T10YL - Kelly Johnson Completes the AL East Circuit (with Jemile Weeks and Ivan de Jesus)
Featuring cutting-edge analysis from account-suspended Reddit user yoda133113
August 30, 2014
The Names: Baltimore Orioles receive: Kelly Johnson, Michael Almanzar. Boston Red Sox receive: Jemile Weeks, Ivan de Jesus.
The Team Context: We’ve officially arrived at the real trade deadline, representing the end of meaningful baseball trades for the 2014 season. While players could still be placed on waivers well into September, August 31 was the deadline by which players needed to be in an organization in order to be on the postseason roster. That’s the main reason why a team would want to make a trade so late in the year instead of just waiting until the looming offseason, so transaction activity generally ceases for the next couple of months (aka, this scheduling gap at Trades Tens Years Later that has been filled by minor MLB trades).
Both of these teams were active at the July trade deadline, and in fact had already traded with each other when the Red Sox sent pending free agent Andrew Miller to Baltimore for Eduardo Rodriguez. Their positions had only calcified since then; the Orioles had gone from a 1.5 game division lead to an 8 game lead, while the Red Sox had gone from 13 games to 19.5 games back in the basement.
But the Orioles were reeling from the recent loss of Manny Machado after the 21-year-old wrenched his right knee during an at-bat on August 11. Initial optimism that the issue could be solved with rest gave way to the reality of a season-ending surgery on August 23. When asked about the potential of adding a new infield option, Baltimore GM Dan Duquette acknowledged that “there’s a very limited pool of players that are available this time of the year, because a lot of players’ contracts don’t get through the trade waiver process.” When asked about the team’s confidence that they could withstand the loss of Machado, manager Buck Showalter replied “It’s just reality. I don’t know if it’s confidence. It’s just reality. What are you going to do? Say ‘stop? I want to get off?’ There’s another game today, another game tomorrow.”
Both Duquette and Showalter were correct. With surgery for Machado confirmed the day after Gordon Beckham’s trade, there were almost no acquirable players who could play third base. And yet, there would continue to be games today and tomorrow. For many of these games, the Orioles had turned to slugger Chris Davis as a fill-in third baseman. Davis had been pushed off third base due to gross defensive incompetence shortly after arriving in Baltimore in 2011 and did nothing to merit a reinstatement at the position, grading horribly by whichever defensive metric you choose to value. It was time for Dan Duquette to dive into the very limited pool and hope he didn’t break his neck.
The Player Context: Kelly Johnson had arrived in Boston on July 31 from the division-rival Yankees and was doing little to ingratiate himself to the new fanbase. He showed up with an injury and wasn’t added to the active roster until August 7, sending recently-promoted prospect Mookie Betts back to the minor leagues. Johnson went 0-for-4 with two strikeouts in his first game with the Red Sox (which was also Vinnie Pestano’s first game with the Angels), putting him 20% of the way to his total of 10 strikeouts in the 25 plate appearances he would have with the team. The only run that Johnson scored in Boston made the score 2-0 in a game that the Red Sox would go on to lose 8-3. The Red Sox lost the final eight games that Johnson played in, a remarkable stat when considering that he only played 10 games there. He didn’t have an extra-base hit or an RBI until his final Boston game, when he hit an 8th-inning double that drove in Brock Holt. In Johnson’s next and final plate appearance with the Red Sox, he struck out to end the game.
The two players headed back to Boston also had organizational tenures that could be measured in months, though their totals were plural rather than Johnson’s singular. Jemile Weeks was traded to Baltimore during the 2013 offseason in an ill-fated move that sent closer Jim Johnson to Oakland, where he immediately combusted. Weeks had debuted for the A’s in 2011 and played in 215 games in his first two MLB seasons, but only got into eight MLB games for the 2013 A’s and three MLB games for the 2014 Orioles. He had been in the minors since May 1st.
Ivan DeJesus Jr. signed in Baltimore as a free agent about two weeks after Weeks was acquired. DeJesus’s prospect status probably began when he was serving as batboy for the Houston Astros while his dad was hitting coach, but was sufficiently legitimized in formal channels for him to be taken 51st overall in the 2005 MLB draft. DeJesus was a fringe top-100 prospect in baseball by 2009, but disappointed in early big league opportunities as he failed to develop any meaningful power to complement his fringe-average bat. The Dodgers sent him to Boston in 2012 in the trade that launched them into their current sphere of financial juggernaut, then Boston sent him to Pittsburgh after the season. DeJesus spent the 2013 season playing in AAA without receiving a call-up and was pacing to repeat that feat in Baltimore. He played the second-most games on the Norfolk Tides that season.
The only player involved in this trade who would be saying goodbye to a longtime organizational home was Michael Almanzar. Almanzar had signed with the Red Sox out of the Dominican Republic and made his professional debut in 2008. After crushing rookie ball, Almanzar spent the latter part of the 2008 season in A-ball, an aggressive promotion that would starkly contrast to the rest of his tenure. It took until the latter half of 2011 for Almanzar to receive his next promotion to Hi-A, where he spent his entire 2012 season before ascending to AA in 2013.
This is where we get to the caveat about Michael Almanzar leaving a “longtime organizational home,” as there’s a better counterargument that he had only been in the Red Sox system for the past two months. In December of 2013, the Orioles selected Michael Almanzar in the Rule 5 Draft, which would allow them to retain him for minimal compensation if they were willing to keep him on the MLB roster all year. Perhaps the Orioles would’ve been willing to do that, but they never had the chance – Almanzar hurt his knee during a spring training game and was placed on the 60-day injured list, resulting in his removal from the 40-man roster. In June, the Orioles sent Almanzar on a rehab assignment to the minors (the only circumstance under which Rule 5 players can go to the minor leagues), which hilariously included his first two games at AAA. But when it came time to put him on the major league roster, the Orioles cracked and returned Almanzar to Boston. Obviously, for a minor league player, the few weeks that Almanzar spent playing minor league games in the Orioles’ system would break his tenure as a player in the Red Sox system. But Almanzar wasn’t a “minor league player” while on the rehab assignments, he was a major league player on a rehab assignment to the minors. The instant that Baltimore decided he was actually a minor league player after all, he went back to Boston to resume being a minor league player.
Despite the fact that he had just come from a rehab assignment in AAA, Boston promptly reverted Almanzar to the AA level they kept him at in 2013. Slow and steady.
The Trade: We have gobs of evidence that neither of these teams cared about the players they were giving away. The two players with MLB experience (Johnson and Weeks) had come to town in trades that primarily served to dump another player’s high salary. The other two were freely available to any team that wanted to offer an MLB job, with both the Orioles and the Red Sox affirmatively declining to give Almanzar that opportunity within the past couple of months.
It’s odd to see a swap featuring so many similar players, with all four guys profiling as utility infielders. Johnson was the one who had regularly proven himself to be an MLB-caliber player, so he went to the contending team. Almanzar hadn’t even shown he could make the majors, so he was valued least. The other two had flashed enough ability to make the majors, but not enough to convince anyone they should stick around, so they were valued somewhere in the middle. If you do the math lazily enough, the numbers balance, and any numbers we were dealing with were small enough that nobody was going to exert much energy on the math.
Even if Kelly Johnson’s time in the Red Sox organization was short-lived, he still expressed appreciation for the learning opportunity it provided. “First of all, Boston, right away you can tell why they win and why they’re always at the top year in and year out,” Johnson said in an interview shortly after being traded. This is a very funny thing to say about a team that has just traded you away immediately after losing eight straight games where they let you play. Johnson continued with “they have winners everywhere throughout the organization … just a bunch of guys with World Series rings on their fingers,” which is a very funny thing to say when referring to the Boston Red Sox after the New York Yankees traded you there midseason. Johnson also acknowledged the obvious fact that this was his fifth consecutive AL East team, which is really all anybody cared about at this point.
The only person in this trade subject to any substantive analysis among Reddit commenters was Ivan De Jesus’s wife. Reddit user yoda133113 was disappointed that De Jesus and his wife wouldn’t be back with the Tides next season. In response to somebody else saying that this was “the strangest scouting report I’ve ever heard on a player” and including mock 20-80 scouting grades that included an 80-grade for “wife,” yoda133113 doubled down. “Wife is higher than 80, masters degree, smoking hot, super nice, and very supportive of his career. If she’s only an 80, then there is no 100,” he said, referring to a scale that maxes out at 80 and does not include 100. The Reddit account of yoda133113 has subsequently been suspended.
The Results: Kelly Johnson got into 19 games for the Orioles and played third base in 17 of them, hitting at an acceptable level while filling a hole on the Baltimore roster. After starting his tenure with an interleague series against the Reds, Johnson spent the rest of September playing exclusively against AL East teams, which were all revenge games for him. Johnson recorded nine hits as an Oriole and six of these came against the Yankees, which suggests that his revenge was primarily directed at the team who had signed him before the season. Fair enough. Johnson failed to record a hit in either of his two playoff at-bats, but anyone setting expectations that high deserved to be disappointed.
Jemile Weeks took advantage of Boston’s weaker MLB roster and was promoted back to the big leagues after this trade. He thrived with the newfound opportunity, slashing .308/.406/.423 in the month of September. That momentum did not result in Weeks keeping a 40-man roster spot; he was outrighted to AAA after the season and only got back to the majors for three games in 2015. That’s substantially better than Ivan DeJesus did in his Red Sox tenure, which consisted of two games at AAA before he became a free agent after the season. Small victories.
Michael Almanzar finally got the opportunity for an extended run at AAA in Baltimore, but that’s all he got. 138 games without a call-up in 2015 were followed by 118 more in 2016, making Almanzar a regular component of the Norfolk Tides experience. But never a part of the Baltimore Oriole experience.
The Aftermath: Almanzar stuck at the AAA level with the Toledo Mud Hens and Syracuse Chiefs. He logged 384 games at the highest level of the minors, which probably seemed like an achievement during the time he was locked in as a AA Portland Sea Dog, but zero games at the major league level, which is probably still disappointing. Almanzar was released 18 games into the 2018 AAA season, played four hitless games for the Fargo-Moorhead Redhawks of the American Association, and that was that.
After playing 215 MLB games in his first two seasons at the level, Jemile Weeks would play just 45 more after being traded to Baltimore. 17 of those were in Boston during September of 2014 and July of 2015, with the final 17 coming in San Diego early in the 2016 season. Weeks did not get off to a hot start with the Padres, slashing .188/.257/.281 through the month of April. Unfortunately, that month actually was a hot start compared to what was coming and included six of the seven base hits he would accumulate as a Padre. Weeks went 1-for-18 in the month of May, got placed on the injured list with a hamstring strain, and never returned to the major leagues. Weeks spent the 2017 season hitting poorly for the Iowa Cubs and spent his 2018 playing for Acereros de Monclova, a team on which Andre Rienzo set the Mexican League single-season ERA record (0.76, pretty good!).
Ivan DeJesus Jr.’s MLB career seemed to already be over, with 48 games in 2011 and 2012 looking increasingly like the only cup of coffee he’d get. De Jesus signed a minor league contract with the Reds for the 2015 season with hopes of competing for one of the Reds’ final bench spots. He earned the spot and stuck around longer than anybody would expect, getting into 76 games for the Reds in 2015 and 104 more in 2016. It’s not that happy of an ending, since De Jesus still couldn’t hit at an acceptable MLB level, but it was a happier ending than could reasonably be expected. After the Reds released him, De Jesus spent three more seasons playing at AAA, perhaps hoping that it would end with an extended MLB stint like the last time he spent three straight seasons at AAA. It didn’t, and the cancellation of the 2020 minor league season ended De Jesus’s tenure as an affiliated baseball player. His career continued to plug on, with appearances in the Puerto Rican Winter League each year. He hit .151 for Cangrejeros de Santurce last year as the oldest hitter on the roster by five years, but announced his retirement this summer.
After the 2014 season, Johnson signed the first of two straight one-year contracts with the Braves, both of which were finished as a New York Met. Whoops, already talked about that last time. Uhhhh, let’s pivot.
After retiring from affiliated baseball, Johnson was on the roster of the Louisville Stars for the inaugural Bluegrass World Series in 2018. The Bluegrass World Series and the Louisville Stars had their roots in the Kansas Stars, which competed in the 2016 and 2017 editions of the National Baseball Congress World Series in Wichita, Kansas. Most of the teams in the NBC World Series consist of college or semi-pro players, which facilitated an easy march to the championship for a 2017 Stars roster that featured Chipper Jones and Roy Halladay. Unfortunately, the Kansas Stars were met with tragedy after primary sponsor Kansas Star Casino (and I thought the name was because they were former “star players”) booked a “major convention for the next several years” that conflicted with the NBC World Series dates. Apparently the problem also existed in 2017 and resulted in the entire tournament being moved to accommodate the Kansas Stars, but the organization was unwilling to replicate this treatment going forward.
Not to be deterred, the Stars pivoted and announced plans to launch the Bluegrass World Series in 2018 alongside their move to Louisville. This time, they got their lodging sponsorship from Horseshoe Southern Indiana and weren’t even required to change their name to fit the new casino theme. On a more star-studded team that featured Johnny Bench as manager, Kelly Johnson was a regular starter at second base, choosing to wear his Braves jersey instead of the uniform of any AL East team as the Stars blew out their early competition by a cumulative score of 24-2. In the championship game, Johnson was moved to shortstop and hit leadoff for a star-studded lineup where he was backed up by Nick Swisher, Jayson Werth, and Adam LaRoche. But baseball is baseball, so of course this team of ringers lost the championship game 6-4 to the Dubois County Bombers, a team composed of college students who spend their summers based in Huntingburg, Indiana. The star of the game was John McDonald, a then-freshman at Austin Peay University who had four hits and three RBIs against the group of former pros. McDonald is now a business development representative for something called Teamworks (“The Operating System for Sports”) and if I were him I would never shut up about this game.
Miscellaneous: Link to purchase rights to use a photo of Red Sox Kelly Johnson for hundreds of dollars (I suppose it is necessarily rare). Perfect Game profile for Ivan DeJesus Jr.’s son. A nice Immaculate Grid cheat code that pre-dates the creation of Immaculate Grid by several years. Autograph prices for members of the 2017 Kansas Stars (good value on Joe Nathan; World Series inflated price on David Ross).