Catcher Framing Hits the Trade Market
Featuring a surprising visual cameo from 1975 Frank Tanana
November 5, 2014
Los Angeles Angels receive: Cesar Ramos
Tampa Bay Rays receive: Mark Sappington
We’ve mostly dispensed with the use of the formal post structure here at Trades Ten Years Later. We’ll still break out the format for longer trade write-ups, but we don’t need to establish franchise context for every single swap of reliever-for-nothing.
That being said, since we’re starting with two same-day Angels trades this week, let’s take a moment to consider that the 2014 Angels we’ve spent the year writing about have been a 98-win behemoth. That season is over; those Angels were swept from the playoffs in their first round of action. The 2015 Angels will post a winning record, but miss the playoffs, and all subsequent incarnations of Angels to the date of writing will be generally awful. There’s more to building an organization than just trades, but the transactions the Angels have conducted over the last ten years have generally served to make them a less successful franchise than they were ten years ago.
We probably cannot blame the general decline in the Angels on this trade, as their surrendered prospect of Mark Sappington was fringey at the time and never made it to MLB. In exchange, they benefited from the best season of Cesar Ramos’s MLB career. Ramos was a Padres first-round draft pick in 2005 who didn’t make the majors until he was 25 and was pushed to a middle relief role by the time he got there. San Diego sent Ramos to Tampa Bay as part of their ill-fated acquisition of Jason Bartlett, and he spent 2011-14 as an unspectacular but solid left-hander in the Rays’ bullpen (with a brief and unsustainable cameo in the rotation early in the 2014 season).
Four years tends to be a magic number for tenures in Tampa Bay. When the Rays acquire a player with minimal MLB service time (as they did with Ramos in 2011 and regularly do in other transactions), keeping the player for four years gives Tampa Bay all but the last one or two of the player’s cost-controlled arbitration years. Trading players at this juncture tends to weaken the MLB team, but allows for newly-acquired prospects to replenish the farm system and turn into future cheap players. This concept is likely generally familiar if you’re willing to read four paragraphs into a description of a Cesar Ramos for Mark Sappington trade.
For low-budget teams like the Rays, it’s especially important to embrace these swaps during a transitional period where you aren’t likely to contend for a championship. Tampa Bay had entered this period in more ways than one. On the field, the Rays had just finished 77-85 to break a streak of 90-win seasons and traded away longtime ace David Price at the deadline. Off-field was even more tumultuous — long-time general manager Andrew Friedman was hired away to become the Dodgers’ President of Baseball Operations, which triggered an opt-out clause in long-time manager Joe Maddon’s contract. Maddon chose to opt out and take a job with the Cubs, depriving the Rays of two men that oversaw the only successful period in franchise history. The Rays pulled Matthew Silverman in from his role of president of business operations to take over as general manager and hired former outfielder Kevin Cash as the new youngest manager in MLB. 2015 was likely to be a year when everyone had the chance to grow into their role and was not a year for clutching the likes of Cesar Ramos.
But that’s not any slight against Cesar Ramos, an effective reliever who was among the best options out of the bullpen for the 2015 Angels. Ramos posted a 2.75 ERA through 52.1 innings, the only Angels pitcher with more than 4 innings to keep an ERA under 3. For an Angels team that remained in playoff contention through the end of the season and only missed a playoff spot by one game, acquiring such a reliable reliever for organizational depth is a coup.
The bummer about it is that 2.75 is actually the second-highest ERA that Ramos ever finished a game with in the 2015 season. On September 30, Ramos had a 2.08 ERA for the season. The Angels lost that day to fall three games behind Texas for the AL West and a half-game behind Houston for the last Wild Card spot. But Anaheim’s one remaining series was a four-game set against the Rangers, giving them substantial control over their playoff destiny. In three of the four games, the Angels handed the ball to Cesar Ramos. He gave up four runs across the three appearances and managed to get just one cumulative out as his ERA jumped to 2.24, then to 2.41, and finally to its closing mark of 2.75. The Angels split the series, with both losses coming in games where Ramos pitched. The Angels non-tendered Ramos after the season rather than paying his final arbitration salary and he never returned to any sort of meaningful leverage role, spending the 2016 season pitching in long relief for the Rangers until he was designated for assignment in July.
Ramos started working as a coach in the Phillies’ minor league system in 2021 and was promoted to be the MLB team’s bullpen coach last season. Mark Sappington retired from baseball after the 2016 season and got into the coffee business. He’s a co-founder and operator of Marcell Coffee, a Kansas City-based wholesale specialty coffee supplier that works with members of their Roasting Club to manufacture and supply bespoke retail products. Mark, if you’re reading this, I hope that the detailed plug for Marcell Coffee makes up for me completely trivializing your professional baseball career earlier.
Los Angeles Angels receive: Hank Conger
Houston Astros receive: Carlos Perez, Nick Tropeano
The Angels’ other November 5 trade paired them with a team on the opposite end of the competitive cycle spectrum from the Rays (and the Angels, for that matter). The Astros went 70-92 in 2014, a horrible record that represented breakneck improvement from their start of the decade doldrums. Houston went 56-106 in 2011 as they embraced tanking on an apocalyptic scale, then got even worse in 2012 and 2013. By the final of these years, the Astros were drawing 0.0 local television ratings and fielding an unfathomably cheap team.
A 19-win improvement in 2014 was therefore exciting but still insufficient. Years of building for the future meant the 2014 Astros had a roster featuring no meaningful contributors over age 30 (besides Chad Qualls) and room to start trading fringe future pieces for upgrades to the present-day roster. It would seem surprising for the Astros to target a move at catcher though; incumbent Jason Castro was basically the team’s only good hitter in 2013 and wouldn’t be a free agent until after 2016.
Hank Conger was already used to splitting time at catcher, at least. Conger was an Angels’ first-round draft pick out of Huntington Beach High School who made his MLB debut in 2010. Initially working as the backup to offensive black hole Jeff Mathis and seeming to warm up to take over the role on a full-time basis, Conger’s path to playing time was thwarted by the arrival of Chris Iannetta in a trade with the Rockies in November of 2011. Iannetta played in something of a platoon with the switch-hitting Conger, but had been such a consistently good hitter over his time in Anaheim that rostering both players was an overallocation of resources, particularly with Conger hitting arbitration for the first time and growing increasingly expensive.
Even if Conger’s ceiling was higher than that of a backup catcher, the Angels were using him in that role, so Carlos Perez provided a readymade replacement. Perez never hit well at any level of full-season baseball, but could clearly play catcher at an MLB level. In exchange for downgrading their backup catcher option, the Angels were rewarded with Nick Tropeano, a young starting pitcher who Fangraphs ranked as the Astros’ #11 prospect a month before the trade. Tropeano made four MLB starts for the Astros in September of 2014, winning the first and then losing the final three.
Ordinarily it’s rare to see intra-division trades between teams that finish one game apart in the playoff hunt later that season. Given that the Astros had just moved to the AL West two seasons ago and had yet to be remotely competitive in that timeframe, we cannot exclude the possibility that neither team remembered they were in the same division as each other.
This trade made too much sense on paper for fans of either team to be rationally upset. The Astros were trading away future pieces while the Angels were trading away a long-tenured hometown player, creating substantially more sentimentality on their side of the equation. At Fangraphs, the analysis was unsurprisingly less sentimental and instead focused on Houston’s presumed infatuation with Conger’s pitch framing abilities. While Jeff Sullivan admitted that this wasn’t “a blockbuster or a rip-off or anything,” he also made the admittedly strong point that “Conger seems like a pretty good catcher overall, because of one particularly strong strength, and it’s not often you can get a pretty good catcher for a worse catcher and a back-of-the-rotation project.”
While true in theory, it didn’t quite work out that way. Conger had his best offensive season ever on a team that surprisingly made the playoffs, but was dumped to the Rays for cash after the 2015 season. In large part, this may have been a consequence over a more traditionally-considered aspect of catcher defense than pitch framing. On May 29, 2015, Conger threw out J.B. Shuck as he tried to steal second base for the White Sox. That was the first baserunner Conger had thrown out in six attempts and the last one he would throw out all season. Base stealers went 42-for-43 against Conger in 2014, which translates to 2.3% of attempted stealers being thrown out. A nice pie chart where 2.3% of the pie is “J.B. Shuck” and 97.7% is “every other baseball player.” The prior worst performance on record from a regular catcher was 2012 Rod Barajas, who only threw out 6.1% of the baserunners he faced – a terrible mark that more than doubles Conger’s 2015. The average catcher threw out 31.7% of baserunners in 2015. Jason Castro threw out 36% that year.
What’s not quite clear to me in hindsight is why Conger didn’t allow more stolen bases. Baserunners attempted .0836 stolen bases per inning caught by Conger despite the fact that they were nearly guaranteed to reach second base. They attempted .0747 stolen bases per inning caught by Castro despite the fact that their odds of reaching base were worse than average. And against Carlos Perez, who stepped admirably into the Angels’ backup catcher role as a rookie in 2015, baserunners attempted .0992 stolen bases per inning despite getting thrown out at a 37.9% rate. Perez didn’t hit better than would be expected for a backup catcher, but he also didn’t hit worse than would be expected, and that was good enough. More saliently, he could throw out base stealers. Why weren’t two or three times as many runners stealing bases on Conger?
As may be expected, divisional teams who played the Astros frequently were particularly well-positioned to notice Conger’s inability to throw out runners. The eventual division champ Rangers became keen-eyed predators by the end of Conger’s year in Houston. On September 15, the Rangers stole three bases against Conger in a walkoff victory to take a division lead that they would not relinquish. On September 17, the Astros pinch-hit for Castro in the 7th inning and brought Conger in to catch the final two innings. He allowed three more steals in those two innings, including two steals of third base that underlined the particular impunity with which Texas was running.
You might expect similar tendencies to be observed by Conger’s former team in Anaheim. You would be mistaken. Whether because their scouts missed it or because they didn’t want to embarrass an old teammate, the Angels attempted just two stolen bases in the eight games they played against Conger.
After Conger left the Astros, a trade that looked like a clear win for the Angels suddenly started to diminish in value. After making a few effective starts in 2015 and 13 more in 2016, Nick Tropeano required Tommy John surgery and didn’t return to pitching until 2018. Tropeano never seemed to make a full recovery and certainly didn’t recapture the pre-injury promise; the Angels let him go after the 2019 season and he’s had a journeyman minor league career since. Carlos Perez started hitting worse than would be acceptable for a backup catcher and was traded to the Braves in 2018. He made a few appearances for Atlanta and a few more for Texas in 2018, then embarked on his own minor league odyssey that culminated with a surprising return to the Oakland Athletics’ opening day roster in 2023. At age 32, Perez posted his new best offensive season ever, which was still not very good by the standards of a typical MLB hitter. He returned to the organization last year, but spent the entire season in AAA Las Vegas.
Hank Conger played 49 games in MLB in 2016 before the Rays optioned him to AAA Durham in July. He never got called back up, and his playing career ended after 16 mediocre games in the Mexican League in 2018. After the 2019 season, Conger began his coaching career in an unconventional venue when he became the catching coach for the KBO’s Lotte Giants. The move was less surprising than it might seem – Conger was born Hyun Choi Conger to Korean immigrant parents and grew up with his mother speaking Korean in the home. This career move also had a payoff Conger couldn’t have predicted when he took the job in December 2019; the KBO returned to play from the pandemic quicker than any other professional sports league and afforded Conger more games of coaching experience than he might’ve gotten in the United States. Conger spent two seasons in Korea before taking a job back in MLB as the first base and catching coach for the Minnesota Twins, a title he still holds today.
November 11, 2014
Colorado Rockies receive: Shane Carle
Pittsburgh Pirates receive: Rob Scahill
There is not one single fact about either of these men that permanently resides within my head. I probably knew these names once but I’m learning them again now. Shane Carle is from Santa Cruz County, California, and has an unsatisfying combination of first and last name. Surely he reached the pinnacle of athletic achievement for anybody named Shane Carle or Carl Shane. Rob Scahill is from DuPage County, Illinois, and his nickname is “Gramps” according to Baseball-Reference. His official headshot looks like a man who has stared deeply into The Abyss:
I’ve truly got nothing for you here. Both guys were worth 0.7 WAR for their careers, with Carle worth 0.0 in Colorado and Scahill worth -0.1 in Pittsburgh. Scahill was waived in July of 2016 after throwing 47 innings for the Pirates. Carle made his debut in April 2017, pitched once more in August and once more in September, then was waived after the season to conclude his Rockies career. Carle had a nice year for the Braves in 2018, where he compiled 1.1 of his 0.7 career WAR total (he lost the rest during the 2019 season).
Rob Scahill is now a realtor, which appears to be the most common profession for former MLB pitchers, but he’s the only one of them smart enough to snag “thebigleaguerealtor.com” as a URL. Excellent work, Rob. I’m unable to confirm Shane Carle’s current occupation, but he was inducted into his high school’s Hall of Fame a couple of months ago. A search for “Shane Carle realtor” returned no results, at least not yet.
November 12, 2014
Pittsburgh Pirates receive: Francisco Cervelli
New York Yankees receive: Justin Wilson
For twenty seasons between 1993 and 2012, the New York Yankees were good every single year and the Pittsburgh Pirates were bad every single year. The Yankees made the playoffs 17 times in that span, missing out in only 1993 (88-74), 1994 (70-43, in first place when the strike ended the season), and 2008 (89-73). The Pirates made the playoffs 0 times and never even mustered a winning record. These teams were at opposite ends of the spectrum when it came to winning, spending, prestige, and success.
It’s not 2012 anymore, it’s 2014, and it’s a different world. The Pirates broke their playoff drought in 2013 and made it back in 2014, even if a juggernaut Cardinals team prevented them from capturing the NL Central division crown in either year. The jubilation of 2013’s victorious Wild Card game was replaced by a brutal home shutout loss in the 2014 edition, ending this most recent playoff run after just one game.
Still, that was more than the Yankees could say. The Yankees maintained winning records in 2013 and 2014, but their 85-77 and 84-78 respective records didn’t guarantee anything in a loaded AL East. For the first time since the early 1990s, New York missed the playoffs in back-to-back seasons, returning to a past so distant that Frank Tanana pitched on the last Yankees team that met this dubious standard.
But some dynamics in baseball are less malleable than seasonal records. During this two-season run of glory, the Pirates employed former Yankee and Dodger catcher Russell Martin after signing him on a 2-year, $17 million deal. This was something of a bargain after two years of mediocre play in New York, but still constituted the most expensive free agent contract ever awarded by Pirates GM Neal Huntington. The Pirates got substantially more than they paid for, with Martin rating as one of baseball’s best catchers over those two seasons, but now that contract was over and there was not going to be a bargain this time around. Martin met with the Cubs, Dodgers, and Blue Jays when free agency opened, and while the Pirates remained in discussions throughout the process, they were probably never going to match the $82 million contract over five years that Toronto ultimately awarded.
Instead, the Pirates were going to look for value at the catcher position in the form of Francisco Cervelli. Cervelli had signed with the Yankees out of Venezuela in 2003 and made his MLB debut at the end of the 2008 season. He battled injuries over the next few seasons and spent time in the minors, but generally performed well as the Yankees’ backup catcher while on the major league roster. When Martin left the Yankees to sign with the Pirates after 2012, Cervelli was expected to be promoted to serve as the new starting catcher.
The misadventures that followed contributed to Cervelli’s bargain availability at the time of this trade. Cervelli fractured his hand in April of 2013, requiring surgery that put him on the 60-day injured list. Before he could make a return, Cervelli was implicated in the Biogenesis scandal and received a 50-game suspension for the use of performance-enhancing drugs, costing him the rest of the season. The next April, Cervelli again picked up a long-term injury (this time to his hamstring) and didn’t return until June, then missed more time in September while suffering from migraines. Across the two seasons that Martin spent in Pittsburgh, Cervelli only managed to play 66 games, calling his viability as a long-term starter into clear question. On the other hand, he produced 2.2 WAR in those 66 games, obviously suggesting there was room for future improvement. And thanks to all the missed time, Cervelli was only going to make about $1 million in his penultimate year of arbitration.
Cervelli also offered the 2014 offseason’s hottest skill for catchers, grading out as one of the best pitch framers in baseball. There was still enough diversity of thought in the 2014 offseason for there to be “smart front offices” that embraced baseball’s advanced data revolution and “dumb front offices” that made inefficient transactions (and then won the next World Series). “Catcher framing” was more of a niche skill that some teams (like the Pirates) attempted to meaningfully quantify and some teams (like the Yankees) may not have. Today, MLB publishes their own leaderboard of the best-framing catchers and there are two Yankees catchers in the top five.
Wouldn’t you know it, that pitch framing leaderboard goes back to 2015, allowing us to confirm that Cervelli once again graded among the best framers in baseball with the Pirates (and ushering Trades Ten Years Later into the Statcast Era?). But there wasn’t ever much doubt about Francisco Cervelli framing pitches well. More importantly, he stayed healthy and played in 130 games that season, providing a reliable and above-average bat at the position. The Pirates ultimately signed Cervelli to a contract extension and he remained with the team through the 2019 season.
Cervelli was the bigger name in this trade and the Pirates were probably the winners here, but not so much so that it’s justifiable for us to have blown off Justin Wilson for this long. The Pirates drafted Wilson from Fresno State in 2009 and developed him as a starter through the minors. In 2012, Wilson came back for a second season at AAA and proved that he was more-than-qualified for the level. In April, he threw the first 7.1 innings of a combined no-hitter against the Durham Bulls, getting pulled after 107 pitches and two walks. An opportunity that may never come again, except for when it did four months later and Wilson threw an individual no-hitter against the Charlotte Knights. The solo no-hitter was sufficient to earn Wilson a promotion to MLB about a week later, but not enough to give him a rotation spot – Wilson worked exclusively from the bullpen and has in fact never made a start in the big leagues. Still, a left-hander in the bullpen who can keep a 2.08 ERA (as Wilson did in 2013) is always going to have appeal to MLB teams, even if their ERA subsequently balloons to 4.20 the next season.
Wilson split the difference in those ERAs during the 2015 season, pitching to a 3.10 ERA in his 61 innings in New York. Instead of paying him a first-year arbitration salary, the Yankees opted to trade Wilson to Detroit after the 2015 season for Luis Cessa and Chad Green, which was a good decision. That was not the last time Wilson would be traded in his career, and he’s still active (threw 46.2 uninspiring innings for the Reds in 2024 and is now a free agent), so we’ll surely discuss him later in other contexts. This was also not the last time Wilson would be traded by the Yankees in his career in exchange for Luis Cessa. We’ll probably talk about that again, too. Twice, in fact.