2014 Winter Meetings, Pt. 3
The final act of a madcap week (besides all the deals that weren't finalized until the following week)
Every time we come up to a date where there was a flood of trades, the schedule gets thrown way off and every time, this somehow comes as a surprise to me. This post will take care of the backlog from December 11, but there were already nine trades on the calendar for December 18 and 19 (plenty of which were agreed on at the Winter Meetings anyways). Let’s not worry about that for now. Instead, we return to the calming vista of the Hilton San Diego Bayfront.
December 11, 2014
Boston Red Sox receive: Rick Porcello
Detroit Tigers receive: Yoenis Cespedes, Alex Wilson, and Gabe Speier
This trade was set in motion by Boston’s litany of moves from the 2014 Trade Deadline. Most obviously, they acquired Yoenis Cespedes in a trade with Oakland. You can’t trade Yoenis Cespedes away if you don’t have him on your team first. Cespedes was acquired in a trade that sent away pending free agent Jon Lester, part of the broader Red Sox deadline trend that shaped this trade as they shipped off numerous members of their 2014 rotation.
The Yoenis Cespedes era in Boston wasn’t great and seemed set for an ending. The Red Sox were rumored to have interest in trading Cespedes before the season was over, with one year left on his contract and a rising prospect named Mookie Betts prepared to take over in right field. It was reported that the Red Sox coaches “all hate[d] him,” a claim that was refuted with the note that coaches were in fact disappointed with Cespedes’s lack of effort to improve his defense. A potential Porcello-Cespedes swap was floated on November 30, but on December 8 there “wasn’t a match” and talks were “not hot.”
What seems most likely is that Cespedes was discussed in potential one-for-one trades for other pitchers, but rejected as the sole return for someone of Rick Porcello’s caliber. Porcello was still just 25 years old, even though he had been a mainstay in the Detroit rotation for six years, and was coming off a career-best season. Despite the fact that Porcello and Cespedes were both pending free agents and that Cespedes had provided more value in 2014, the young starting pitcher was seen as a more valuable commodity, making discussions of a straight-up swap seem ludicrous. The Tigers reportedly needed a starting pitcher coming back in return to take Porcello’s rotation spot, which posed a problem as the Red Sox had already traded away all their starters.
Detroit split the difference by acquiring Alex Wilson (the second MLB player born in Saudi Arabia) and Gabe Speier (the 14th MLB player born in Santa Barbara). Wilson was coming off a season that featured a 1.91 ERA in his 18 MLB appearances, but had worked as a reliever since the 2012 season. Most of his time had been spent in AAA. Gabe Speier had mostly been a starting pitcher, but was only 19 years old. The 33 innings that constituted his professional career had all taken place in rookie ball. Neither of these filled any sort of void in the Tigers’ rotation, but that would be taken care of in the next transaction we discuss. Even if the logic of the trade was somewhat clear to neutral fans, Tigers fans were much sadder to see Porcello go and Cespedes arrive than Red Sox fans, though some of this could be explained by the six season vs. five month tenure the respective players had with their prior teams.
His performance in Detroit was quietly excellent, but this was the second of three times Yoenis Cespedes would be traded in a one-year span, with the Tigers shipping him out on deadline day after the team’s rough start to the 2015 season. A similar outcome was expected for Porcello, who intended to test the open market and reiterated on April 5th that he had no intention of discussing an extension during the season. Then, on April 6th, the Red Sox announced that they had extended Porcello’s contract through the 2019 season on a $82.5 million deal that was seen as quite lavish for a pitcher of his pedigree. The extension was vindicated after Porcello won the Cy Young award in 2016, as long as you ignore the controversy surrounding that victory and assume that the one great year makes up for the fact that the four other seasons Porcello spent in Boston ranged from mediocre to bad. The last act of both players’ careers came on the 2020 New York Mets, where Porcello went 1-7 with a 5.64 ERA and Cespedes had a .161/.235/.387 slash line in 8 games.
Gabe Speier was traded away by the Tigers less than a year after this trade and then traded away again almost immediately afterwards. Alex Wilson compiled 5.7 WAR pitching from the Detroit bullpen through 2018, then signed with the Brewers as a free agent and threw the final 11.1 innings of his career.
December 11, 2014
Detroit Tigers receive: Alfredo Simon
Cincinnati Reds receive: Eugenio Suarez, Jonathon Crawford
This was Detroit’s plan to replace Porcello in their rotation, and it was pretty transparently a bad one, so we’ll start with the optimistic view. Alfredo Simon was coming off a season where he threw 196.1 innings with a 3.44 ERA and made the All-Star team as a starter for the Reds. He kept an ERA below 3 in each of 2012 and 2013, his first two years in Cincinnati.
There’s no way to write a third sentence without shattering the optimism and that second sentence only works by omitting key information. Simon was a reliever for most of his career (including the entirety of those 2012 and 2013 seasons), with his last work as a starter coming in 2011 when Simon made 16 starts to a 4.96 ERA for the Orioles. But thanks to Mat Latos’s injuries to start the 2014 season, the Reds turned to Alfredo Simon to take some turns in the rotation early in the year. These went well enough for Simon to hold down the job, ending April with an ERA of 1.60 and keeping it at 2.81 through the end of June. There were plenty of reasons to expect regression from the 33-year-old, which started to occur towards the end of the season, and the 4.33 FIP suggested that his 3.44 ERA was something of a mirage.
If Simon’s story sounds inspiring to you so far, there are plenty of reasons to root against him. Simon’s original sin was a classic case of identity fraud, signing his first contract with the Phillies as a man named Carlos Cabrera with a birthdate 21 months after Simon’s actual. After Simon became a major leaguer in 2008, he missed the start of the 2011 season while being held as the prime suspect in a shooting death that eventually resulted in involuntary manslaughter charges (though he was acquitted after the season). And in the 2014 season, Simon was sued in Washington D.C. by a woman who alleged that Simon had committed forcible rape while in town to play the Nationals, a suit which settled during the 2015 season but was still ongoing at the time of this trade.
In exchange for the final year of team control for a pitcher with enough red flags to vex a vexillologist, the Tigers gave up what seemed like really quite a lot. Eugenio Suarez had made his debut in 2014 at shortstop, playing about half the season. There weren’t any seemingly standout tools in Suarez’s arsenal, but he was a switch-hitting shortstop who had already provided value to an MLB team as a 22-year-old rookie. A tools-based projection wasn’t terribly necessary for somebody who could already contribute. The Tigers also sent 2013 first-round pick Jonathon Crawford, a starting pitcher selected out of University of Florida who had pitched to a 1.89 and then 2.85 ERA in his two seasons of professional baseball. Crawford was just a few months younger than Suarez and had only gotten as high as A-ball, but had an electric fastball and strong slider that made it all but certain that he’d at least have a bullpen role in the majors someday. The Tigers did not have a well-regarded farm system, but these were two of its relative jewels. Fans were disgusted by this deal, with sorrow over the loss of Suarez and Crawford actually outweighed by disappointment over the acquisition of somebody as comprehensively terrible as Simon.
For Fangraphs, Scott Strandberg wrote a post titled “Alfredo Simon Will Be Better than You Think.” Strandberg’s post took as an accepted premise that Fangraphs readers viewed Simon’s 2014 performance as a mirage, acknowledging that “Simon’s critics have plenty of perfectly legitimate reasons not to buy into” his 2014 numbers and that the Steamer projection system thought Simon would be “downright bad in 2015.” But in a sudden burst of nominative determinism, Strandberg disagreed with Steamer’s assumption that Simon would strand 67.4% of baserunners in 2015, noting that “ever since joining the Reds in 2012, Simon has been consistently elite at leaving runners on base, especially for a pitcher with such a low strikeout rate.”
Strand rate (or LOB%) is a favored statistic for evaluating whether a pitcher has been lucky or good. A pitcher who loads the bases every inning is likely to allow more runs in the long-term than one who limits traffic. An average strand rate is something like 73%, though the number can be higher for pitchers that get more strikeouts (and the average has ticked up over time as the league-wide strikeout rate increases). Simon was not a strikeout pitcher, so his 77.5% strand rate in 2014 did suggest that regression should be expected. But at the same time, this was a large sample of innings that followed strand rates of 78.2% in 2013 and 78.7% in 2012. Strandberg postulated that “Simon is particularly skilled in this area, and expecting him to just completely lose this ability (especially to the point where he’d be worse than league-average, as Steamer suggests) is a bit irrational.”
Strandberg was sort of right that Steamer was a bit low on Simon’s strand rate – instead of dropping all the way to 67.4% in 2015, it only dropped to 67.8%. Besides that, most of the adjustments to Simon’s peripherals were minor, though none moved in favorable directions. That was all enough to shift Simon from an All-Star to one of MLB’s worst pitchers in 2015, with the 5.05 ERA in 31 starts much more indicative of what the underlying numbers suggested he was capable of as a starting pitcher. All of this was made more sour by the fact that Simon and a disastrous Shane Greene took over rotation spots previously occupied by Rick Porcello and Max Scherzer (who had signed with the Nationals as a free agent), highlighting the rapid slide towards the abyss in Detroit. After one season in Detroit, Simon became a free agent and returned to the Reds on a minor league contract. This would cement the win for Cincinnati if not for the fact that Simon pitched beyond terribly in 2016, allowing 64 runs to score in 58.2 innings. Porcello and Scherzer each won a Cy Young award that season.
The win was already deeply cemented for Cincinnati, even as Jonathon Crawford flamed out in the minor leagues and Simon provided negative contributions for both teams. Eugenio Suarez took over as starting shortstop midway through the 2015 season and was an above-average offensive player even as he struggled defensively. In 2016, Suarez was moved to third base and gradually grew into increasing power. He signed a 7-year extension with the Reds in 2018 and made his first All-Star game that season, hitting 34 home runs that year. Suarez’s 49 home runs for the 2019 season is tied for the second-highest total that any Red has hit in any of the 143 seasons in franchise history. His 189 home runs as a Red was good for the 13th-most anyone had hit as a member of the team when he was traded away before the 2022 season.
In 2018, a Tigers fan posed the question “if you could reverse one transaction your team made over the past 18 years, what would it be?”. His three nominations are all trades we’ve written about in the past month, with Shane Greene for Robbie Ray and Anthony Gose for Devon Travis taking the bronze and silver medals. But Alfredo Simon for Eugenio Suarez takes the top spot in the eyes of this fan. Tough competition, but ultimately the correct decision in my view, too.
December 11, 2014, continued
Colorado Rockies receive: Austin House and cash
Oakland Athletics receive: Mark Canha
This one is a borderline trade. The Rockies had just taken Canha with the second overall pick in the Rule 5 Draft, selecting him from the Marlins organization. We’ve discussed the Rule 5 Draft before, and the full rules are too technical to be worth knowing, but teams are essentially afforded a low-cost acquisition of a player from another team’s farm system. The condition is that the drafted player needs to remain on their new team’s major league roster for the entire season without returning to the minors.
A trade for a Rule 5 pick implies a set of negotiations behind the scenes. The Marlins, already aware of Mark Canha’s impending time-based eligibility for the Rule 5 draft, would be contacted by the Athletics (and probably other teams) regarding a potential trade of somebody like Austin House. If the A’s traded for Canha directly, they’d be able to add him to their 40-man roster without preventing him from spending time in the minors, while the Marlins would be able to pick up a prospect instead of potentially losing Canha for nothing. The Marlins rejecting that trade is an implicit bet that Mark Canha will fail to stick in the majors for the entire season, resulting in his return to their system. And when the A’s trade Austin House to the Rockies (along with cash, presumably the nominal $50,000 fee required to make a Rule 5 pick), it’s a hedge against the risk that a different team will select Canha between the Rockies’ 2nd pick and the A’s 25th. The Rockies were able to turn their favorable Rule 5 pick into a near-ready prospect in Austin House, who had made appearances at AAA in 2014, but avoided the requirement of locking down an active roster spot for the season.
The Marlins seemed to be taking a more dangerous risk than the A’s. Canha was a San Jose native who was drafted out of Cal in 2010. He advanced through one level of the minors in each season with the Marlins (Low-A in 2010, A in 2011, Hi-A in 2012, and AA in 2013), with his 2014 spent putting together a .303/.384/.505 slash line for the AAA New Orleans Zephyrs as a 25-year-old. It seems obvious, purely from a standpoint of elementary pattern recognition, that Canha was ready to advance one more level and spend his 2015 season in the majors. It’s not clear what the Marlins were saving him for. It was easy for the A’s to envision Canha slotting into their lineup as either a first baseman or an outfielder, versatility that was valuable for a team in transition.
Austin House never made the majors, so the Rockies lost this trade even if they didn’t have much to lose. Mark Canha played in 124 games for the A’s in 2015 as he remained on the roster all season, so the Marlins lost this trade too. But an obvious victory for the A’s seemed to be short-lived. Canha suffered a hip injury early in the 2016 season that required season-ending surgery, then bounced back slowly in a 2017 year where he was below-average in MLB and spent most of the year at AAA. But then Canha was very good in his final four Oakland seasons, putting up 10.1 WAR between 2018 and 2021 and returning this trade to an easy victory. This was Mark Canha’s last time being traded until the 2023 trade deadline and he’s been traded twice more since then.
When we look at the A’s offseason so far, it’s amazing how close they came to working their magic again. They traded Brandon Moss at the right time, picking up an effective player in return, then grabbed a Moss replacement in the Rule 5 Draft. They flipped a centerpiece of their last trade deadline for a bevy of future talent. Almost all of these trades turned out to be wins for the A’s. Except the one.
Also December 11, 2014
Colorado Rockies receive: Jairo Diaz
Los Angeles Angels receive: Josh Rutledge
A regrettable inclusion to the Trades Ten Years Later calendar.
Josh Rutledge was a shortstop who reached MLB in 2012 and played a utility infield role for the Rockies. Rutledge was slightly below-average offensively and didn’t rate as a very good defender. Jairo Diaz was a 23-year-old pitcher with 5.2 innings of MLB experience and 0 innings of AAA experience. It’s not the most exciting trade.
The outcomes for these two players and teams were similarly unspectacular, but wildly different. Jairo Diaz spent the remainder of his MLB career in the Rockies’ organization, signing back with the team on the two occasions that he was released. That remainder consisted of 19 innings in 2015, 5 in 2017, 57.2 in 2019, and 20 in 2020.
In stark contrast, Josh Rutledge was assigned to AAA Salt Lake City and played zero games for the MLB Angels before he was traded to Boston at the 2015 deadline. Rutledge returned to the majors with the Red Sox at the end of the 2015 season and was back with the MLB team by April of 2016, but his year ended early with a knee injury and he became a free agent after the season when he rejected an outright assignment to AAA. On November 23rd, Rutledge signed a reunion contract with the Rockies, briefly giving Colorado an inarguable win in this trade. Then, in a shocking twist, the Red Sox selected Rutledge in the Rule 5 draft on December 8, yanking him away from the Rockies and back to Boston just two weeks after he returned. This was both a weird outcome for Rutledge, who was now being sent back to the organization he had chosen to leave, but also for the Red Sox, who were now obligated to keep a guy they tried to outright to AAA on their active roster. If Rutledge had waited just a few more weeks to sign the same contract with the Rockies, he actually could’ve played for them again.
The issue was mooted by hamstring, head, and hip injuries that cost Rutledge much of the 2017 season. He retired in 2018 after recording four hits in 18 games for the AAA Sacramento River Cats.
Still December 11, 2014
Miami Marlins receive: Dee Strange-Gordon, Dan Haren, Miguel Rojas, cash
Los Angeles Dodgers receive: Enrique Hernandez, Austin Barnes, Chris Hatcher, Andrew HeaneyLos Angeles Angels receive: Andrew Heaney
Los Angeles Dodgers receive: Howie Kendrick
Functionally, this was a three-team trade for all but a few hours. For a trade that happened something like 88,000 hours ago and counting, the ultimate outcome is what really matters, and that’s how we’ll eventually analyze it, but we’ll do so in appropriate chronological order.
The Marlins were trying to win and acquired three established major leaguers in this trade. Headlining the crew was Devaris Strange-Gordon, the son of Tom. He prefers to go by Dee Strange-Gordon (and we’ll call him that here), but played under the name Dee Gordon for most of his MLB career. Strange-Gordon was a top prospect in baseball going into the 2011 season, building a comical profile in his first three professional seasons as he compiled 144 stolen bases and 25 triples against just seven home runs. Copious speed, no power. He made his MLB debut that season and was promising in a 56-game stint, managing to lead all rookies with 24 steals despite the abbreviated playing time.
In 2012, Strange-Gordon took over as the starter at shortstop and it didn’t go well. He was stealing bases, but completely lackluster at all other offensive and defensive aspects of the game. His slash line was .229/.280/.282 when he injured his thumb while stealing a base on July 4th. The Dodgers traded for Hanley Ramirez a couple of weeks later and Strange-Gordon was used almost entirely as a pinch runner when he returned from injury in September, ending his season with a slightly diminished .228/.280/.281 slash line and -1.2 WAR. In 2013, Strange-Gordon spent more time in AAA (where he hit well) than he did in MLB (where he hit poorly while filling in for an injured Ramirez), cementing a perception that he was simply not well-rounded enough to be a real major league player.
Anybody with a truly elite ability like Dee Strange-Gordon’s speed stands to have some sort of career, but 2014 was probably his last opportunity to establish himself as an MLB starter. His window was narrow – Hanley Ramirez was not going to be displaced from shortstop after putting up a ridiculous 5.2 WAR in an injury-halved 2013 season and the Dodgers had just given star 26-year-old Cuban infielder Alex Guerrero a 4-year, $28 million contract. Guerrero was a shortstop for Las Tunas in the Cuban National Series, but his “stiff” defense led to the expectation that he’d be an everyday second baseman instead. Few were willing to doubt the Dodgers’ international scouting department in the aftermath of Yasiel Puig’s dominant 2013 debut, but Guerrero seemed to present plenty of risk at the price that Los Angeles was paying.
As the news about Guerrero’s present ability trended towards the negative, it started to seem that Strange-Gordon was winning the position battle despite his 3.2 career innings at second base and bad track record of MLB hitting. At Fangraphs, Mike Petriello wrote that “the fact that this might be the best they can do at second base is obviously a bit shocking,” but the juggernaut Dodgers were positioned to withstand this shock. And besides, as Petriello noted at Dodgers Digest, it was no big deal if Guerrero “spen[t] a few weeks in the minors, since acclimating to a new country, culture, and position isn’t easy.”
It took two weeks for the perception of Strange-Gordon as a fill-in to begin to change, with a four-steal game against the Diamondbacks serving as something of a breakthrough moment. By July, the impossible had happened as Dee Strange-Gordon was named to the All-Star team. “I’m floored, really,” the once-skeptical Petriello wrote at Dodgers Digest. “Anyone who said they saw this coming is lying. There was no conceivable way to see a breakout like this.” His performance faded some down the stretch, but Strange-Gordon’s 2014 season still represented a staggering success. For good measure, his 64 stolen bases led the major leagues.
Strange-Gordon would be accompanied in this trade by fellow infielder Miguel Rojas. In January of 2014, Dodgers GM Ned Coletti provoked a bizarre level of outrage when he suggested that the defensively-gifted Rojas could contribute to the second base picture for the MLB team. Rojas had signed with the Cincinnati Reds out of Venezuela in 2005, but was released after the 2012 season after hitting poorly in his first 44 games at AAA. The Dodgers signed him as a minor league free agent and he played for the AA Chattanooga Lookouts in 2013, where he hit .233/.303/.307 in 130 games. This is bad offensive performance for basically any baseball player at any level of competition and is certainly not good for a 24-year-old playing at AA, suggesting that any skepticism about Rojas’s ability to play at the MLB level was warranted.
Nevertheless, Rojas was called up to the team in June of 2014. By the 11th game of his MLB career, he had secured a favorable footnote in Dodgers history when his excellent defensive play at third base preserved an ongoing no-hitter for Clayton Kershaw (particularly contrasted with the preceding error from Hanley Ramirez at shortstop that downgraded Kershaw’s ongoing perfect game into a no-hitter).
Besides that, it was fair to say that Miguel Rojas was not proving himself to be an MLB hitter thus far. He was limited to 162 plate appearances in his 85 MLB games, compiling a tragic .181/.242/.221 slash line in that period. But he was hitting nicely at the AAA level, suggesting a capacity to continue improving on the offensive side. This was a risk worth taking for such a talented defender.
The third established player going from Los Angeles to Miami was the most established, but was also highly contingent for purposes of this deal. Dan Haren had pitched in MLB since 2003 and had earned more than $70 million in a career that included three All-Star appearances, 348 starts, and three trades already. He was set to earn $10 million more in the 2015 season after exercising the player option on the contract he had signed with the Dodgers prior to 2014. Haren had previously spoken about his difficult experience while playing with the Nationals and living apart from his family in California, fueling speculation that he could simply retire if he were traded to a team far from home.
In general, this trade was seen as the Dodgers taking an opportunity to sell high on Dee Strange-Gordon. Dodgers fans were sad to see their long-suffering homegrown talent go to another team, but saw a sizable collection of young talent coming in their direction. Leading the group was Andrew Heaney, a top pitching prospect in all of baseball who had just debuted in 2014. The Dodgers also picked up a cheap bullpen arm in Chris Hatcher, a converted catcher who had put together a strong season after languishing in his prior MLB opportunities. Enrique Hernandez had just arrived in Miami at the trade deadline and only got 18 MLB games with his new team, but looked immediately ready to take a utility spot on the Dodgers’ bench. The final member of the group was Austin Barnes, a quality prospect who had been splitting time between catcher and second base.
From an analytical perspective, this trade immediately looked bad for the Marlins. According to Steamer’s projections for the 2015 season, both Dee Strange-Gordon and Enrique Hernandez were projected to be worth 1.1 WAR per 600 plate appearances, suggesting that the swap of these guys was purely lateral for Miami. When including the other meaningful prospects being sent to Los Angeles in exchange for the lightly-regarded Rojas and the entirely contingent Dan Haren, it became hard to see how this trade would benefit the Marlins.
By January, Haren had requested a trade from the Marlins in accordance with his preferences to pitch for a team “out West.” The Dodgers had sent $10 million in the trade to cover Haren’s salary, and while the Marlins did try to engineer a trade, Haren ultimately agreed to report to spring training. Apparently, some of the awkward beginning may have been caused by Haren’s uncertainty over whether Miami really wanted him on the team, with the lack of a customary pre-trade physical raising his suspicion. Haren ultimately made 21 strong starts for the Marlins, more than anybody could have expected, then got traded to Chicago at the deadline, which I suppose is relatively west of Miami.
The Marlins did nicely with the other pieces of this trade, too. Instead of suffering the regression that analysts feared was coming after his breakout 2014, Dee Strange-Gordon was even better in 2015. His 205 hits led the major leagues and his .333 batting average won him the NL batting title, a nice piece of hardware to accompany the Gold Glove and Silver Slugger awards he snagged for the second base position. The Marlins wanted to acquire a long-term contributor at second base and they now had a 27-year-old who was voted as the league’s best hitter AND defender at the position. In January, Strange-Gordon signed a five-year contract extension with the Marlins, then got suspended for performance-enhancing drug use about three months later, which calls to mind that then-recent Mike Petriello quote “Anyone who said they saw this coming is lying. There was no conceivable way to see a breakout like this.” Strange-Gordon was still an effective player after his return to the Marlins, contributing to franchise lore with one of the most iconic home runs in team history in 2016, then produced 3.8 more WAR in 2017 before he was traded to Seattle.
And somehow, the Marlins didn’t just pick up one long-term infielder in this trade. Miguel Rojas played a part-time role for the Marlins over the next three seasons, but gradually took over as the team’s starting shortstop by 2018. He still couldn’t hit all that well by MLB standards, but was respectable enough with the bat to justify keeping his stellar glove in the lineup. Besides, the Marlins weren’t interested in spending heavily to acquire superstars, so Rojas’s willingness to repeatedly sign extensions that paid him a few million dollars per year led to him becoming the “unofficial captain” of a team where players don’t tend to stick around. Rojas was ultimately worth 11.9 WAR for the Marlins, good for 20th in franchise history and 13th among position players. In a full-circle moment, Rojas was traded back to the Dodgers ahead of the 2023 season and very weirdly just had his best offensive season ever in 2024 at the age of 35, serving as something of an unofficial captain once more for a team that won the World Series in 2024. He’s expected to return in a part-time role in 2025.
If this trade turned out to be exactly what the Marlins were hoping for, it somehow turned out that way for the Dodgers too. Discussing the Dodgers’ results requires invoking the second leg of this trade, where top pitching prospect Andrew Heaney was immediately flipped to the Angels in exchange for their longtime second baseman, Howie Kendrick. The veteran Kendrick was a clear upgrade from Dee Strange-Gordon on paper and was coming off a career-best 6.1 WAR season at age 30. The brilliance of upgrading at second base while adding useful depth pieces was seen as a coup for the recently-arrived Andrew Friedman, even if it would turn out to not actually be an upgrade at the position for 2015, oh well. Andrew Heaney made the most of the situation by firing off a hilarious tweet thanking the Dodgers for the memories generated in his couple of hours with the team. It got a little bit less funny when, after playing out his team control years with the Angels and being traded to the Yankees at the 2021 trade deadline, Heaney signed with the Dodgers as a free agent, creating a year’s worth of actual memories with the franchise.
Chris Hatcher turned out to be a pretty fungible reliever, but the other two guys turned into long-term contributors. Austin Barnes was called up to the MLB team on May 24, 2015 and basically hasn’t left besides a brief demotion to the minors in 2019. Barnes has typically served as an offensively-limited backup catcher (besides the 2017 season where he mysteriously had a .289/.408/.486 slash line), but has done so for long enough that he’s technically the longest-tenured Dodger (for as long as Clayton Kershaw remains a free agent). And while Kiké Hernandez’s time with the team included a detour to Boston, he represents a third 2024 World Series champion to take part in this trade and one of the biggest fan favorites of the past decade of Los Angeles Dodgers history.
This is among the most multidimensionally beneficial trades that we’ve covered at Trades Ten Years Later. The Dodgers just won a World Series with three players who were involved in this trade (two of which they traded for and one of whom hasn’t left), making it clear that they’re winners in at least some respect. The Marlins picked up two of the best infielders in franchise history. The Angels flipped the last year of a declining Howie Kendrick into the entirety of Andrew Heaney’s team control. The only loser was Dan Haren, forced to spend a season away from his family, but at least he got some good tweets out of it.