December Decisions to Repair or Remove
Why does every three-team trade that Arizona makes include a Cy Young winner?
December 1, 2014
Pittsburgh Pirates receive: Sean Rodriguez
Tampa Bay Rays receive: Player to be named later (Buddy Borden named on December 12, 2014)
At first glance, this looks like yet another example of the Rays jettisoning a valuable MLB contributor to avoid paying their already low salary. Sean Rodriguez was a run-of-the-mill utility player expected to make about $2 million in 2015, and his name had been mentioned as a potential trade piece amid the ongoing Rays fire sale. Rodriguez was ultimately kicked out of town when the Rays signed old friend Ernesto Frieri and needed a roster spot, making this the rare example of the Rays trying to upgrade their MLB roster going into 2015. Of course, Frieri was coming off a calamitous season that enabled his signing on a very cheap contract, but baseball’s bar for effort from miserly front offices is low.
Despite the rumors surrounding his departure and the fact that something like 20% of his MLB teammates had already been traded away in November, Rodriguez said he “was definitely surprised” to find out he was designated for assignment, but added that it might also be an opportunity. “What I bring to the table (in terms of versatility) is something a lot of teams like and want to have more of,” Rodriguez added. And because his final projected arbitration salary of $2 million was really not a lot of money, basically any front office in baseball could add Rodriguez as a minor upgrade. Or, a particularly cheap team like the Pirates could add him as one of their larger upgrades of the offseason during the most competitive period in recent franchise history. Either way.
When you search for information on Buddy Borden, it’s a 50/50 split on results about the baseball player or the economist at University of Nevada. Given that the economist’s office is located in Las Vegas and the pitcher attended Las Vegas’s Arbor View High School (awful “Notable Alumni” list) before going on to UNLV, I assume the two Buddy Bordens are related. Most baseball players achieve enough notoriety to push similarly-named economists out of the spotlight, but maybe Mr. Borden is just a particularly notable economist. The other Buddy Borden did not become a particularly notable baseball player; the most newsworthy event in his professional career seems to have been being identified as the player to be named later in this trade. He made it to AA with the Rays in 2016, but was released midseason and ended up rejoining the Pirates organization to wind down his playing career.
The exchanged prospect never making it to MLB and ending up back in your organization makes this an easy win for the Pirates, which was enhanced by Rodriguez actually playing well in Pittsburgh. That wasn’t so much the case in 2015, where he had a dreadful offensive year but still added enough value in his versatility for Pittsburgh to bring him back for another season with a slight pay raise. In 2016, Rodriguez played all over the diamond while hitting better than ever, knocking a surprising career-high of 18 home runs. Rodriguez would leave the Pirates that offseason for a multi-year free agent deal, only to be traded back to Pittsburgh later that summer in a bizarre saga that we’ll discuss in 2027. Until then, we can enjoy the footage of him punching out the dugout Gatorade cooler (for and to which he later apologized).
December 2, 2014
Cincinnati Reds receive: Matt Magill
Los Angeles Dodgers receive: Chris Heisey
There are a couple of ways to define success, some of which can come in conflict. Oftentimes it’s easy – Chris Heisey is the most successful baseball player to ever be drafted out of Messiah University. We can make this conclusion because three players have ever been drafted from Messiah, the Pennsylvania school where students abide by a strict code of conduct, and Chris Heisey is the only one of those three to reach MLB. By the time of this trade, he had spent five years in the big leagues and pocketed about $4 million in earnings, and he wouldn’t even turn 30 for a couple more weeks. There probably aren’t many Messiah University grads who make $4 million before their 30th birthday and there are zero others who have done so playing baseball. Clearly the most successful.
Sometimes it’s harder to describe what success is or isn’t. Take California’s Royal High School, where sixteen players have been drafted by an MLB team but only two have reached the highest level. The first was Scott Rice, the 44th overall pick in the 1999 draft, taken with the first of two picks that the Orioles had in the draft’s supplemental round. That second pick was used on Brian Roberts, who was in Baltimore by 2001 and played more than 1,300 games for the team during a career that lasted until 2013, followed by a 2014 cameo season for the Yankees to end his playing days. Scott Rice’s journey, by contrast, had only progressed up to AAA by 2006, when the Orioles finally decided to part ways. He bounced to four more organizations and one independent team over the next few seasons, mostly pitching at AA, until he finally made an MLB roster with the Mets in 2013. On April 1, 2013, as Brian Roberts started his farewell season in Baltimore, a 31-year-old Scott Rice notched two strikeouts in his MLB debut to become the first MLB player in the history of Royal High School after fourteen seasons spent in the minor leagues.
Nine years after Rice had been drafted and during a season when he pitched for the Long Island Ducks, the Dodgers selected Matt Magill out of Royal High with their 31st-round pick. Less than half of the players drafted in the 31st round of the 2008 draft signed with a team, but Magill was among them. Nobody drafted in the 31st round has any doors opened to them beyond that initial crack, so Magill’s subsequent promotions through the minors were a byproduct of consistently strong performance at each level. A strong season at AA in 2012 positioned Magill to pitch at AAA in 2013, with potential for an MLB debut down the road. That opportunity came earlier than expected, with Magill making a strong spot start on April 27, 2013 to become the second MLB player in Royal High School history, twenty-six days after Scott Rice became the first.
Let’s handle the trade before we get back to questions of relative success. Magill’s first start against the Brewers went so well that the Dodgers gave him a few more opportunities, none of which were as good and most of which were bad. He spent most of the rest of the season at AAA Albuquerque, which was reasonable given his development timeline, but the results at AAA weren’t encouraging either. Magill pitched the entire 2014 season at AAA without getting another opportunity to rejoin the MLB roster. There was recent evidence of him being a promising young MLB player, but it was increasingly vague and distant at this point. Chris Heisey had less promise, but also offered unmistakable value as a quality defensive outfielder. This was something of an odd fit for a Dodgers team that already felt like it had too many outfielders, which signified the potential for other moves down the road (we’ll have more on that in about two weeks).
This trade went poorly for both teams, though slightly better for the Dodgers. Heisey’s expected role as regular center fielder ended up being taken by ascendant rookie Joc Pederson, and the still-crowded outfield meant that Heisey spent more time than anybody expected at AAA Oklahoma City. He was a mediocre hitter in his limited opportunities with the MLB club and was ultimately released around the trade deadline. Heisey joined the Blue Jays on a minor league deal and then, less than a month after that, the Dodgers traded to acquire him again? Unfortunately this trade was just for cash considerations, so we won’t be revisiting this in a few months, but there wouldn’t be much to say anyways. Heisey left the Dodgers (for good this time) after the 2015 season, closing down his MLB career with two successively declining seasons for the Nationals.
This disappointing outcome still constitutes a win for the Dodgers because Matt Magill made three starts with a 7.90 ERA in AAA before his 2015 ended as a result of Tommy John surgery. When Magill returned to the Reds in 2016, he switched to the bullpen, which still didn’t produce good results in the 4.1 innings he threw for Cincinnati. He was out of MLB in 2017, but returned in 2018 and stuck around through 2020 as an inconsistent reliever with the Twins and Mariners. Magill retired in February of 2022, citing lingering shoulder injuries that made it impossible to throw without discomfort and pain. He’s now a mental performance coach in the Rangers organization.
As we return to the question of success, let’s close the book on Scott Rice. A quality 2013 season was followed by a poor start to the 2014 season, which ended with a demotion to the minor leagues in June followed by elbow surgery in July. That concluded Scott Rice’s MLB career, which ended with 64.2 innings pitched in 105 games. Because these innings were often ineffective, Rice’s career WAR is -0.1 according to Baseball Reference. His fellow Royal HS alum Matt Magill pitched substantially more innings (149.2) in slightly more games (112). But his ERA and WHIP are both a little bit worse, and his WAR for his career is a slightly but meaningfully lower -0.6.
So who is the most successful baseball player in the history of Simi Valley’s Royal High School? Is it Scott Rice ‘99, whose early draft selection sparked an odyssey that eventually got him to the majors for an unspectacular year and a half? Or is it Matt Magill ‘08, who got there faster and stuck around longer, allowing him to compile more harmful statistics? Should we only consider MLB statistics, giving the advantage to Magill’s longer tenure, or should we consider that at the comparative point in his career when Magill’s shoulder had failed him, Rice was just on the verge of making his MLB debut? Does playing fourteen minor league seasons make you more or less successful? In a sport where the only constant is failure, can success be defined by just having the opportunity to fail on the highest possible stages?
You could go crazy trying to answer these questions and fortunately we don’t have to. The best baseball player in the history of Royal High School is Eric King ‘82, who wasn’t drafted and pitched at Moorpark College before being kicked off the team when he showed up to an away game with his home uniform. After he was kicked off his college team, the Giants signed him as an undrafted free agent and traded him to the Tigers and he went on to compile 9.6 WAR during his seven-year MLB career. Glad we settled that.
December 3, 2014
Toronto Blue Jays receive: Michael Saunders
Seattle Mariners receive: J.A. Happ
Before we start this one in earnest, we should note that (a) unlike Buddy Borden, baseball player Michael Saunders has managed to knock both the economist and the math professor out of the top search results and (b) the Florida real estate company is named after a different Michael Saunders and there’s no evidence that this one has become a realtor.
Here’s a quote for you to react to, coming from Mariners’ GM Jack Zduriencik’s season-ending press conference:
It’s up to Michael … He was playing well, got hurt, came back, got sick, came back again and did some nice things. But I think what Michael has to do and has to answer this to himself, is ‘how do I prepare myself to play as many games through the course of 162 that I can possibly play without being setback by injury.’ … some of these things need to be handled from a maintenance standpoint where he puts himself in a position where he’s able to compete over the course of a season.
Any thoughts? The quote is cliche-riddled and boring on its face, but what’s clear if you force yourself to think about it is that responsibility is being allocated to Saunders. Not atypical for a professional athlete, but there’s an undercurrent of disappointment or even resentment in the implication that Saunders “had to answer” the question of how to prepare for a season, suggesting that his injury setbacks were something that could have been “handled from a maintenance standpoint.” Perhaps these emotions make sense from Jack Z – after all, Saunders was a top-50 prospect going into the 2010 season who had flashed promise in recent years, but only played 78 games in 2014 after missing time in prior seasons with a wide-ranging set of ailments. It’s a generic enough quote about athletes, but one that feels suitable to the present situation.
You might feel differently if you were the player in question, and you empirically would if you were Michael Saunders, who took exception to Jack Z’s words. This was the first time that Saunders had heard a peep from the organization about his preparation and it didn’t make sense that the comments were being made at a press conference rather than directly from a coach. Saunders’ agent Michael McCann used the words “shocking” and “very disappointing” before reiterating that “these comments don’t reflect Michael Saunders’ work habits. They imply that he’s lackadaisical.” In truth, they didn’t totally reflect reality, either. While Saunders was limited in 2014, an oblique strain that season resulted in the first lengthy absence of his career. Past absences had generally been worked through quickly and had causes like “finger laceration” or “neck stiffness - crashed into wall” that couldn’t exactly be avoided by incorporating yoga. He played more than 130 games in 2012 and 2013, posting above-average offensive numbers, and took another step forward in the smaller sample of 2014. Whatever Michael Saunders had been doing to prepare had worked pretty well thus far.
While Jack Z tried and failed to repair the relationship in public (largely by noting that his comments were generic and boring), Saunders remained aggrieved and Zduriencik probably did believe some of what he had said. The word entering the GM meetings in November was that “both sides” were ready to move on. Saunders wasn’t traded that week, and a couple of weeks later he fired the agent who fiercely defended his work ethic, a weird wrinkle with unclear implications for this saga.
On the other side of the trade we had J.A. Happ. The “J.A.” in J.A. Happ stands for James Anthony but is pronounced “Jay” for some reason. Evidently, Happ decided on this naming convention for himself in first grade and no adult had the courage to tell him it was a bad idea. The name would be a lot more aggravating if not for the fact that J.A. Happ was currently playing for the Toronto Blue Jays, which made the situation acceptably funny. Happ started his career as a Philadelphia Phillie, won the 2008 World Series while retaining rookie eligibility, and then finished 2nd in Rookie of the Year voting during a breakout 2009 season. During the 2010 season, the Phillies embarked on their quest to build the Four Ace Rotation and Happ (plus Anthony Gose?) went to Houston as headliners in a trade package that brought Roy Oswalt to Philadelphia. That was J.A. Happ Trade #1.
Happ joined a bad Houston team that went 76-86 in 2010 and contributed to the problem as they declined to 56-106 in 2011, with his -1.7 WAR good for worst performance among Astros pitchers. The Astros remained awful in 2012, but Happ’s performance improved to “mediocre,” which was enough for him to be sent to Toronto as part of a wacky deadline trade where Happ and two relievers fetched seven minor leaguers in exchange. That was J.A. Happ Trade #2. Happ spent time in the bullpen that year and was identified as an “odd man out” by his own manager after the Jays reinforced their rotation that offseason, then spent that spring surrounded by trade rumors before surprisingly winning a rotation spot and then agreeing to a small extension with Toronto that guaranteed his salary for 2014 and introduced a club option for 2015. J.A. was happy to be a Jay, saying after the extension that “there was a long time before that where it wasn’t quite as easy, but this kind of makes it all worth it.”
Shortly after agreeing to that contract, J.A. Happ was hit in the head by a line drive and was hospitalized with a skull fracture. Happ made a full recovery, but it understandably took some time and cost him the bulk of his 2013 season. As he entered the final guaranteed year of his extension in 2014, it had been five years since he had pitched at an above-average caliber and time was running out to show promise. Happ picked a good time to figure things out, with improved results down the stretch including a 12-strikeout performance against the Orioles that resulted in a tough-luck loss. A couple days after that start, Fangraphs published a post titled “J.A. Happ Hasn’t Been J.A. Happ Lately,” which at that moment in time was intended to be a compliment.
After the season, Toronto exercised the team option in Happ’s contract, but the seeds of J.A. Happ Trade #3 were planted shortly after Marco Estrada came to town. Happ was generating “lots of interest” in trades given his affordable one-year salary, general reliability, and hint of further promise. For a Blue Jays team that had just announced their intent to win a World Series via the acquisition of Josh Donaldson, Saunders would reinforce an outfield that was already a weak spot in 2014 before the expected loss of Melky Cabrera (plus Anthony Gose?). And for a Toronto team that had just lost a Canadian via the departure of Brett Lawrie, the British Columbia-born Saunders would fill in the role of native son (ignore that his high school in Victoria is a little over 100 miles from the Mariners’ stadium and more than 2,700 from Toronto’s). Jays fans were enthused by both aspects of this trade.
Mariners fans, by contrast, were not. At Fangraphs, former Mariners blogger Jeff Sullivan cast this trade as a downgrade for Seattle and “as good a trade as a trade like this can be” for Toronto, characterizing this situation as one where “Toronto [got] to take advantage of the Mariners’ feelings” while Seattle “moved a hole from one place to another” given the need to find a replacement in right field. Sullivan pointed out that “Happ is a little worse than Saunders. He’s older than Saunders, he’s more expensive than Saunders, and he’s under control for less time than Saunders,” all fair points that led him to conclude that “in almost every way, the Mariners draw the short straw.” I’m not necessarily clear why Sullivan felt the need to qualify that with “almost” every way, but he did supplementally note that “there’s no way to see this as anything other than selling low” just to hammer home the disapproval.
There was a kernel of truth to every wrong opinion that surrounded this trade. Michael Saunders got hurt again in 2015, but the injury was a meniscus tear that he sustained after stepping on a sprinkler head while shagging fly balls in February. A new injury would seemingly vindicate Jack Z if not for the fact that this injury occurred while Saunders was seemingly doing the type of work necessary to prepare for a season.
A meniscus that’s sufficiently torn to require surgery can come in two different flavors. If a meniscus tear is small enough, the torn pieces can be stitched together in what is colloquially “meniscus repair.” When a meniscus tear is too severe to warrant repair, the damaged parts are simply trimmed away in a procedure called “meniscus removal” (these procedures are called other things too, but the repair/removal binary is the only way I remember this). Initial reports in February had Saunders out until the All-Star Break, suggesting a multi-month absence consistent with the longer recovery timeline of a meniscus repair. But after the surgery was completed, the Blue Jays announced that Saunders would only be out a few weeks after the damaged meniscus was removed instead, resulting in 60% of his left meniscus being cut away. This is the sort of thing that sounds like good news if you’re thinking about players solely in their capacity to play in baseball games today, but becomes bad if you take the time to consider whether it’s helpful for an athlete to have an intact version of the “shock absorber between your femur and tibia” that “play[s] an important role in knee stability.”
A couple of weeks after his meniscus removal, Saunders was back to baseball activities with whispers of being ready for opening day, though the team slow-played his return until later in April to make sure he could make a full recovery from surgery. He played in eight games from April 25 through May 3, with back-to-back two hit games suggesting that his timing was starting to return after a slow start to the season. Then he didn’t play again until May 9, then he went to the injured list for a reported three to five weeks as a result of what was called a “bone bruise” in the affected knee, then he received a cortisone shot and had fluid drained from that knee in an attempt to return to play, and finally he was shut down for the season in August, ending his first season in Toronto with six singles.
If you have two intact menisci, take a moment to appreciate them.
Meanwhile, J.A. Happ continued to pitch with workmanlike mediocrity for a losing Mariners team until the trade deadline, when he was sent to the Pirates as the headliner of J.A. Happ Trade #4 (more on that in a few months). Happ went absolutely bananas in Pittsburgh, putting together the best 11-start stretch of his career in an excellent platform before his free agency. Seattle gets no credit for and derived no benefit from this surge of elite performance from J.A. Happ and would probably prefer it never happened.
After the 2015 season, it would seem that the swap of Michael Saunders and J.A. Happ had no winner at all (but probably Seattle if you had to pick one and weren’t allowed to choose the Pirates). Then, two things happened to swing the needle firmly in Toronto’s favor. Most obviously, Saunders had an offseason to rest his knee and produced an amazing first half of the 2016 season that resulted in an All-Star selection, making good on the potential that rendered him a highly-touted prospect. But more importantly, from our perspective, free agent J.A. Happ signed a multi-year contract with the Blue Jays and then continued to pitch at a new level of effectiveness, finishing 6th in AL Cy Young voting in 2016. If every player involved in a trade is having the best season of their career on your team eighteen months later, you automatically win the trade.
Unfortunately, Saunders really only put it together during the first half of 2016 and played his last MLB game during the 2017 season as a 30-year-old whose best years and good knees were already behind him. He transitioned to managing in the Braves’ minor league system but has now taken a job with the title “outfield baserunning coordinator” that allows him to be home with his family during the season. J.A. Happ stuck around for a few more seasons and played for a few more teams, which we’ll elaborate on when we discuss J.A. Happ Trade #5 (summer 2028) and J.A. Happ Trade #6 (summer 2031).
December 5, 2014
Detroit Tigers receive: Shane Greene
Arizona Diamondbacks receive: Domingo Leyba, Robbie Ray
New York Yankees receive: Didi Gregorius
This post is gonna go long, huh?
It’s a little strange to see these three teams involved in a trade together. About five years beforehand, the same three teams linked up for a deal involving Max Scherzer (and Austin Jackson, whose future three-team trade allowed us to revisit this previously). Three-team trades are rare and always exciting; three-team trades that include a future Cy Young award winner are special treats indeed.
At least, I thought so. But Didi Gregorius had arrived in Arizona two years earlier as part of a three-team deal where Gregorius went from the Reds to Diamondbacks, Shin-Soo Choo was sent from Cleveland to Cincinnati, and future Cy Young winner Trevor Bauer went from Arizona to Cleveland (although he would confusingly win his Cy Young with Cincinnati). The Amsterdam-born, Curacao-raised Gregorius was a strong defensive shortstop based on talent and (mostly) reputation who hadn’t shown much ability to hit in his 191 games of MLB action so far. In 2014, he had been beaten for the starting shortstop job by Chris Owings and spent much of the season dominating the competition at AAA. Gregorius was probably a starting-quality shortstop by this point, but Arizona didn’t have room for him to be one.
Fortunately for Gregorius, the Yankees had played the entire 2014 season with a massive liability at shortstop position and now had a legitimate hole once that liability finally retired. A big difference between 2014 and now is the amount of shortstop talent available – many of today’s most entrenched stars at the position were on the doorsteps of MLB in 2014, but had yet to debut. The market at shortstop was limited, and it wasn’t clear what upgrades were possible outside of a whaling pursuit of Troy Tulowitzki or Hanley Ramirez. Gregorius had question marks, but also had clear potential at age 24 to be a long-term solution at shortstop for a franchise that hadn’t had to think about the position for the past twenty years.
Acquiring Didi Gregorius cost New York a compelling young pitcher in Shane Greene. Greene was a 15th-round draft pick and never had much regard as a prospect, but pushed his way to the majors in 2014 and was effective in 14 starts he made for the big club. The Yankees had planned to give Greene another opportunity in the rotation, but the available pool of pitchers was sufficiently larger than the pool of shortstops for the Yankees to justifiably prioritize this shift in resources.
The Yankees were happy to swap found money in Greene for a solid young player in Gregorius, but the Diamondbacks rejected the Yankees’ proposed one-for-one trade. Instead, Arizona chose a two-part package with younger players from Detroit. Robbie Ray had joined the Tigers just about a year earlier in a trade that sent Doug Fister to Washington, but his stock had diminished in 2014 as unimpressive results in AAA were accompanied by dreadful results in his debut MLB appearances, with his once-impressive strikeout rate cratering all the while. Domingo Leyba was a 19-year-old who was coming off an electric full-season debut, posting a .397 batting average in his 30 games of A-ball. He was an exciting prospect at an age where nobody is all that confident in projecting a player’s MLB ability.
In the popular imagination, the story of this trade mostly involved the Yankees finding a shortstop to replace Derek Jeter. Shane Greene was seen as a painful piece to part with, but the logic was at least traceable. Ray and Leyba were something of afterthoughts, with Fangraphs’ Jeff Sullivan expressing the viewpoint that he’d rather have acquired Greene. Still, Sullivan was able to articulate a reasonable rationale for Arizona in the “interesting matter of prospect pedigree versus results.” Greene had performed well in a small sample size at the MLB level, but was never much of an amateur prospect. Ray and Leyba were each farther away from doing so, but had a clearer set of tools in the eyes of scouts. It was particularly notable that Arizona had just hired Mike Russell from the Tigers front office, who was said to know the two acquired prospects very well.
On April 15, 2015, Joel Sherman wrote “the replacement for Derek Jeter is playing horribly and the main guy traded for Didi Gregorius is performing like a Cy Young candidate, thus the Yankees’ most important move of the offseason – and arguably one of their most vital in years – is a Di-minus one week into the schedule.” Unbelievable that an editor allowed that pun to be printed (Trades Ten Years Later does not have an editor, which is why “J.A. was happy to be a Jay” was allowed to be printed 20 paragraphs ago).
Sherman’s next sentence acknowledges that this conclusion is intentionally premature, coming after Greene’s first two starts in Detroit. In fairness, those starts had each gone eight innings with zero earned runs, which is an absurdly strong way to make a first impression. Greene’s next start after Sherman’s article only lasted seven innings and involved one earned run, raising Greene’s ERA to a still-ridiculous 0.39. By contrast, Gregorius’s next game after Sherman’s article was another 0-for-4 performance that lowered his season slash line to .152/.194/.152. Robbie Ray was in AAA. After four months, it was looking like a runaway victory for Detroit.
There’s a reason we wait 116 months longer than that to make our evaluations, and it might’ve behooved Joel Sherman to wait even one or two more. Shane Greene gave up one earned run in his first 23 innings of 2015. Over his final 60.2 innings, he gave up 63 earned runs, which is about 24 times as bad if I’m doing my math right. The Tigers demoted Greene to AAA in June, then brought him back up to the majors for three more bad starts in July. His final two MLB appearances of the year came in relief, previewing an eventual role change. Greene’s year ended with -1.7 WAR despite the head start of good performances, making him one of the most destructive pitching forces of the 2015 season.
Meanwhile, Didi Gregorius cleaned up his offensive game to finish 2015 as a 3-WAR player with an acceptably below-average bat for a shortstop. Meanwhile meanwhile, Robbie Ray threw 127.2 innings in MLB and performed like an above-average starter, suggesting that the Diamondbacks had chosen wisely by swapping their pitching returns. Domingo Leyba’s year in the minor leagues was disappointing, but any contribution from him was basically a bonus if Robbie Ray was going to be better than Shane Greene. At the 12-month mark, this trade looked like a massive victory for New York and Arizona at the expense of Detroit.
And that’s basically what it ends up as at the 10-year mark, though the scale of the advantages has considerably softened. Greene’s transition back to the bullpen was effective, eventually and generally speaking. Another poor season in 2016 was followed by a dominant season in 2017, which in turn was followed by another really bad season in 2018 and then an All-Star appearance in 2019. The Tigers traded Greene away shortly after the All-Star break, ending his career in Detroit on a high note with demonstrated multi-octave range.
The Tigers would’ve rather had Robbie Ray, a pitcher who was also inconsistent year-to-year but whose range of results included higher highs and higher lows. Any difficulty that Ray faced striking out MLB hitters in the early stages of his career was quite thoroughly solved by 2016, when he eclipsed the 200-strikeout mark for the first time even as he allowed several more runs to score. His 2017 season featured identical strikeout (218) and walk (71) totals to 2016, but his ERA was two runs lower in an All-Star season where Ray finished 7th in NL Cy Young voting. This would end up as Ray’s best season in Arizona; his worst season would come with unfortunate timing in his final year of team control, resulting in his cut-rate trade to Toronto in 2020. Improved results induced Ray to sign with the Blue Jays on an $8 million deal for 2021, a magical season where Ray led baseball with 248 strikeouts and captured a Cy Young award.
Arizona swapping Greene for Ray (and Leyba, whose time in the majors was short and bad) was a savvy move, but it’s hard not to feel sympathy for the Diamondbacks. Every three-team trade they make involves an eventual Cy Young winner. In the two earlier three-team trades, they were the ones giving up the eventual Cy Young. This time, they had the good sense to trade for the Cy Young, but then they traded him away one year too soon. What’s even more brutal is that they sort of made the right decision in trading Ray away. One season after signing a 5-year, $115 million contract with the Mariners, Ray blew out his elbow and required Tommy John surgery. He was traded to San Francisco while recovering and made his first return from the injury in 2024 before missing the final month of the season with a hamstring strain. But he should be back in 2025 and will continue working on his historically significant career – the pitcher who seemed unable to strikeout MLB hitters in 2014 has managed to punch them out at the third-highest rate in history among pitchers with 1,000 innings.
The story of Didi Gregorius is a little more ambiguous. According to Baseball-Reference WAR, Gregorius was worth 15.1 wins in his time as a Yankee, making him by far the most valuable player in the trade for the relevant time period. But the reputed defender ended up producing most of his value with the bat and the surprising development of 20+ home run power, with the most favorable fielding metrics rating him as a roughly average shortstop defender. The less favorable fielding metrics thought he was a disaster. According to Statcast’s Outs Above Average Leaderboard, which goes back to 2016, Gregorius has been the worst defender at shortstop by a substantial margin. Gregorius ranks 38th among the 38 qualified shortstops with -76 OAA. 37th place is at -62 and 36th place is at -34.
That’s a lot of numbers, but look at them again. Don’t let them gloss over you. Gregorius ranks 38th among the 38 qualified shortstops in Statcast history with -76 (negative seventy-six) Outs Above (Below) Average. 37th place is at -62 (substantially better than negative-seventy six) and 36th place is at -34 (not even half as bad as negative seventy-six).
It’s fun to joke about the defensive metrics, but maybe the metrics just hate Yankee shortstops. The important thing to remember is that Gregorius was given the impossible task of replacing not just a future Hall of Famer, but the most iconic player from an iconic generation of baseball’s most iconic franchise. Somehow, he succeeded. When Gregorius left New York to sign with the Phillies in free agency after the 2019 season, the outpouring from Yankees fans was heartfelt and basically unanimous. Didi would be missed. The Yankees hoped to use a 15th-round pitcher to acquire five years worth of a Derek Jeter replacement and nailed the assignment. Nice work.
Things went off the rails quickly for Gregorius, who put up 1.2 WAR in a pandemic-shortened 2020 season and then knocked his Phillies total back down to 0.0 over the next two seasons (which consisted of 166 games in total). Gregorius was released in August of 2022 and may have played his final MLB game at the age of 32. His age-34 season was his second consecutive year playing for Algodoneros de Union Laguna in the Mexican League, with this year’s .772 OPS among the lower figures on the squad. At least it was better than Domingo Leyba, whose .610 OPS in 2024 was the worst among all Olmeca de Tabasco players with more than 70 plate appearances, or Shane Greene, whose 16.88 ERA in 2024 was the worst among any Round Rock Express pitcher with at least 8.0 innings pitched.
Evidently I didn’t give enough credit to Robbie Ray on his acceptable 4.70 ERA in seven starts returning from Tommy John surgery. Congratulations to him on still getting it done ten years later.