T10YL - Bryan Morris from Pittsburgh to Miami for... an MLB Draft Pick?
Did you even know they were allowed to do that?
The Names: Miami Marlins receive: Bryan Morris. Pittsburgh Pirates receive: 2014 Competitive Balance Round A pick (Connor Joe).
The Team Context: The Pittsburgh Pirates were a month and a half into the Ike Davis Era, the launch of which we discussed in April. Ike Davis was not fixing things; the team was languishing below .500 even after a season that redefined expectations in Pittsburgh baseball.
The 2014 Marlins roster feels completely inconsistent with popular connotations of the Miami Marlins. We have the benefit of hindsight to know that the Marlins have more frequently been among the league’s worst teams than a contender since this trade was made. But we also have the benefit of hindsight to know that basically everybody 24 and under on this roster went on to have a great MLB career. The outfield core of Giancarlo Stanton (24), Marcell Ozuna (23), and Christian Yelich (22) is obvious, but JT Realmuto (23) can’t be forgotten and Enrique Hernandez (22) shouldn’t be. Future 2023 World Series champions Nathan Eovaldi (24) and Andrew Heaney (23) pair with Brad Hand (24) and Anthony DeSclafani (24) to form a strong pitching foundation (and this excludes the ones we thought would be even better like Henderson Alvarez (24), Jarred Cosart (24), and the late Jose Fernandez (21)). But none of that young talent converted into winning records and most of those players are known for their work with other franchises.
If we put aside the World Series Championship in 2003 (and maybe even if we don’t), the greatest accomplishment of owner Jeffrey Loria and president David Samson’s tenure of Marlins stewardship is the construction of the stadium currently known as LoanDepot Park, which opened in 2012. Prior to the construction of the ballpark, the Marlins were tenants in the local football stadium, which contributed to low attendance and revenues. The Marlins hoped to open up their new stadium with a bang and signed star free agents like Jose Reyes, Mark Buehrle, and Heath Bell, but when the 2012 season started as poorly as possible, the team sold off these new additions and other team stars at the trade deadline. It didn’t go over well, with the two men vilified as charlatans who had orchestrated a rugpull on Miami-Dade County.
The Marlins spent 2013 planting seeds in their freshly scorched earth and, when the team was competitive to start 2014, capitalizing on the opportunity and resetting the public relations damage was imperative. The Marlins were hovering at .500 at the time of this trade – it had been three games over .500 until they got swept by Atlanta, with the final game featuring the only save of Shae Simmons’ MLB career. That series pushed them from 0.5 games back in the NL East to 3.0 games back.
The Player Context: If I wanted to talk about an interesting Bryan Morris trade, I’d go back to 2008. Morris was a first-round selection by the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 2006 MLB Draft, a quality he has in common with Clayton Kershaw. Kershaw had a quicker path to MLB, making his debut for the MLB team in May of 2008. While Kershaw was getting acquainted with his new home in Los Angeles, Bryan Morris was pitching his way to a 3.20 ERA for the Great Lakes Loons of the Midwest League, having missed the 2007 season with Tommy John surgery.
At the 2008 trade deadline, Bryan Morris was a key piece in the three-team swap that electrified the baseball world. Bryan Morris and soon-to-be-busted top prospect Andy LaRoche were sent to Pittsburgh, along with former Red Sox Craig Hansen and Brandon Moss. In exchange, Pittsburgh sent Jason Bay to Boston and Boston sent Manny Ramirez to Los Angeles. That’s clearly an awesome trade just from looking at names, and it gets even better when you consider what happened afterwards. Ramirez smashed 17 home runs in August and September on his way to a .396/.489/.743 slash line, Hollywood was rechristened as “Mannywood,” and the Dodgers surged to win the NL West. Jason Bay filled Ramirez’s shoes capably, winning his only Silver Slugger award in 2009, then left to sign a big contract with the New York Mets. This earned him the ire of Red Sox fans and, after Bay got off to a wretched start in New York, Mets fans as well.
The Pirates’ side of the trade was, well, less inspiring. Craig Hansen pitched his final MLB game nine months after arriving in Pittsburgh. Brandon Moss attained some success, substantially all of which came after he left town. LaRoche had a solid season in 2009 surrounded by a terrible 2008 and 2010. LaRoche and Moss were each non-tendered after the 2010 season. That leaves us with just Bryan Morris, who is going to get traded away for a draft pick by the time this post ends. If you’d like to read more about Jason Bay or Manny Ramirez, go buy a book or something. We’re beholden to the calendar, so let’s follow the last vestiges of the Pirates’ haul.
Morris looked to be a bad bet upon arrival. In his 2009 season, pitching for the Lynchburg Hillcats of the High-A Carolina League, Morris pitched to a 5.57 ERA in 15 starts as he walked more batters (34) than he struck out (32). Despite this poor performance, he needed to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being selected in the Rule 5 Draft, and the Pirates complied.
In 2010, Morris reported back to High-A, except he now played for the Bradenton Marauders of the Florida State League (the Pirates had swapped minor league franchises with the Reds over the offseason). Morris evidently liked Bradenton more than Lynchburg (shocker!), because his 0.60 ERA through his first 8 starts was enough to get him kicked out of town and up to AA for the latter two-thirds of the season. He was converted to the bullpen in 2011 and, on June 24, 2012, the Pirates called Bryan Morris up to the major leagues to join the Pittsburgh bullpen. Morris told his wife first, since she was at the AAA Indianapolis ballpark when he got the news, then called his parents. “They were excited,” he recalled, reportedly smiling, “It’s been a while since I’ve actually heard my dad cry.” But Morris didn’t get into a game that night, and then on June 25, 2012, the Pirates needed a roster spot for Jeff Karstens, so Morris was sent down to AAA, becoming a phantom major leaguer. He had been on the 40-man roster for a couple of years and spent a day on the 25-man roster, but he hadn’t played any MLB baseball yet. Sure, he eventually got to make his debut, but not until September 14 — almost two months after his initial call-up.
A prospect who makes the majors but fails to live up to their perceived potential spends some period of their MLB career in limbo. By the tail-end of 2012, Morris’s hype had already diminished somewhat, but he was still seen as a pitcher with “the stuff to be a future closer in the majors” despite the lack of hard evidence that he could do that. He spent most of the 2013 season with the MLB team and worked out of the bullpen on the way to Pittsburgh’s greatest season in decades, but pitched more like a pedestrian middle reliever who didn’t strike out enough guys and walked too many. He was now seven years removed from being selected in the first round and it was starting to look like this was the best he could do.
The Trade: This is still a bit early with respect to the MLB Trade Deadline, but the inclusion of a draft pick imposed a different sort of deadline; the 2014 MLB Draft was scheduled to begin on June 5. It’s tough to explain what animated this trade without getting too deep in the weeds of MLB Draft rules, but hopefully we can grab the information we need and get out safely.
As a general rule, and unlike every other major American sports league, MLB teams are not allowed to trade draft picks. The protection was intended to prevent low-revenue teams from selling away their picks and was expanded in 1985 to include a prohibition on trading players within one year of their selection in the draft (a rule that was often circumvented and which was one year away from being abolished at the time of this trade). An exception is made for competitive balance picks, which are supplementary draft picks allocated to the lowest-revenue or smallest market teams in MLB. Teams are allowed to trade these picks, but each competitive balance pick can only be traded one time.
There were a few factors that put the Marlins in prime position to trade a draft pick. For starters, their terrible 2013 season meant they would be picking 2nd overall in the 2014 Draft. Then, they got lucky in the then-existing Competitive Balance Lottery, which resulted in their competitive balance pick landing in Round A (at the end of the first round) rather than Round B (at the end of the second round). This was further buttressed by the compensation pick they would receive for failing to sign their 2013 draft pick from the competitive balance round, Matt Krook. With three of the first 39 picks and a roster that already had plenty of young talent, it made sense for the Marlins to convert one of those future chips into present value.
Meanwhile, the Pirates had grown accustomed to early draft picks over the preceding decades but were all the way down the draft board at pick #24 after they actually played well in 2013. Making matters worse, the Competitive Balance Lottery put their pick in Round B. Pirates fans were thrilled to get a first-round pick back for a guy that they “wanted to DFA or give away for a bag of baseballs.” Marlins fans weren’t too thrilled with the so-called bullpen reinforcement they were picking up in this trade, but acknowledged that a pedestrian middle reliever was still better than what they had trotted out of the bullpen.
The Results: Bryan Morris made enough of a first impression that by June 11, Marlins fans were asking “how about Bryan Morris?”. He left the Pirates with a 3.80 ERA on the season and had already chiseled it down to 3.10 by the time of that post. By August 20, he had cut that ERA down to 1.81 and Marlins fans were taking victory laps, asking “is anyone still salty about trading the sandwich pick for Bryan Morris?”. The poster pointed out that Morris had been “vital to this recent run,” but unfortunately that hot streak was only enough to bring the Marlins back to 63-63 after a couple of vicious losing streaks over the summer. The Marlins ultimately finished 77-85, 4th in the NL East and 11 games out of a Wild Card spot, but not because of any deficiencies from Bryan Morris; he had a 0.66 ERA in 40.2 innings as a 2014 Marlin.
Morris was still under team control for several more seasons and spent the next two in Miami, but his 2016 was derailed by back problems that put him on the injured list and resulted in surgery in May. In September, the Marlins decided to designate him for assignment, concluding his career with the team and leaving him with a 2.30 career ERA in 130 games as a Marlin. The underlying numbers never supported this level of effectiveness, as the 96 strikeouts and 48 walks he put up in this timespan look like they belong in the 1940s, but the run prevention is all that really matters. By Baseball Reference’s WAR calculation, Bryan Morris was worth 2.7 wins above replacement in his career. 2.6 of those wins above replacement came when he was a Marlin.
Having multiple early picks in the 2014 Draft wasn’t enough for the Marlins to select any good players. With the #2 pick, they took a high school pitcher named Tyler Kolek who never made it past A-ball. With the #36 pick, they took a high school catcher named Blake Anderson, who never even made it up to A-ball. With the #39 pick originally controlled by Miami, the Pirates took Connor Joe, an outfielder from the University of San Diego. You might think this worked out really nicely if you know that Connor Joe is currently an everyday player for Pittsburgh (first base, some outfield), but this came after a circuitous path that involved four subsequent trades and a Rule 5 draft selection. Joe’s post-draft tenure in the Pittsburgh farm system ended in August of 2017, when he was traded to Atlanta for Sean Rodriguez, a former Pirate who many remember for beating up a water cooler (we’ll discuss that further in August of 2027).
The Aftermath: On December 6, 2016, former Pirates closer Mark Melancon agreed to a four-year, $62 million contract with the San Francisco Giants. While on a post-signing conference call with reporters, Melancon mentioned that he had talked with former teammate Bryan Morris about playing for the Giants. This was curious, as Morris was a free agent, but general manager Bobby Evans clarified to reporters that the team and Morris were in the final stages of negotiating a minor league contract. Melancon ultimately got credit for breaking the story of Morris’s signing with the Giants.
Morris was up with the MLB Giants by May 2 and made his San Francisco debut against the Dodgers, where he came into a game with his team trailing 10-5 and left with his team trailing 13-5. His 2017 ERA declined from its initial benchmark of 27.00, but allowing 2 runs in his second appearance as a Giant prevented it from declining all that slowly. His ERA fell to a season-low of 3.44 on June 15, but went back up after a 3-run outing on June 17 and surged from 4.43 to 6.43 after a June 22 appearance against Atlanta where he allowed five runs and got two outs. Matt Cain had started the game by allowing seven runs, so Morris didn’t take the loss, but he can claim responsibility for the Giants’ late-inning comeback falling short as they lost by a final score of 12-11. He did “take the loss” in a career sense, as the Giants released him the next day.
Morris had only just turned 30 and was not long removed from being an effective member of an MLB bullpen, but the league evidently didn’t value him beyond the minor league contract he was offered that offseason. He and his wife had recently welcomed their first child and there was a particularly enticing job open outside of professional baseball. About one month after Morris was released from the Giants, he agreed to become the pitching coach at his alma mater, Tullahoma High School. “While there have been some things that go into coaching that I never really thought about, the actual coaching side of it and the relationship that I have with the kids has been what I envisioned and more,” Morris said in a 2023 interview. He’s since received a promotion to Head Coach, according to a page on the school’s website that also has a link to the 2022 schedule. But we can be sure he’s currently in the position — last week, he coached the Tullahoma Wildcats to their first state championship in 34 years. Congratulations Bryan!
Miscellaneous: Ten days before this trade, the season finale of Survivor: Cagayan aired, concluding a season that started when Marlins president David Samson was the first player voted out. Patrick Mahomes was drafted out of Whitehouse High School with the Detroit Tigers’ 37th round pick in the 2014 MLB Draft (#1120 overall) – he didn’t sign.