Mariners.
Who I’d pick over him to win a game. Randy Johnson, Pedro, Seaver, Gibson, Schezer, Clemens, Maddux just to name a few. Those were great and dominant pitchers. In their primes they were dominant. I just wouldn’t associate the word dominant with Skubal.
I think if you are going to compare the Dayton Moore Royals to the Brewers, the better comparison would be 2015 trade deadline. The Myers trade you are thinking of, which did end up to be a very good trade, came at the end of 2012, with the Royals having just completed their 9th consecutive losing season.
I find the 2015 Royals closer to what the Brewers are now. The Royals had the incredible playoff run all the way to game 7 of the World Series the year before, and had a good team that was bound for another post season. But they went out at the trade deadline and addressed their weaknesses by trading highly ranked prospects to get Ben Zobrist and Johnny Cueto to make themselves better.
The Brewers are a good team and organization who have already been in contending mode for some time. They have had a winning record every full season since 2016. They have been in the playoffs 6 of the last 7 full seasons. This team, on paper and by record, is better than any of those, and this year might be their best chance.
But they, unlike the Royals, chose to keep playing the long game. Consistency like the Brewers, especially without a high payroll, is something to be admired. But flags fly forever, and they chose future years over maximizing their chances for getting one of those this year.
Hi Joe - Eyanson was Keith Law's 41st ranked prospect at midseason, there were some concerns about a velo dip but I still think he could turn out well for Baltimore. He's a freakish athlete for a pitcher (google "Eyanson double play" if you want to see a video of that athleticism in action). I too admire the Red Sox for going all in and this isn't a rental either, and they certainly have the wherewithal to extend Adley (like they did for Crochet). As for the Brewers and Skubal, the Brewers were from what I have read willing to include Luis Pena and another top 100 overall prospect, but that prospect would have been a position player and the Tigers valued getting a controllable pitcher in return and got one in River Ryan. Ryan, who is himself a midseason top 70 prospect, cost the Dodgers basically nothing- he was acquired from SD for Matt Beaty! So it appears that Pena and Logan Henderson would have gotten it done for MKE, and Henderson is where they drew the line (not on Made who I expect the Tigers didn't really think they had a shot at).
Guards... really did something. Foster Griffin (barring injury)... The Guardians starters:
1. Tanner Bibee (rh)
2. Foster Griffin (lh)
3. Gavin Williams (rh)
4. Parker Messick (lh)
5. Joey Cantillo (lh) and the bullpen.
Cleveland now has 3 LH starters!! A 1st in my lifetime. The starting pitching is formidable.
Just getting this on the record. I suspect Hoosiers will be one of the movies. Gene Hackman was an absolutely horrible game coach. Finishes up a game with four players? Early on when they are horrible, the only good basketball they play is when the players ignore his four passes rule? And in the final game, Jimmy Chipwood has shot approximately 90% from the field as far as we can tell, so we’re going to use him as the decoy?
And here I thought Hoosiers was a basketball movie, not a baseball one. Guess I’ll have to refresh my memory by watching it again.
Touche. I was thinking he said sports movies but he did say baseball
Shouldn’t there be some way to qualify this using war? Like on average, how much war does the numbers one, two, three etc. prospects produce over their next 1, 2, 3 etc years of team control or whatever it is? And then compare that to how many starts the rental should get etc. I know war isn’t everything, but I think there’s a way to quantify a lot of this. I would be shocked if the best teams aren’t doing something like this analysis.
An on-line friend of mine did something like this. He wrote a multi-part series of blog posts that starts here: https://saber-all-i-want.blogspot.com/2025/03/exploring-top-prospect-lists.html.
I can't figure out a way to post the charts from the series, but to summarize, the median career bWAR for the top 100 prospects (from Baseball America) in any one year:
Rank 1 --> bWAR 35.7
2-5 --> 16.7
6-10 --> 12.9
11-15 -->16.5
16-25 --> 5.7
26-50 --> 4.9
51-75 --> 1.6
76-100 --> 0.8
(Edit: Ugh. Sorry about formatting.)
That was about halfway into the multi-part series: https://saber-all-i-want.blogspot.com/2025/03/exploring-top-prospect-lists_02036735014.html
Later he breaks it down by pitchers vs position players with the conclusion, "Not to put too fine a point on it, but over this sample at least, you’d have been better off with a position player ranked from 11-15 than with a pitcher from any of the groups, including 1-5. As far as players in the same bucket go, the position players had better results in every single group, often by a hefty margin."
This is for everyone on the BA top 100 from 1990 to 2012. So it could be that more recent prospect rankings are more accurate. And it is the entire career, not just the six years of team control. But a nice starting point for your question.
Great info. Thank you!
I know there are always exceptions, but my takeaway from this is if you don’t get a top 15 prospect just keep your guy and try to win that year. I don’t know comps but 5.7 career war sounds like a journeyman to me
Did more research. Baseball Reference lists all players by war. The list goes to 999. The lowest tier is 20-21 war. Active players in this tier include Gleybar Torres, Randy Arozarena, Max Kepler and Tommy Edman. So solid players but nobody you would regret trading. And like you said this is career war not just until free agency
Yep! To believe otherwise one has to either assume one’s own talent evaluation / instruction is significantly better than the norm or one has to value the cost savings over the possibility of winning.
I wouldn't have offered Jesus Made for two months of Tarik Skubal, but I'd've had to consider offering him for that plus also two months of Casey Maze. (Like, if you're going all-in, go ALL-in.) I wonder if the Tigers would've been interested. That said, the Dodgers just lost their fifth straight game last night, with Skubal starting. You figure they *might* have the graciousness to time it for the playoffs, right?
On a different note- Dodgers are right now down 6-1 in the 7th against the Cubs and current real life Superman PCA (2 dingers and a double so far) maybe on the way to losing six in a row. Are they just rope-a-doping everyone? Get the slump over early in August? Getting hungry for September?
A couple of random pitcher trades for some context.
Trade deadline 1998: Seattle parts with Randy Johnson sending him to Houston for Freddy Garcia, John Halama, and Carlos Guillen. In his fractional year in HOU, Johnson was great: 11 starts, 10-1 record, 1.28 ERA. He starts twice in the playoffs, allowing 4 runs, 3 earned in innings (1.93 ERA) and a 17:2 strikeout to walk ratio, but loses both starts as the Astros can't hit Padres pitching. Garcia, Halama and Guillen were all at least solid contributors for several years in Seattle.
Midseason 2008: Cleveland ships CC Sabathia off to Milwaukee. By memory, the key player going back was thought to be Matt LaPorta, but it turned out that the PTBNL, Michael Brantley was the best of the bunch. Brantley had several All Star seasons playing for the CLE franchise and even had one MVP quality season as well. Sabathia was fantastic for the Brewers, 11-2, 1.65 ERA in 122 innings, leading the league in Complete Games and Shutouts even though he spent half the year in the other circuit. He famously took the ball on short rest down the stretch even though he was risking his big payday yet to come. In his one post season outing, he got rocked by the Phils.
I can't speak for others, but were I a fan of the Astros or Brewers, I wouldn't be upset about losing some really good performers for the two and three month rentals they each acquired. Even though, in hindsight, we know it wasn't enough to result in a WS trophy. And that is why I wish "my" club had been all in to get Skubal instead of piddling around getting Mahle this year. When a team is in contention and a possible HOF talent is available, pay the price to rent him. Maybe you give up Freddy Garcia or Michael Brantley but the return on that investment is worth it.
To me, it would clearly have been worth parting with Logan Henderson - yes he looks like a very nice young controllable pitcher but he's had some injury history and the Brewers seem to have a pitching factory - I realize they are injured now but look what the Brewers did with Quinn Priester and Kyle Harrison. It's just incumbent on the scouting and pitching department to draft, sign and develop their replacements. I'm sure that was some of the thinking in the Red Sox front office around the Adley trade - we drafted Eyanson and Witherspoon last year, we may have replaced them in this year's draft and if not we'll get it next year. Getting Skubal would have been the Brewers best chance at a WS championship since 1982 - and flags, unlike top ranked prospects, fly forever!
I have no meaningful opinion on Henderson. I'd just be scouting the stat-line or plagiarizing a Baseball America report. So this is a more generic comment not focused on him: TANSTAAPP. If a good but not outstanding pitching prospect can bring you a CYA winner near the top of his game, do it. Heck, even the outstanding pitching prospects flame out with regularity.
I'm reminded of Bill Veeck's story of pay 100k for a pitcher from the St. Louis Browns, and he did it because he needed him to win the pennant. And they did.
Most Veeck stories have a bit of fluffery to them, but this one seems to mostly check out. He did buy Sam Zoldak from STB in mid season 1948, his one pennant winning season when the Browns were in existence. And Zoldak did cost $100k plus Bill Kennedy (^). But I'm not sure I'd say that Zoldack was the key to the title. I'm thinking that Lou Boudreau, Larry Doby, Bob Lemon and the like may have been a bit of a bigger deal.
(^) From Kennedy's SABR bio: "Any pitcher who strikes out more than 450 batters in a single season is going to attract attention. Left-hander Bill Kennedy is credited as having struck out 456 in 280 innings of work for the Rocky Mount Rocks in 1946.1 Yes, it was Class-D baseball, but it was still quite an accomplishment." https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/Bill-Kennedy/
Zoldak had a pitching bWAR of 1.9 in his half-season with Cleveland in '48. The guy he mostly replaced in the rotation, Don Black, had a -0.5, an ERA of 6.50 at the time of the trade, and got knocked out in the first inning three times that year. So definitely an upgrade.
"Rotation" though is a misnomer. Zoldak was a swingman used by Cleveland as both starter and reliever. Black got several starts post trade as did Gromek and - my favorite Cleveland mid-season acquired pitcher that year, Satchel Paige. Everyone on the staff was expected to pitch in relief, including stars Feller, Lemon and Bearden and virtually all of them got starts as well.
Since the club won the league by only 1 game, anyone with a positive contribution could be said to be the key to winning the title. Including, of course, Zoldak. But I take with a massive grain of salt any comment Veeck made about a factual situation.
Sidebar: my Father-in-law was born in '39 and grew up in Cleveland. He served as a baseball salary arbitrator in the 90s and 00s and was questioned about his fandom. His response was that he could tell the inquisitors all they wanted to know about the '54 Indians, but after that things got rather hazy.
I liked you on Decades of Sports. I wish the show on the sixties devoted more than a still picture of my Texas Western Miners, and I couldn’t figure out why they showed the episode on the seventies first. As for baseball I am so glad the Nationals did not trade Crews or Wood.
Definitely agree on Wood. I’d love to see Crews blossom, but my confidence is dropping. Right now, the Nats probably wouldn’t even get much for him.
Wow!
At Wrigley to see Ohtani for the first time in person. First at bat. Gone.
Aims to deliver.
And PCA answers right back.
Slugfest.
Two apiece.
The Rutschman trade certainly has garnered a wide array of responses. I saw one analyst with an A grade for Boston and another with a D. I think Joe is spot on that most of the trades involving established players for prospects wind up benefitting the team that got the established player(s). And even the 1987 Tigers got a huge lift from acquiring Doyle Alexander for future Hall of Famer John Smoltz. Time will tell which team “won” the Rutschman trade.
It seems to me there are three ways to evaluate a trade:
1) Did it make sense at the time?
2) Did it work out as planned?
3) What were the long-term ramifications?
A GM only has control over #1. The rest, as Joe says, is luck and lottery tickets.
I guess I'd quibble a bit. A GM - and the organization - has some control over whether a deal works out. Is the acquired player used in the role to maximize his talents and, for pitchers especially, minimize risk? Does the player development part of the front office work well? These aren't Strat-o-Matic cards where talent is fixed and outcome, around that talent level, is purely chance.