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Baseball Primer Newsblog — The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand Friday, November 30, 2012Braves send Tommy Hanson to Angels for Jordan Walden
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1. Dock EllisEdit: Looks like his strikeout rate is pretty decent. Maybe the Big A suppresses the home run issues he had last year. I think they're better today than they were yesterday, but I'm not 100% convinced they're better now than they were the day after the season ended.
EDIT: Except for the Teixeira trade. Wow, that looks really bad in retrospect.
Still, it's an odd trade for the Braves, insofar as Walden looks like a decent-but-interchangeable reliever and the Braves really don't have much need for one of those right now. I wonder if this is more a salary dump than anything else.
Rumors are flying on that front...Swisher, Willingham, other Upton, etc, etc.
I'm OK with the deal, though I don't like giving up the upside of a Tommy Hanson. But it was painful to watch him pitch last year.
No idea what the Cubs would have that meets the Braves criteria -- but James Russell? Rafael Dolis? Clevenger? Belliveau? I know none of them add up to Walden but if this was just a salary dump, I have to think that the Cubs could have put together some mix of cheap something or other, or, absent that -- picked up enough salary to make it work. I mean - I'd have been willing to ship Marmol, pay full freight, for this dice roll.
In one game in July, Hanson had 7 K - and 7 BB - in 5 IP. allowed only 1 run, but threw 108 pitches to get the 15 outs (56 strikes, 52 balls!). He only threw more than 6 IP once in his last 13 starts, and that one was 6 2/3 IP. He gets a lot of Ks, but can't seem to rear back and get them when he needs them most, since his injury.
He's only 26 so he could go either way, and I can't say this is what I'd have wanted in return, but I can imagine the Braves were getting tired of the nibbling, as CFBF put it. Plus they have a lot of SP inventory.
Maybe getting him out of the league was important too, so if he does resurrect, it doesn't blow up right in their face.
I am one of those Braves fans who consistently and repeatedly "really disliked" Tommy Hanson. That's not a moral judgement about the boy, just a judgement about his infuriating inability to get major league pitchers out while taking 120 pitches to get through 5.1 innings. It was just brutal to watch.
It's not often that I agree with Keith Law, but he nails it up there. Hanson's shoulder is meat. Just meat. It was meat at the end of 2011, and they had to shut him down. He came back with "a new delivery to relieve stress on his shoulder" in 2012. And they had to shut him down. People who weren't following closely probably remember Tommy Hanson, the superstar, can't miss, hard throwing prospect with all the Ks. Those of us who were watching, and following his medical reports, remember him as the guy who's rotator cuff looks worse than Kerry Wood's.
I wish Hanson no ill-will. But he's not a $4 mil resource, and the Braves can get a better LF for $14 mil than they can for $10 mil.
I also think the Braves wanted to open up a spot in the rotation for Delgado or possibly even Teheran down the line. And of course Beachy comes back at some point...
Which means Hanson was close to 7th on the SP depth list, and he was going to make relatively big bucks. It still bothers me to give him up - my mind can't let go of the Hanson of two years ago - but it makes sense.
They can get an even better one for $18 mil.
I think there was a 10 to 12 year period when literally every "prospect" who left the Braves ended up being of literally no value at all. Streak broken by Adam Wainwright.
Right. He was basically a RH middle reliever on the Braves. He wasn't going to start ahead of Hudson, Medlen, Minor or Maholm. And he had no performance based case to start ahead of Delgado while Beachy rehabs, and certainly not ahead of Beachy himself.
Whence the Rob Bell love? Whither the Reuben Quevedo respect?
EDIT: Jason Marquis and Kevin Millwood had some value post Braves.
Kevin Millwood wasn't a prospect who left the Braves; the two best seasons of his career were as a Brave.
I've never understood the logic, even pre-IL days. You make a deal because you think it's in your club's best interests. If it is, you should often be making your rival worse (or, at the very least, not better). If it's not, you shouldn't be making the trade.
Schmidt was traded in '96, and Wainwright in '03. Odalis Perez was dealt in early '02, and he had a couple of pretty good years with the Dodgers.
The one I thought who'd make it who never did is Joey Nation.
- Trade aren't zero-sum. Sure, fleecing the other guy is great - but deals that are, at minimum, Pareto optimal are fine too.
- Part of being a GM is keeping the job. If you think it's in the club's best interest for you to have the job - you'll want to make moves that help you retain and, moreso, avoid ones that will get you canned.
Descriptions like this make it seem that "Tommy Hanson" is American for "Daisuke Matsuzaka".
Walden looks like a good guy to have in the bullpen, though. If the Braves had a hole in their bullpen, it was right-handed setup men.
And a GM should make the deals that make his club better. If it also happens to improve the opposition while improving your club, that's life. Allowing other team's concerns to trump your interests is not sound.
Make good trades, avoid bad ones. That's the best way to keep your job. I seem to be in a minority here, but for as long as I've been a sports fan (seriously, dating back to when I was a little kid) I've never understood the "don't trade within your division" mindset, and I've never heard a rationale that convinced me it's a logical position.
If you have two identical offers, and one is from within the division and the other is out, I can see choosing the one from outside if they're likely to be win-win situations. Other than that, no.
Sure. That, to me, is different than 'you should often be making your rival worse (or, at the very least, not better)' - I'm not going to take a worse deal to help out the other guy, but if his team gets better while mine does too, great.
I don't believe in 'don't trade within your division' either (and never have) - but my point was that how people react to deals matters too, particular since a decent percentage of the moves you make are not going to pan out. How your management would react to potential bad outcomes is something you need to account for (while at the same time not operating out of fear - that's a sure path to failure).
To an extent, but, looked at another way, most trades aren't truly equal. One team gets more value, even if both teams may benefit as a result of how the talent is distributed within a particular system. Thus, in most cases*, GMs should be looking to get the better end of a talent exchange, which would naturally mean that the other club is getting the lesser end, or "worse."
* Obviously there are some situational trades - for example, deadline deals when you're a club in contention - where the talent exchange calculus can be different. But the attitude that it should be about what's in the best interest of your club, and your club only, should remain the only factor considered, as far as I'm concerned.
It's not a hard-and-fast rule, but teams clearly try to avoid dealing with rivals for substantial trades. Almost all the recent major trades (Span, BOS-LAD, TOR-MIA, this one) were between an AL team and an NL one. What was the last inter-division major trade? Franky Liriano to the White Sox? Scutaro to the Giants?
You guys are missing the common thread -- it was Braves pitching prospects who became Cubs --
In addition to Ruben Quevedo and Joey Nation... Kevin Blankenship is another that comes to mind. Yorkis Perez... Micah Bowie...Kevin Coffman... and I'm sure there are more.
Contrary to what I've said in Cubs threads -- perhaps I shouldn't be as high on Arodys Vizcaino as previously believed.
And if the Red Sox had made that trade with the Yankees (for comparable players) instead of the M's, it would have benefited them even more. Again I think the solution is make good trades, avoid bad ones. If you think you need to hedge against the one you're considering blowing up in your face, it's probably a deal you shouldn't be making.
Hanson, like Weaver, has lost about 3 MPH on his fastball (92.2 to 89.6 for Hanson via Fangraphs; 90.4 to 88.0 for Weaver); like Weaver, he's occasionally had dinger problems; like Weaver, his BB rates have been goodish to quite good indeed. They have the same repertoire. Weaver is a workhorse and an ace who consistently out-pitches his xFIP. Is it possible that the Angels see something coachable in Hanson, something they can exploit that other teams can't, that might turn him into at least a Weaver-lite? The kid was very good not very long ago.
Fair point - avoiding trading with your rivals limits the potential upside as well as the downside.
Almost all trades have the potential to be 'win-win.'
But the point should not be just to make your club better. It should be to improve the club's chances of winning the WS or maybe making the playoffs. Not every trade that makes the team win more games makes the team more likely to go to the playoffs or win the World Series.
Example: You're in a five team division with no wildcard, with three awful teams and another team roughly as good as your team is, say around 92 wins. Numbers will be unnaturally precise for the sake of the example. You've got an extra five win 3B and an average CF, they've got an extra five win CF and a replacement level 3B. They are willing to trade their extra CF for your extra 3B, and doing so will make your team project to win 95 games rather than 92.
At the same time, that trade will make your biggest rival project to win two games more than you, rather than project to win the same as you. You've improved your team, but made it much less likely that you'll make the playoffs. I can't imagine that you really think you should make that trade. This is a competition, the point is to beat other people. If a trade makes you better, but makes it less likely that you will beat your central competition, you've ###### up.
So you've got to pay attention to trades' impacts on the other team, particularly when you are in direct competition with that other team, like in the case of divisional rivals.
Hanson with a shoulder that looks like "hamburger meat" on the inside is still more valuable than Walden is (1.359 WHIP last year, career ERA+ of 125).
Even if you want to salary dump, you can do better than that, can't you? Walden is no better, and is probably worse, than Bobby Parnell (1.356 WHIP, 128 ERA+ cumulative last three seasons).
In a few years your prospect might get you back those wins with interest, but you're not really taking them away from your opponent because you can't really know that he'd have been there winning games for your opponent if you hadn't made the trade. If the Tigers don't trade John Smoltz for Doyle Alexander then maybe they trade him for John Tudor instead. The possible outcomes isn't a binary, Smoltz a Brave or Smoltz a Tiger and no other possibilities. There's a bit of irrationality here, but even a trade that works out perfectly can still look and feel very bad.
EDIT: Half a Coke to #44.
But if you are trading a good veteran for a prospect, you probably don't care about the standings at that particular moment. And so it might actually be one of the cases in which you would trade within the division, because you aren't actively competing at that time so it doesn't hurt you (beyond emotionally) to have your rival enjoy a win half of a win-win deal. For example, the Marlins trading Al Leiter to the Mets for AJ Burnett during their post-1997 firesale.
Clearly this is not the case. I'm guessing Frank Wren didn't have notably better offers on the table but just liked the fact that Walden jumps in the middle of his delivery motion. I suspect, rather strongly, that baseball people have a pretty good understanding of the risks involved with Tommy Hanson at this point. He's not the Tommy Hanson prospect doll from 2009 any more.
Well, you don't care at that moment, but you might care about the next year. The Denard Spann for Alex Meyer trade, for instance, is one I wouldn't make inside the division if I thought I had a chance to compete in 2014. (I maybe be thinking that Meyer's arrival in MLB will be later than I should.) The Red Sox probably shouldn't trade anyone to Tampa who would be better in 2014 than whoever the Sox got back, even though trading away 2013 production for later production wouldn't be an awful idea for them generally.
1. I wouldn't make a trade unless I believed I was getting something more valuable than I was giving up.
2. Therefore a trade with a division rival is doubly good, because I'm getting better and he's getting worse.
If I have a hole at second base and two catchers and he has the opposite, an otherwise equal-value trade that makes both teams better could be made. I'd make that trade with a division rival too, because it would be neutral between the two of us and would improve me relative to the rest of the league, right?
Obviously if you're in a pennant race you don't want to trade a good veteran to your rival for a couple A-ball prospects, but that would never come up in real life anyway.
And I just don't get this. The Red Sox should make the trades that most help the team, in whatever time frame they're looking to improve. Any other kind of thinking is counterproductive to their aims.
You mention the Alexander-Smoltz trade. Would you advocate the Braves passing on that deal if the Tigers had been in their division?
The "don't trade within your division" rule only makes sense if you restrict your views to the potential downsides. And, if you're so afraid of a deal coming back to haunt you, then the solution is to avoid making that kind of deal, not to find a trading partner willing to give you less.
This assumes value is constant between teams. This is a false assumption. If you have a team with four solid starters and four fungible options for the 5th starter spot, but no LF, and a team with a moderately talented LF but only two or three dependable starters, then the LF is more valuable to team A than one of their 5th starter options, and the 5th starter is more valuable to team B than the LF.
But the destination of the players you are sending away helps determine what most helps the team.
This implies that you recognize at least some value in the idea, otherwise you wouldn't even use it as a tiebreaker.
Not to me it doesn't. I want the deal that improves my team on the field the most. I don't care what it's effect is on my rival. I think that thinking is counterproductive to the team's aims.
The odds of two tied deals that would both be win-win are so slim as to render the distinction virtually meaningless. I would never take what I thought a slightly inferior deal from an out-of-division club over the superior one from the division rival.
See also: Jair Jurrjens.
Right, for simple reason that even if you did help your rival: if you got past them in the playoffs or whatever then the final game should be that much easier. so it should wash out in the end in a perfectly mathematical, deterministic universe.
Put it this way. Let's say we could measure trades in terms of wins/losses, suppose some trade is really a win win for two rivals. Say Pitt and Balt. in football. So both teams improve.
SO what? Nothing wrong with that. lets saw we improved by +3 and they improved +2. What it means is assuming both teams were equal, that we get to the playoffs ahead of Balt. And presumably the rivalry between the two teams is more intense than ever. but nothing wrong here from Pitt standpt. They got better and got to the playoffs or whatever.
Or say the other way. Bal. gets the better of the deal and they go to the plays. both teams improved Pitt almost caught them and the Pitt. fans b.tch.d about that "...if we hadnt good old WIllie go we would have beat them." Forgetting that they got good old Butch at Lb to fill in in return. So the trade helped both teams. The only net result is that the rivalry got tougher. Nothing wrong here either. Maybe if you could show that Pitt could have made a better deal with someone else. But that's always true whether trading intra division or inter division. THat's just basic logic. The scenario presumes a logical trade.
So about the only thing that you can say that is common is that both teams got better, the rivalry got hotter. So maybe you could say "well the rivalry got hotter, more players were injured on both teams, so therefore both teams weakened themselves before they got to the super bowl."
but then the argument would be that presumably, if the talent in the rest of the league presumably was the same as before, (or more accurately, that the average talent level of the NFC champion remains the same, which really it probably doesnt in the real world, but that doesnt change the overall pt) then whichever team: Balt or Pitt got to the super bowl then, presumably each team was 2 or 3 pts better than it's NFC opponent. which should compensate for the fact that the rivalry was tougher to get through, since if you do gain a benefit for this supposed disadvantage.
Pt is even if you benefit a rival, assuming a win win trade, then a win win trade is a win. YOu make the rivalry more intenser if it's a win win or less intesnser if its a loss/loss trade. But that doesnt really change things does it??
I have an example, although this inter-division trade didn't happen to harm the team. The Patriots trading Bledsoe to the Bills probably helped the Bills more than the Patriots, in terms of wins and losses. This would have been the case probably no matter where he was traded, but because it still helped the Patriots to trade him, it made sense for them to do it even if the other team "won" the trade. Normally in a trade like this, you would want to avoid trading to a division rival because you play that rival twice and they are your competition for the division title. In this example, the Pats were so much better than the Bills that it didn't matter to the Patriots that the Bills might have out-improved them because of the trade. The Bills did improve from 3-13 to 8-8, but they still lost to the Patriots twice and didn't figure into the division title race. However, if the teams had been equal as in the Pit-Balt example from #58, it would have made sense for the Patriots to take a worse draft pick in return to send Bledsoe to a different team.
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