New Front Office, Same Old Mistakes

Except not all front offices were new, not all the new ones made mistakes, and some of the mistakes were also new.

November 13, 2014
Detroit Tigers receive: Anthony Gose
Toronto Blue Jays receive: Devon Travis

Intuitively, this feels like one of those perfectly-balanced Estrada-for-Lind swaps to me, but that’s not really supported by foresight or hindsight. Anthony Gose was a top-100 prospect before he debuted for Toronto in 2012 and was an “established major leaguer” in the sense that he had played in 202 MLB games across parts of three seasons. But the term “established major leaguer” implies a level of demonstrated aptitude that was not yet present for Anthony Gose, who had hit poorly in each of his samples and was not performing that much better in AAA. Gose was a high school draftee who had just turned 24 and was still young and athletic enough to dream on his potential as a five-tool center fielder, even if there seemed to be at least a couple of tools missing from his chest in the present reality. 

By contrast, Devon Travis hadn’t made his MLB debut yet, though he seemed to be right on the cusp. The Tigers drafted Travis out of Florida State in the 13th round of the 2012 draft and he quickly outhit that draft status, demonstrating a carrying tool that elevated the rest of his otherwise solidly-average profile. Travis seemed like he could play second base well enough to hold down the position and produce enough power and speed to occasionally capitalize on those threats. After another great pro season at AA Erie, Travis was regarded as a top-5 prospect in the Tigers’ system, though that didn’t mean much in a system that most thought was among the worst in baseball. 

But John Sickels, who was an early fan of Travis, registered his disagreement with the disrepute and distinguished the Detroit farm system as only “thin” rather than “weak.” “The Tigers have a strategy, they execute it well, and they’ve shown they can produce players who can fill holes, either through trade or direct insertion into the lineup when necessary,” Sickels noted. He had a point; the names on the prospect list included Travis, Nick Castellanos, Robbie Ray, and Eugenio Suarez, among other future big-leaguers. Unfortunately for Detroit, general manager Dave Dombrowski was about to send most of the good ones away in trades over the next few weeks, rather than saving them for direct insertion.

In our last post, we noted that the most recent peak for the Angels came in the 2014 season — a team that won 98 games that year has not been back to the playoffs since and just lost their most games ever in 2024. The Detroit Tigers have followed this same contour, following early decade dominance with ten years of nearly uninterrupted despair. The team won 87 games in 2016 and went on an unbelievable second-half run to make it back to the playoffs this season, but otherwise everything that happens to the Tigers from this trade forward will generally erode at what has been a first-class organization. And unlike the Angels trade we were discussing at the time we made this point, this transaction was part of the downfall, albeit a small one. 

When the deal was completed at the GM meetings, prospect writer Keith Law dismissed the move in a since-deleted tweet as “failed prospect [referring to Gose] for non-prospect [referring to Travis].” In fact, Baseball America had just ranked Travis as Detroit’s #1 prospect, but that came with caveats and not everyone was high on Travis’s MLB ability. The price did seem high for Anthony Gose, but the Tigers had already pushed anything they had resembling a poker chip into the middle of the table. Gose’s ability to contribute to an MLB team had already been demonstrated and he seemed like a safer bet to do so in 2015 than Devon Travis.

That did not turn out to be correct. Gose did spend essentially the whole season starting in center field for Detroit, posting a .254/.321/.367 slash line that was both starkly unimpressive but also the best hitting performance of Gose’s career. The next season, Gose got off to a terrible 30-game start to the season and earned a demotion to AAA Toledo. While there, Gose got into an altercation with manager Lloyd McClendon during game one of a doubleheader, which culminated with Gose shouting expletives at McClendon, cleaning out his locker, and then getting demoted to AA as punishment. He was designated for assignment after the 2016 season and never returned to the Tigers’ active roster.

Making matters worse, Devon Travis hit the ground running in Toronto. Despite spending the entire 2014 season in AA, Travis won the MLB starting second baseman job and immediately thrived, putting together an April that earned him AL Rookie of the Month as well as Blue Jays Player of the Month. The fun ended prematurely, as Travis was placed on the injured list with a shoulder injury that eventually required a couple of surgeries. Still, he had put together a 62-game rookie cameo worth 2.1 WAR – more than Gose had been worth in his entire career. 

Unfortunately, this rookie year foreshadowed all aspects of Devon Travis as an MLB player. The shoulder surgeries prevented Travis from starting his 2016 MLB season until May 25. He was still an above-average hitter, if slightly less torrid than his first year, but then got pulled from Toronto’s playoff roster due to a progressively worsening knee injury. Travis was only 25 years old, but was more than halfway through his MLB career and past all the best parts of it. His remaining two seasons were ineffective and injury-marred as the knee continued to pose complications, with a potential 2019 season entirely missed after spring training meniscus surgery. In spring of 2021, Devon Travis officially retired as a player and became a minor league coach for the Braves. He’s now a college baseball analyst for ESPN and seemingly also a realtor, like all retired baseball players. A couple of years later, Devon’s younger brother Jordan Travis would have his own controversial injury after sustaining a broken leg while playing quarterback for Florida State that cost the still-undefeated Seminoles an opportunity to compete in the College Football Playoff. 

The reason why Gose for Travis intuitively feels like an even trade is because the initial swap was between two young players who were seen to still have some amount of future growth potential, but ultimately get remembered as “what could have been.” The two reasons why it wasn’t even, at all, are (1) Travis’s limited MLB career produced much more on-field value than Gose’s and (2) most of the MLB value that Gose produced was in a Blue Jays uniform, anyways. The Tigers lost this one! It’s not close!

Or at least, the Tigers lost this one so far, since we still need to unpack a bizarre epilogue. Nobody claimed Anthony Gose after the Tigers designated him for assignment in 2017, so he remained in their minor league system. That spring, he suggested attempting a conversion to pitcher to take advantage of the 97 mph velocity he demonstrated in high school. Gose told scouts at the time that he preferred to hit and would use pitching as a fallback option; evidently the time had come for falling back. Detroit cut Gose loose after one season of the experiment, but he developed further in the Rangers’ system in 2018 and then signed with Cleveland in 2019. Gose was still only pitching at lower levels of the minors, but was starting to actually see promising results. The cancellation of the minor league season in 2020 had potential to scuttle this progress, but Gose continued to pitch in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic before finally making it to AAA in 2021. Then, on September 20, Anthony Gose appeared in his first MLB game since 2016 as he pitched against the Kansas City Royals. He allowed a run in that game, but it was the only one he allowed in six appearances that season.

Anthony Gose managed to climb to the big leagues twice, first as an outfielder and then as a member of the bullpen. But now that he had received his triumph, it was time to endure the tribulations of being an MLB relief pitcher. It wasn’t long before the obvious – Gose was placed on the injured list in August of 2022 with arm problems that eventually required Tommy John surgery and kept him out of action through 2023. Welcome to the world of pitching, Anthony.

Gose made it back to MLB in 2024 on three separate occasions, surrendering runs in all three. Gose didn’t (doesn’t!) have any minor league options by virtue of his meandering career thus far, so to get him off their MLB roster, Cleveland needed to designate him for assignment, allow him to pass through waivers, and then assign him to the minors if no other team claimed him. The net result is a transaction log that evokes a toxic relationship, with Cleveland repeatedly releasing and signing Gose:

Gose is now a free agent once again and we will see if any team besides Cleveland wants to sign him this time. Maybe the Tigers want to make a final push to win this trade!

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November 14, 2014
Arizona Diamondbacks receive: Jeremy Hellickson
Tampa Bay Rays receive: Andrew Velazquez and Justin Williams

Part of the appeal to being comprehensive with Trades Ten Years Later is that the mediocre transactions can be more illustrative than the blockbusters. When the Rays trade away David Price in the penultimate of his team control years but get Willy Adames in exchange, it activates a memory that you might have forgotten, but knew was there. You probably (hopefully?) can’t say the same about “Jeremy Hellickson for Andrew Velasquez and Justin Williams,” but this trade provides us with a more generalizable example of what led to the respective trajectories of these two franchises. It’s particularly notable considering that this was the first trade for each of Dave Stewart and Matt Silverman as the senior baseball executives in Arizona and Tampa Bay, respectively. 

Did you know that Jeremy Hellickson is just one guy?

Jeremy Hellickson was the headliner here. A 4th-round draft pick in 2005, Hellickson had the fortune to be drafted by the Rays as they entered their era of competence and developed into the 2011 AL Rookie of the Year. But Hellickson’s 4.44 rookie FIP suggested that his 2.95 rookie ERA had been unsustainably fortunate, and as Hellickson’s ERA did in fact fluctuate over the next few seasons his FIP stayed pretty close to the low-mid 4s. His 2014 had been impacted by a late start after a spring surgery to remove “loose bodies” in his elbow, but still counted as a bounceback compared to a terrible 2013. 

With two years left of team control, the time would ordinarily be right for the Rays to trade Hellickson anyways. But this need was particularly pronounced as Tampa Bay had stated intent to reduce payroll beyond 2014’s already paltry $76 million figure. Since the spendthrift nature of the team meant that there weren’t many “overpaid” players hanging around, the only way to make cuts would be to cobble together enough “fairly-paid” players in hopes of replacing them with “underpaid” major league contributors. The Rays will make four more trades before the end of 2014, all of which serve to cut payroll obligations by a couple million dollars at a time. Hellickson’s departure would save the Rays about $4.25 million and it wasn’t clear that his continued presence would result in that level of performance.

The two prospects headed back to Tampa Bay had a combined age of 39 years. 20 of those came from Andrew Velasquez, a 7th-round draft pick in 2012 who put himself firmly on the prospect radar in 2014 with a 74-game on-base streak that broke the minor league record. The other 19 belonged to Justin Williams, a 2nd-round draft pick in 2013 who was hitting well enough in the minors to distract from the fact that his projected power hadn’t quite shown up yet. Neither player was going to make it to MLB any time soon, but both had the potential to be serious contributors if they got there. There weren’t many things that the Tampa Bay Rays could afford, but patience was among them. 

Ostensibly new front office regimes in each of Arizona and Tampa Bay gave each fanbase an opportunity to use this trade as a litmus test for the future. In general, the future seemed like it was going to look a whole lot like the past. Rays fans were thrilled with the move and Diamondbacks fans were not optimistic, and it’s not difficult to fathom why. Hellickson was a proven MLB player, but not all that recently, and even the best years weren’t necessarily exciting. Velasquez and Williams weren’t proven, but that also meant they weren’t conclusively proven to be boring like Hellickson. 

As he seems to have reliably done numerous times in 2014, Jeff Sullivan at Fangraphs hit the nail on the head with his closing synopsis: “Odds are, Arizona won’t miss the prospects they dealt. Odds are, after he’s gone, Arizona won’t miss Jeremy Hellickson.” The latter date came precisely one year later; after another season with a mid-4s ERA across 27 starts, Arizona flipped Hellickson to Philadelphia on the anniversary of his arrival. According to Fangraphs, he was worth 1.0 WAR; according to Baseball-Reference, he was worth 0.0.

Williams and Velasquez combined to make 25 plate appearances for the Rays before they were both traded for international bonus slot money (more on that in just a moment). Baseball-Reference also gives these two a combined contribution of 0.0 WAR to the Rays, but that’s because they penalize Williams with -0.1 WAR for grounding into a double play in his only plate appearance for the team. Seems harsh, but it actually could be worse – because this double play came with two runners on in the 7th inning of a game that the Rays lost by one run, Williams’ WPA- of -0.156 means that he did more than anyone else on the team to lose the Rays this particular game. Maybe the Diamondbacks won this trade after all. 

Velasquez spent his 2024 playing for the AAA Gwinnett Stripers and Williams spent his split between three different Atlantic League teams. Despite the fact that the Diamondbacks ostensibly added major league talent in this trade, the 2015 Rays finished with an 80-82 record one win better than the 79-83 Diamondbacks. 

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November 16, 2014
Chicago Cubs receive: Tommy La Stella, ATL international signing bonus slot #4
Atlanta Braves receive: Arodys Vizcaino, CHC international signing bonus slots #2, #3, and #4. 

The Braves were yet another organization going through transition at the top of the front office. Atlanta won the NL East in 2013, their first division title in seven seasons after a decade-long run of regular season dominance through the 1990s. But success proved to be fleeting, as the team skidded to a 79-83 finish in 2014 that cost former GM Frank Wren his job in September. The Braves entered the offseason with a new front office led by president of baseball operations John Hart and GM John Coppolella. Hart was a baseball lifer who received his first MLB general manager appointment in 1991, presiding over a successful run of Cleveland teams. Coppolella was also something of a baseball lifer, but his life had been thirty years (and one week) shorter than Hart’s, so that didn’t mean as much yet. He took an internship with the Yankees out of college in 2000 and joined the Braves front office in 2006. Together, the two men were going to get Atlanta back on track.

It’s gotta be a little awkward to be promoted from within as a replacement for a fired sports executive. You were probably involved with quite a few of the decisions the team has been making for the past few years, but those decisions went poorly enough that your boss just got fired for them. You probably didn’t get appointed to his job by doubling down on past practice in the interview. The most optimal move to maximize your future options is to repudiate those decisions to the extent possible and set a new direction for your regime. If you declare your intention to enter a rebuilding period, trading away veterans for younger talent, you inevitably buy yourself a few years to see whether your decisions work out. 

Atlanta’s two Johns will make several decisions in that vein, as we’ll see in the next couple of months. This is not one of them, for a few reasons. For one, both of these players had already made it to MLB, and Arodys Vizcaino got there well before Tommy La Stella did. For another, Arodys Vizcaino initially debuted for the Braves way back in 2011, making his acquisition more of a return than a redirect. Atlanta had acquired Vizcaino as a prospect from the Yankees in 2009, brought him to the majors as a 20-year-old in 2011, then traded him to Chicago shortly after he underwent Tommy John surgery in the spring of 2012. The recovery took longer than expected and Vizcaino ultimately required another elbow surgery in 2013, which prevented him from returning to MLB until a five-game stint in September of 2014. Typically, you do not set a new direction for your reign by reacquiring somebody whose short MLB career has mostly been spent with your franchise. 

The player going back to Chicago was a very minor Internet sensation by the name of Tommy La Stella, whose excellent work as a prospect left him projected to be a fringe MLB regular. He wasn’t going to hit for power and his defense at second base would be mediocre, but he sure could avoid striking out. After continuously hitting his way through the minors, La Stella spent about half the 2014 season at the MLB level and it went unspectacularly, with his performance grading out as roughly replacement level. In some sense, that’s pretty good! Many of the players that we discuss at Trades Ten Years Later are worse than replacement level. 

These are both interesting players with long MLB careers worth remembering. Unfortunately, we’re going to glance past them a little bit and talk about something else (it’s okay, both guys will get traded again). Part of this editorial decision acknowledges circumstances at the time of the trade, when it was already seen as a strange on-field fit for a rebuilding Braves team that lacked options at second base to trade their most obvious second baseman for a reliever and for a Cubs team stacked with too many top-notch infield prospects to pick up another. The more interesting piece of this trade came from the swapping of international bonus slots, a useful arbitrage that leveraged MLB’s international free agent signing rules. 

“International bonus slots” refer to signing bonuses that can be allocated to “international amateurs,” the non-draft pipeline for baseball players outside of the United States. In an effort to prevent teams from getting into bidding wars and giving (too many) millions of dollars to 16-year-olds, MLB institutes caps on the bonuses that can be offered to international amateurs. As was somewhat customary for teams at the time, the Cubs responded to these rules by conducting their international free agent signings in two-year cycles. During the 2013-14 cycle, the Cubs signed 27 players, including the top two prospects in the class in Eloy Jimenez and Gleyber Torres. The amounts paid were wildly in excess of what Chicago was allowed to spend under league rules, so they received penalties including a prohibition on signing any international amateurs for a bonus of more than $250,000 during the 2014-15 signing period. But that was fine, because they had basically just signed two classes worth of players in one year. This was a fairly standard practice and among the more palatable loopholes that MLB teams have exploited with regard to their international player pipelines.

Even though the Cubs would be limited from offering bonuses of consequence to international amateurs, they still received their standard bonus slot allocations. They couldn’t really spend this money, but they could trade it, which brings us to our present moment. A hitting prospect is generally seen as safer than a pitching prospect, and in this particular case La Stella’s path to MLB value was a bit more obvious than Vizcaino’s, but the Braves also picked up about $830,000 in permitted spending money on international amateurs. The Cubs couldn’t use that money anyways, so this trade had an easy path to being win-win. 

The reason we care about that $830,000 isn’t so much what the Braves did with it. Atlanta did sign Ronald Acuna Jr. in that international signing period, which is about the best outcome one could hope for in an international signing class, but they only paid him $100,000. They already had $100,000 before making this trade. Most of the new $830,000 seems to have been allocated to overpayment of Juan Yepez, which did little to affect the fortunes of the Atlanta Braves. But more than the players, we care about this transaction because of what it says about the new front office. John Coppollela and John Hart were at the reins now, and they wanted to start their tenure with as many resources as possible on the international market. 

A little more than three years after they took over, the two men lost their jobs as a result of an MLB investigation into Atlanta’s international signing practices. The Braves had fraudulently reported signing bonuses in subsequent signing periods that were lower than what players had actually been paid, paying the excess via an inflated signing bonus to a less-regarded prospect represented by the same agent. As punishment to the team, nine players fraudulently signed by the Braves were granted free agency, though none have become major leaguers of consequence. John Hart left his post semi-voluntarily and has seemingly transitioned into retirement, but John Coppollela received a lifetime ban (eventually overturned in 2023) due to his non-cooperation with the investigation.

I’ll be honest, I did expect that we’d eventually end up at this conclusion that the two Johns set their downfall in motion from their very first trade, but I thought it would feel more fun when we got here. Instead I re-read some of the most recent hyperlink and am feeling sympathy for John Coppollela. And now we’ve got to talk about them making trades for the next three years when I’ve already spoiled their ending. What a disaster. Maybe we should’ve just talked about Arodys Vizcaino’s fastball.