At the trade deadline, all fans are equal. No matter their age, location, partisan commitments, gender, religion, emotional disposition, or level of statistical curiosity, they have one thought: “Man, our bullpen stinks. Our GM really needs to do something about it.”
By and large, the GMs agree. That’s why a quick survey reveals that roughly a bajillion pitchers got traded this deadline season. OK, it’s not that many. Between July 1 and July 30 this year, I counted 44 major league pitchers who were traded to a playoff contender. For transparency’s sake, I judged “major league pitcher” subjectively. Some of these trades amount to one team sending the other a Low-A no-hoper or a bag of cash in order to jump the waiver line for a guy they like. And then the team in question waives the guy they traded for three weeks later.
In short, I love you, Tyler Jay, and we’ll always have that killer Big Ten regular season in 2015, but you don’t count as a major league pitcher for the purposes of this experiment.
“Contender” is a little easier to define accurately and objectively; I narrowed the field to teams that had 10% playoff odds or better at the time of the trade.
Today marks exactly one month since the trade deadline. Of those 44 pitchers, only 26 are still on the active rosters of the teams that acquired them in July. Of the 33 relievers that contenders added at the deadline, only 20 are currently on active rosters.
Which is not to say that trading for pitching at the deadline is a total waste of time and resources. This was kind of an odd deadline in that there was no bona fide no. 1 starter — a David Price or Justin Verlander or Yu Darvish — who changed teams. Of the relatively big-name arms who did move, both starters and relievers, most are healthy and pitching well: Tanner Scott, Erick Fedde, Yusei Kikuchi, Carlos Estévez. The Dodgers picked up Michael Kopech, told him to stop throwing the ball in the strike zone, and turned him overnight into a prettier Eric Gagne. You still can improve your bullpen at the deadline.
And of the 18 pitchers who aren’t on the active roster, two thirds are still with the organization that traded for them. (Not counting Shawn Armstrong and Trevor Richards, who are awaiting disposal after being DFA’d.) That group of 18 pitchers includes 11 who are currently hurt, and that number feels right. Out of any group of 18 pitchers, it seems like 11 are hurt at any given moment.
More to the point, of the 12 pitchers who are still with their new teams but not on the active roster, six — Nick Mears, Paul Blackburn, Zach Eflin, Hunter Harvey, Tyler Matzek, and Trevor Rogers — have some form of team control beyond this season. Every GM worth their cellphone holster knows how to spin a short-term failure as a long-term investment.
But some of these guys lasted, like, one or two homestands with the teams that went out of their way to acquire them at the deadline. Mike Baumann got traded twice in July, and then he got waived by the Angels in August. I’ve got condiments in my fridge that have seen Big Mike pitch for five different franchises. Let the poor man rest.
He’s not alone. The Cardinals just DFA’d Armstrong, four weeks after they gave up Dylan Carlson to get him. That’s a big deal — most baseball fans have heard of Dylan Carlson! He was supposed to be good! Richards is on his way out of Minnesota. Enyel De Los Santos lasted a measly five appearances with the Yankees.
It’s an interesting bit of trivia that pitchers acquired at the trade deadline have had so much trouble lasting until Labor Day. But more than that, I think there are two actually useful lessons to draw from this series of events.
First, the high attrition for pitchers at the trade deadline is merely an outgrowth of the way pitchers are used and exchanged these days. We live in an age of relatively high pitcher injury attrition, and at an all-time high for the number of pitchers used per game. The size of pitching staffs had to be fixed by statute at 13, and that de jure limit can be stretched to 15 or 16 as teams roll a sixth starter or a ninth reliever up and down from Triple-A the way fantasy baseball players stream starting pitchers.
And even then, it’s not enough. Here’s what happened to Big Mike. It’s not that he’s not good enough to stick in a major league bullpen. Last year he made 60 appearances and won 10 games on a team with one of the best bullpens in the league. When the Orioles DFA’d him the first time, he had an ERA of 3.76. The Mariners even tried him out as a closer briefly this season. (It didn’t work, but still.)
The problem is that Big Mike is out of minor league options. So if he’s the eighth guy in your bullpen, he can’t go straight to Triple-A to hide for a week if he’s thrown three days out of four, or you need a spot starter or another lefty. He has to go through waivers first. Now, Big Mike throws 97 and never gets hurt. He’s good enough to be the no. 7 reliever on basically any team in the league.
That means he’ll never make it through waivers. In fact, he’s never even made it to waivers when a trade was an option — the Mariners, Giants, and Angels all gave up something to get him, and the Marlins picked him up after the trade deadline. But because he’s only good enough to be a low-leverage arm, and because he’s out of options, he’ll be right back in the same position three weeks from now.
Not geographically, mind you. Big Mike’s worked in more cities this season than Steve Miller Band’s “Rock’n Me.” But metaphysically, he’s back in the same position.
Big Mike is an outlier, but this is kind of how things are now for low-leverage relief pitchers under current rules. Everything is the churn. Even in August, when — absent the old-school post-waiver deadline trade option — teams will just cut players loose and hope they wash up somewhere. This can be for noble reasons — you know you’re going to miss the playoffs and you want to do a vet a solid and see if he lands with a better club — or otherwise. Consider last year’s mad dash by the Angels to get under the luxury tax threshold, which required waiving a third of their roster.
The second lesson has little to do with the post-deadline mayhem and more to do with the deadline itself. I’ve long been an adherent of the philosophy that, when it comes to player acquisition — i.e., free agency and major league trades — the best way to avoid getting burned is to shop at the top of the market.
In simpler terms, just go out and pay for the top player available. Even if you end up paying sticker price, teams that try to outsmart everyone and get 80% of the player for 60% of the price would as often as not have been better off just going after the star.
One exception to this rule of thumb is relief pitchers. Especially at the trade deadline, and especially for hired guns who are basically being brought on for one playoff run. Kopech-to-L.A. was a heist, because who the heck knows what the White Sox are doing anymore, but apart from that I had the same reaction to most of the big trades for relievers this July. Estévez to Philly for Samuel Aldegheri and George Klassen? Good player, but that’s a lot to give up. The Padres traded seven total prospects for Scott, Jason Adam, and Bryan Hoeing. That’s a lot of quality bullpen arms, but man, that’s a lot to give up. Even Kikuchi, a starter, I thought commanded far too high a price.
Trades like these are about getting something like 12 innings in October. And really, more than that, it’s about avoiding disaster. It’s so hard to predict postseason bullpen performance that I have basically given up on the utility of anything more than marginal upgrades. Last year’s Rangers won the World Series with a bullpen of José Leclerc and a bunch of guys I wouldn’t trust to close a jar of pretzels. What’s the point?
The point, I suppose, is avoiding what happened to the Red Sox. In the month of July, Boston sent out seven players in trades to acquire four pitchers — James Paxton, Trey Wingenter, Lucas Sims, and Luis Garcia — none of whom are available to Alex Cora as of August 30. Maybe this is another situation in which the most expensive option is the best one, and those who try to cut corners could end up with nothing.
