T10YL - Jeff Samardzija and Jason Hammel to Oakland for Addison Russell and more

The A's aren't just buying, they're buying in bulk

The Names: Oakland Athletics receive: Jeff Samardzija, Jason Hammel. Chicago Cubs receive: Billy McKinney, Addison Russell, Dan Straily, and (probably) cash.

The Team Context: The Oakland A’s were the best team in baseball, with their .621 win percentage (54-33) 30 points above the next closest team (Milwaukee, 52-36). They had led their division since April, but had reasonable concerns about the suitability of their pitching staff for the second half. Oakland’s starting pitchers had put up a 2.85 ERA in March and April followed by a still-impressive 3.12 ERA in May, then a less-impressive 4.00 ERA in June. You didn’t even need to look at numbers with decimals to understand that they needed more pitchers; on June 17, the A’s acquired Brad Mills from the Milwaukee Brewers for $1, with Ken Rosenthal including the sad note that Mills was “expected to move into rotation shortly.” If you prefer an explanation with no numbers whatsoever, consider that the A’s had a rotation opening for Dollar Bill Mills because breakout starter Drew Pomeranz had recently broken his hand while punching a chair. 

Brad Mills was unimpressive in each of his June 20, June 25 (ok that one was pretty good), and July 1 starts for Oakland, though the team still managed to go 2-1 thanks to clutch performances by their excellent bullpen. And it wasn’t just a “Brad Mills problem.” Oakland’s other rotation members included Jesse Chavez, starting games and shooting past his career-high in innings after spending the first six years of his MLB career as an ineffective reliever, Drew Pomeranz, currently out with a self-inflicted injury but previously enjoying the first good season of his career after escaping from Colorado at age 25, and Scott Kazmir, who had been injured for most of the 2010s thus far. All three had been very good for the A’s in the first three months of 2014, but there was plenty of cause for skepticism about each. 

The Cubs hired Theo Epstein and Jed Hoyer to run baseball operations prior to the 2012 season. They had just endured 5th-place finishes in the NL Central in 2010 and 2011 and didn’t have much in the way of positive momentum. Epstein and Hoyer quickly set to work tearing the team down to the studs, hoping to amass future assets and rebuild with a wave of young, cost-controlled stars. The first step was down, as the 2012 Cubs went 61-101. They earned the #2 pick in the 2013 Draft and selected Kris Bryant. Chicago improved slightly to finish 66-96 in 2013 and were getting close to breaking through, having built up one of baseball’s elite farm systems. 

2014 may have gone a bit better than expected as a result of improvements from recent trade acquisition Jake Arrieta and recent call-up Anthony Rizzo. They were still a few players away from truly contending, but most of the skeleton of the Next Great Cubs Team was already setting into place. Still, positive returns from previous deadline sales of veteran pitchers gave the Chicago brain trust reason to stick to the multi-year script. 

The Player Context: Jeff Samardzija was “one of the best, if not the best, receivers to ever play at Notre Dame.” He caught 179 passes (27 touchdowns) for 2,593 yards during what was really just two seasons (2005 and 2006) of action (he caught 17 passes in 2004). He caught a touchdown pass in each of the final five games of his career, a streak that became frozen as permanently active when Samardzija decided to sign a contract with the Cubs rather than enter the 2007 NFL Draft. With his attention now on baseball full-time, Samardzija rocketed through the minor leagues and made his debut in the Cubs’ bullpen by 2008. The next two seasons revealed that Samardzija may have been rushed a little too quickly as he pitched horribly from the Chicago bullpen and adequately from the Iowa Cubs’ rotation. 2011 brought Samardzija’s first full effective season and 2012 was his first year pitching from the rotation.

Samardzija as a starter quickly earned plaudits from baseball’s advanced stats community, as his healthy strikeout rates combined with substantially improved control made him seem like a pitcher on the verge of breaking out. This continued in 2013, which fielding-independent measures like SIERA and xFIP suggest was just about as good as 2012 even as Samardzija’s ERA went from 3.81 to 4.34. 

Ahead of the 2014 season, Jeff Sullivan at Fangraphs discussed the possibility of Samardzija being traded due to a failure to reach agreement on a long-term contract with Chicago and substantial league-wide interest, noting that “the days of the market caring too much about ERA are over.” Sullivan made two arguments in favor of the Cubs’ reported decision to hold off on trading Samardzija until midseason, both of which would prove to be more correct than he imagined. First, Sullivan noted that “if the Cubs hang on to Samardzija for a few months, there’s a good chance his ERA comes in line with the rest of his statistics. And then he’d be a power starter with strikeouts and a mid-3.00 ERA,” a prediction which actually overestimated the 2.83 ERA Samardzija put up in 17 starts for Chicago that year. Second, Sullivan observed the supply-demand mismatch that the Cubs could exploit as one of the few teams that (a) featured a high-end starter and (b) would likely be out of contention at the trade deadline. 

As it would turn out, the Cubs had two high-end starters to trade away at the deadline. They had signed Jason Hammel to a one-year deal that winter after a disappointing age-30 season in Baltimore. Hammel’s signing echoed 2013’s signing of Scott Feldman, who joined the team on an identical $6 million contract and then was flipped to Baltimore at the deadline for Jake Arrieta and Pedro Strop. By late April, it was already being reported that the Cubs planned to make Hammel available in a trade, and he did his part to juice the return by pitching to a career-best level over his time in Chicago. His ERA at the time of the trade was 2.98, quite close to Samardzija’s performance.

Dan Straily was ostensibly the MLB piece going back to Chicago, though he hadn’t been in MLB for a couple of months at this point. Straily debuted for Oakland in 2012 after being drafted in the 24th round of the 2009 draft and performed adequately as the A’s fourth starter in 2013. He was slated for a similar role in 2014, but didn’t make any good starts after his second appearance of the season. Starts numbers three through seven were enough to get Straily demoted to AAA, where he had been pitching since May 7. 

But Straily was more of an afterthought compared to the two prospects, who were Oakland’s two most recent first-round picks. Their 2012 selection (and the more-heralded prospect) was Addison Russell, a particularly desirable name for the Cubs and a smooth-fielding shortstop who had made it all the way to AAA as a 19-year-old in 2013 after electric play in his first taste of pro baseball. It looked like he was beginning to tap into his projections to hit for power and he was a consensus top-10 prospect in baseball, with no limit on his ceiling. 

The A’s 2013 first-round selection was Billy McKinney, a bat-first outfielder drafted out of Plano West Senior High School. McKinney hit .326/.387/.437 in his first professional season, but was having a tougher time facing older competition in High-A. Still, he was just 19 and was Oakland’s second-best prospect after Russell, generally recognized as one of the top-100 prospects in baseball. 

The Trade: I would guess you don’t really celebrate 4th of July if you work in an MLB front office. For starters, the rest of your team probably doesn’t get the day off (there were 14 games played on July 4, 2014) and it would be a bad look for the front office to kick their feet up while everyone else works. But it’s also close enough to the trade deadline that you’re pretty much required to attend some meetings and make some phone calls. We only see trade discussions in their final form, but they’re preceded by numerous back and forth exchanges to feel out value and opportunities. Even if trades don’t often get finalized on the 4th of July (perhaps because whoever at MLB has the job of ministerially recording transactions does get the day off), trades inevitably get discussed.

If you report on MLB trades, it’s not up to you whether you celebrate 4th of July. You can do your best, but if a source calls you right before the fireworks start, that’s what you celebrate now. At 5:58 PM Pacific, Ken Rosenthal reported that the Cubs were in “serious talks” with the A’s that would send “Hammel and/or Samardzija” to Oakland. For the next two hours, he spent his Independence Day sending text messages and making phone calls to excavate further morsels of information, providing real-time twists and turns to baseball’s trade junkies who preferred instantaneous transaction updates to the millions of pounds of real-life fireworks that were being set off across the country. At 7:43 PM Pacific, Rosenthal declared “DEAL IS DONE” and that both Samardzija and Hammel would go to the A’s for Addison Russell. “May be other players and team(s) involved,” Rosenthal said cryptically about a deal that he also said was all-caps DONE. 

Perhaps because it was late on a Friday night that was also a national holiday, there was conflicting information in the public sphere about whether or not the trade included a player to be named later. At 7:59 Pacific, Jon Morosi provided the entire transaction and claimed there was no PTBNL. Within the next hour, Susan Slusser and Jeff Passan had both reported to the contrary, though Slusser’s report left open the possibility that the A’s would send cash. When the teams officially announced the trade on July 5, the A’s tweeted that they were sending a PTBNL or cash, while the Cubs just said it was a PTBNL. It doesn’t look like any player was ever sent, so it seems the A’s were correct, but how could I be sure? The teams weren’t even sure. 

Fans couldn’t really muster a coherent reaction under the circumstances, as they were either drunk or full of sausage. The A’s might have overpaid on paper, but that could be worth it for a team that wanted to win now and stop experiencing frustrating playoff exits. The equation was easier to process for Cubs fans, who had already resigned themselves to a cycle of tanking but could now take simple joy in having the best farm system in baseball. The only real question was where all these highly-touted infielders would end up playing. 

Jason Hammel pitched on the 4th of July and evidently didn’t think it was trade season yet. He was removed from the game after throwing 92 pitches and completing 6 innings when he led off the 7th by surrendering a double to Anthony Rendon. In response, Hammel told reporters he wanted to stay out for the seventh. “I have no idea why I came out of the game,” Hammel said, while pitching to a 2.98 ERA on a one-year contract with a 38-46 team in July. It’s one thing for Hammel to not figure out his obvious destiny on his own, but why didn’t anyone with the Cubs clue him in about his fate before letting him speak to reporters? 

On July 6, 2014, Jeff Samardzija was named a National League All-Star. Because he had been traded to the American League, Major League Baseball determined that he was ineligible to play in the game (for either team). This would be the only All-Star appearance in Jeff Samardzija’s career. 

The Results: The A’s ended up collapsing and losing the division by 10 games before being defeated in the AL Wild Card game. There are other trades more to blame than this one, but Samardzija and Hammel didn’t really help matters. Samardzija’s ERA increased despite otherworldly control (12 walks in 111.2 innings in Oakland) as he allowed twice as many home runs as he had with the Cubs. Hammel was worse by literally every relevant metric for a pitcher, suggesting that Chicago had done a stellar job at selling lightning in a bottle before the glass broke. At the end of the season, Hammel’s contract expired and Jeff Samardzija was traded away for his final year of team control.

It certainly looked like a win for Chicago in the short-term, even after Dan Straily was kicked off the Cubs in the offseason after allowing 20 runs in his 13.2 innings pitched for the MLB team. Addison Russell made his MLB debut in 2015 and made his first All-Star team in 2016 as the Cubs won the World Series for the first time in 108 years. Billy McKinney had yet to debut, but still played a key role as one of the main trade chips that allowed the Cubs to acquire Aroldis Chapman at the 2016 trade deadline. Adding insult to injury, the 2015 and 2016 Cubs teams included Jason Hammel, who had re-signed in Chicago after leaving Oakland. 

This trade is perhaps most notable for the lack of impact it ended up having. On July 5, 2014, this was seen as an early-summer blockbuster that would secure Oakland as the AL’s best team and set Chicago up for the long haul. But the A’s played just one playoff game and these acquisitions combined to face one batter (Hammel entered the game in the 12th inning to face Salvador Perez, who promptly hit the walk-off single). The team did collapse down the stretch, but most people wouldn’t blame this trade. Meanwhile, the Cubs were seen as edifying the best farm system in baseball, but only picked up one long-term contributor (and we’re stretching to call Addison Russell “long-term,” as we’ll discuss shortly). 

Ordinarily this would be a clear loss for Oakland, a team that traded away future pieces for present value in a year where they went 0-1 in the playoffs. But if you consider the package that Oakland would receive from trading Samardzija away five months later (Chris Bassitt, Marcus Semien, Josh Phegley, and Rangel Ravelo), this somehow becomes a win-win trade for the teams involved. We probably shouldn’t consider that trade until it comes up on the schedule in five months, so for now we can declare Oakland the losers.

The Aftermath: Let’s get Addison Russell out of the way first. Russell and his then-wife were married in January 2016, about four months after their child was born (and about seven months after Russell’s first child was born to a different mother). In June of 2017, MLB began investigating claims that Russell had abused his wife. The investigation took about a year and a half to play out, during which time Russell continued to play for the Cubs even as his performance diminished. His penalty ended up being a 40-game suspension that covered the final 11 games of 2018 and first 29 games of 2019 (during which time his third child was born to a third woman). Bringing Russell back for 2019 was controversial and didn’t pay off as he produced another below-average offensive season while splitting time with the AAA Iowa Cubs. At this point, Russell was in his third year of arbitration and not playing well enough to justify even the financial outlay, let alone the moral compromise. The Cubs cut Russell after the 2019 season and he’s bounced between KBO’s Kiwoom Heroes and the Mexican League’s Acereros de Monclova.  

Speaking of moral compromises and the Cubs’ 2016 World Series championship, this is not the last time we’ll see Billy McKinney get traded around the deadline. After being sent to the Yankees in the Chapman trade, McKinney got flipped to Toronto (along with Brandon Drury) for J.A. Happ. McKinney didn’t end up having enough hit tool to reliably stick in the major leagues and became waiver material after the 2020 season. His 2021 season began in Milwaukee and detoured to the New York Mets before concluding in Los Angeles, with his crescendo being a single plate appearance in the epic NLDS between the 107-win Giants and the 106-win Dodgers (he struck out looking on three pitches). After 2021, McKinney became minor league contract material and reunited with the A’s organization for the 2022 season. He made the opening day roster, then was permanently sent to AAA Las Vegas after getting 5 hits in his first 52 at-bats. McKinney spent 2023 on a minor league contract with the Yankees, but actually hit well in his 48 games of MLB opportunity. Presumably hoping to build on that progress, McKinney signed another minor league contract with the Yankees in December of 2023. Six days after he signed with the Yankees, they traded him to Pittsburgh for cash considerations. That doesn’t feel like it should be allowed? Particularly since the Pirates seemingly ended up spending more money than it would’ve cost them to sign McKinney to the same contract — did his agent not call them? In any case, he’s only played in AAA Indianapolis this season (though hasn’t played since May 11). 

Dan Straily had a few more trades in his future too, with the first coming just after the 2014 season when he went to Houston with Luis Valbuena in exchange for Dexter Fowler. He spent 2016 through 2018 as a consistent member of the Reds and Marlins rotations, then spent 2019 getting blown up on the Baltimore Orioles to the tune of a 9.82 ERA in 47.2 innings. Straily’s greatest success since then has been with the KBO’s Lotte Giants, where he pitched for at least part of the 2020-2023 seasons. This spring, Straily went on a reunion tour of his own when he signed with the Cubs on a minor league deal. On Tuesday, he picked up his first win in his 12th start as he struck out eight Omaha Storm Chasers in five innings. 

As we’ve already alluded to, the two pitchers Chicago traded away would each return to the city in short order. Samardzija was sent to the White Sox in his final year of team control and proceeded to lead Major League Baseball in both hits and earned runs allowed. Despite what Jeff Sullivan called a “conventionally disappointing season,” Samardzija signed a contract in San Francisco for 5 years and $90 million (more than the 5-year and $85 million extension offer he rejected from the Cubs in the midst of his best season). He was pretty good in the first year of that contract, pretty bad in the second year, hurt in the third year, surprisingly effective in the fourth year, and both bad and hurt during the pandemic-shortened fifth year. Samardzija made his final start on September 25, 2020, returning from the injured list to allow three runs in three innings. Despite the fact that there were only two games left in the season and Samardzija wouldn’t have pitched again anyways, the Giants released him the next day to open up a roster spot. They lost those final two games to finish 29-31 and miss the 16-team playoffs. 

Jason Hammel signed a 2-year, $20 million contract to return to the Cubs, earning himself more security and a nice pay raise with his 2014 season. His 2015 and 2016 numbers marked a return to effectiveness from what he had shown in Oakland, though he missed out on the Cubs’ World Series run due to right elbow tightness experienced in late September. Hammel got another 2-year contract after the 2016 season, this time from Kansas City (and at a slightly discounted price of $16 million). He was bad in the first season and really bad in the second season, becoming a free agent again after the 2018 season. Hammel signed a minor league contract with the Texas Rangers in 2019, though he made it clear that he wasn’t interested in actually pitching in the minors. “I certainly won’t go to Triple-A… I’m more than willing to go home and spend time with my family,” Hammel said. The stand-off was averted when Hammel was informed on March 22 that he’d be on the opening day roster. But the Rangers were mistaken; on March 23, Hammel announced that he was retiring from baseball instead. 

Miscellaneous: The leading vote recipients in the 2014 All-Star game were Jose Bautista (AL) and Troy Tulowitzki (NL). Addison Russell (and Dexter Fowler) were the first Black players to start for the Cubs in a World Series (since the Cubs had not made it to the World Series post-integration). “5th place in the NL Central in 2010 and 2011” is different from “last place” because the Astros hadn’t moved to the American League yet. 

July 6, 2014:
New York Yankees receive: Brandon McCarthy
Arizona Diamondbacks receive: Vidal Nuno