T10YL - Padres trade Nick Hundley to Orioles for Troy Patton
Matt Wieters was able to read this entire post before I started writing it.
The Names: Baltimore Orioles receive: Nick Hundley. San Diego Padres receive: Troy Patton.
The Team Context: We discussed the Padres on January 23, noting that structural changes within Padres ownership left incumbent general manager Josh Byrnes at risk of losing his job. Then we proceeded to describe a trade where the Rays completely fleeced the Padres, which probably didn’t help anyone in San Diego’s job security. Since then, the Padres had gone 22-28 in their first 50 games of 2014 and were ten games back in the NL West. Josh Byrnes had just entered his final month of employment with the San Diego Padres, though he probably didn’t know that at the time.
If the Padres embodied baseball mediocrity in the years leading up to 2014, the Orioles embodied something a little bit worse than that. Between the 2001 and 2013 seasons, the Padres went 1,006-1,101, which averages to something like 77-85 per season. The Orioles went 937-1,167, which averages to about 72-90 per season. Neither of those records are good for a baseball season, but the latter takes you to a place of more immediate hopelessness, particularly for a team that plays in a division as annually competitive as the AL East. For most of the 21st century, Orioles fans would see their team on top of the division standings in March (when every team had a 0-0 record but “Baltimore” was first alphabetically) and then watch them fade to the basement by May.
But for the first time in ages, Baltimore fans had hope. In 2012, the Orioles went 93-69 and made the playoffs as a Wild Card team. Sure, they only outscored their opponents by 7 runs across the regular season, but a dominant bullpen where the top five relievers all had sub-3 ERAs carried the team to the postseason for the first time since 1997. The team was better in 2013 by run differential, but worse by record at 85-77. This wasn’t enough to make the playoffs, but was still dramatically better than what Baltimore had been accustomed to and set up rare hope for the 2014 season.
On May 24, 2014, the Orioles suffered one of their worst defeats of the year as they lost 9-0 to Cleveland to fall to 24-23. Lonnie Chisenhall had two hits for Cleveland to raise his average to .382.
The Player Context: Optimism among the Orioles fanbase was inexorably linked to the arrival of catching prospect Matt Wieters. Wieters was selected with the fifth pick of the 2007 MLB Draft, then posted incredible stats in his first season of minor league baseball in 2008.
Do you remember “Chuck Norris facts”? This genre of joke was remarkably popular in the mid-late 2000s and involved making outlandish claims about how strong Chuck Norris was. “When Chuck Norris does push ups, he pushes the Earth down,” stuff like that. We all thought this was funny for some reason. Simpler times. Anyways, the hype for Matt Wieters was so powerful that it led to the creation of a subgenre of “Matt Wieters facts,” where you would recycle a Chuck Norris fact but make it about Matt Wieters instead. “The sun rises when Matt Wieters decides to wake up,” stuff like that.
A 2008 Chuck Norris comparison is impossibly high praise for a baseball prospect, but Wieters seemed to be on track for rarified air. Wieters was poised to make his MLB debut in 2009, and the PECOTA projection system stoked excitement by forecasting a .311/.395/.546 batting line for his rookie season – for context, in Jose Canseco’s 1988 season, he hit a remarkably similar .307/.391/.569 and won an MVP award. This would be absurd for any rookie, let alone a catcher. Wieters missed those projections, which were so overly aggressive that it resulted in changes to PECOTA, but he was still good enough to win a Gold Glove and make the All Star team in each of 2011 and 2012, earning MVP votes in the latter year.
Wieters got off to a strong start in 2014, pushing his slash line to a .337/.372/.598 on May 2 that made his once-forecasted heights seem like a good guess. But Wieters began feeling pain in his elbow at the end of April and was transitioned to designated hitter by May 4. On May 7, he consulted with Dr. James Andrews and received confirmation that he would not require Tommy John surgery – instead, Dr. Andrews identified an “irregularity in the flexor mass” of Wieters’ elbow. Tommy John surgery would be bad news, but it’s not like this news was great; Wieters was placed on the disabled list (still known as such) on May 11 and received a platelet-rich plasma injection in his elbow shortly thereafter under the justification that he “thought it could only help speed up the healing.”
But Matt Wieters wasn’t actually involved in this trade, Troy Patton was. Troy Patton was born and raised in the north suburbs of Houston and drafted by his hometown Astros in 2004. He debuted for the big-league team in 2007, got traded to Baltimore as part of a package for Miguel Tejada after the season, and didn’t return to the majors until September of 2010 after spending time recovering from a torn labrum. Patton got two outs in his one appearance and things were looking up, but that offseason, he was arrested in Houston and charged with first-offense DWI after a police officer watched him speed and drive his GMC Yukon onto the curb of a city street at 8:15 PM on a Saturday and he blew a .14 BAC. In fairness, roughly 8% of Houston drivers on any given weekend are drunk-driving their full-size SUV onto the sidewalk, and the only reason the percentage isn’t higher is that there aren’t many sidewalks.
Patton bounced back to rejoin the Orioles bullpen in May 2011 and entrenched himself as a left-handed specialist for the next couple of seasons. He was one of those top-five Baltimore relievers that brought the team to the 2012 playoffs. But there were still mishaps in Patton’s future. In August of 2012, he was walking through a parking garage when he tripped and sprained his ankle. Patton woke up the next day with his ankle throbbing and ended up missing the next month of the season. Then, after the 2013 season, Patton was hit with a 25-game suspension after testing positive for amphetamines. A 25-game suspension is the penalty for a second positive drug test; the first positive test remains anonymous, but subjects the player to further scrutiny. Patton was conciliatory after the suspension and spoke candidly with the media, detailing that he took an Adderall without a prescription in order to manage his self-diagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
The typical word associated with “drugs” and “baseball” is “steroids,” but amphetamines have an arguably richer history within the sport. In 2003, Tony Gwynn estimated that 50 percent of position players used amphetamines with regularity, with players less likely to regard amphetamine usage as cheating than steroid usage. Today, amphetamines are viewed by MLB’s drug policy as performance-enhancing drugs and cannot be used by players – unless, of course, they have a “therapeutic exemption” following an ADHD diagnosis from an MLB-certified clinician. In the season that Troy Patton tested positive for amphetamines, 119 MLB players received a therapeutic use exemption, a rate that implies that professional baseball players are twice as likely to have ADHD as the general population. Impressive that so many people with a disorder that leads to a lack of focus could climb to the highest levels of an incredibly precise game!
We would never accuse MLB players of working with doctors to unscrupulously gain access to controlled substances to boost their athletic performance (at least not directly or in writing). In fact, we can certainly conclude that at least one MLB player (Troy Patton) did not do that. Evidently, Patton legitimately felt that he had ADHD and sought a doctor’s approval to take Adderall, but “was unable to get a script for it” after the doctors told him that he didn’t have the condition. He said that he “still [thought] I am ADD and still would like to take Adderall,” but acknowledged that he knew he didn’t have permission to take it. He also noted that he would not keep Adderall “within a mile” since any subsequent suspension for amphetamines would last 80 games. “It is no longer in my repertoire at all. It is over with,” said Patton, who certainly wasn’t foreshadowing anything.
Nick Hundley was a catcher who had just about been relegated to the “career backup” tier. He debuted with the Padres in 2008 and was quickly given the opportunity to start, but injuries or competition from the likes of Yorvit Torrealba prevented him from reaching 300 at bats in any of his first five seasons. Hundley’s strongest offensive season came in 2011 and he signed a contract extension the following offseason, but he was terrible to start the 2012 season and gradually lost playing time to newcomer Yasmani Grandal. When Grandal received a 50-game suspension for performance-enhancing drugs (good ol’ steroids, not amphetamines), Hundley reclaimed starting duties and made waves when he gave the killer quote about Grandal “you want to talk about a guy who is unproven and had a good couple months on steroids, go ahead. I’ve got a job to do.”
Well, Grandal turned out to be pretty good without the steroids. To make matters worse, Rene Rivera made the team and started producing at a career-best level, leaving Hundley third among the Padres’ MLB catchers. He was quickly identified as a surplus member of the Padres roster and became “the center of trade discussions” for the team by April 22.
The Trade: The 2014 season had only seen two trades since the start of the season, both of which were really the settlement of offseason housekeeping (the DFA of Eduardo Nunez and the six-month odyssey of the Mets trying to get value for Ike Davis). Practically speaking, this was the first trade that took the 2014 baseball season into account. After this, there are three MLB trades in June, then things pick up with 26 in July ahead of the July 31 trade deadline, nine more ahead of the August 31 waiver trade deadline (remember waiver trades?), and then 45 MLB trades between the end of the World Series and December 31.
The point is that we’re picking fruit out of season – baseball teams don’t really trade from their MLB rosters in May. Teams are typically incentivized to trade for two reasons: to reallocate the distribution of talent on the roster (more common in the offseason) or to move veterans from bad teams to competitive teams midseason in exchange for younger talent (more common closer to the trade deadline). This trade falls into the first category, it’s just rare to have a situation where two teams have rosters that complement each other’s imbalances so cleanly. Baltimore urgently needed a catcher not named Caleb Joseph or Steve Clevenger to fill in for Matt Wieters for an indefinite amount of time. The Padres had three of those and were happy to unload Hundley’s guaranteed salary for more pitching depth (with cash considerations sent to Baltimore to balance things out).
The top Reddit comment reacting to this trade said, in entirety, “Bad pitcher for bad hitter. So it goes.”
The Results: Troy Patton was not a bad pitcher for San Diego, but was a short-lived pitcher. He got into eight games as a Padre and threw 7.1 innings, but was placed on the injured list with left shoulder soreness on June 14. The day before, Patton faced three batters, allowing an RBI single to Bobby Abreu before closing his Padres career with a strikeout of Lucas Duda. Patton began rehabbing in the minors in August, but was designated for assignment before returning to the majors.
Matt Wieters underwent Tommy John surgery in June and didn’t play for the Orioles after May 11. The Orioles ended up needing Hundley after all, even if his production in Baltimore was basically equivalent to what Caleb Joseph and Steve Clevenger had been doing. Despite their poor production at the catcher position, the Orioles went on to win their first AL East title in decades. Despite only playing in 26 games all season, Matt Wieters was named the starting catcher for the American League All Star team. It was the fewest games Wieters would play in a season between 2009 and 2019 but was the only time he was voted as an All Star starter.
The Orioles declined Hundley’s $5 million club option for the 2015 season.
The Aftermath: As it turns out, Adderall may have remained in Patton’s repertoire, as he tested positive again in November and received an 80-game suspension. He signed a minor league contract with the Kansas City Royals and pitched for them in AAA after completing the suspension, but never returned to the major leagues. Patton’s last contract with a major league team was an invitation to 2016 spring training from the Miami Marlins; he was cut by February 23.
Hundley signed a two-year contract with the Colorado Rockies and took advantage of the thin air to post the second-best season of his career in 2015 followed by a pretty average year in 2016. “Pretty average” is high praise for a veteran MLB catcher and was sufficient for Hundley to earn consecutive one-year contracts from the San Francisco Giants, where his role as backup to Buster Posey was clear. He accepted a minor league contract from the A’s in 2019 and ended up on the opening day roster. On June 8, Hundley started the first game of a doubleheader, but was removed in the 4th inning with back spasms. He was placed on the injured list, then underwent a knee surgery while already injured, and never returned to the majors.
On February 5, 2020, 36-year-old Nick Hundley told Susan Slusser that he had spoken to multiple teams that offseason and planned to play baseball that year. On February 6, 2020, Major League Baseball announced that Nick Hundley (along with fellow 36-year-old suddenly former player Gregor Blanco) had been hired by the league office as a senior director of baseball operations. It’s not clear what changed in the twenty hours between those two reports. Hundley has since moved to the Rangers front office and is frequently rumored as a future managerial candidate, though he declined an offer to interview for the Giants’ manager position this offseason.
Josh Byrnes was fired in June. In the offseason, he was replaced by AJ Preller, who will become a main character of Trades Ten Years Later this winter and persist as such for at least nine years. Preller would trade away Yasmani Grandal and Rene Rivera in his first offseason in charge, leaving the Padres with none of their three catchers from 2014. More on that in a few months.
Miscellaneous: The Padres and Orioles both had a .324 team OBP from 2001 to 2013. Ronald Acuna nearly signed with the Arizona Diamondbacks? Matt Wieters has the 7th-most saves in Georgia Tech history. In the 2006 College World Series, Wieters hit a sixth inning game-tying home run against Cal State Fullerton and then gave up three earned runs in the ninth to take the loss.