T10YL - Vinnie Pestano for Mike Clevinger
Reintroducing the now-dead concept of August waiver trades
August 7, 2014
The Names: Los Angeles Angels receive: Vinnie Pestano. Cleveland receives: Mike Clevinger.
The Team Context: Both of these teams had made trades around the July trade deadline that had set the direction of the rest of their season. Cleveland had traded away some veterans, while the Angels entrenched their bullpen for the stretch run. That was only about a week before this trade happened, so we don’t have much else in the way of updates. In the week that had passed since the trade deadline, Cleveland was 4-3 and the Angels were 3-4, which either shows you that deadline moves don’t matter or that seven games is too small of a sample for any reasonable baseball analysis.
The Player Context: Vincent Pestano was born and raised in Orange County, attending Anaheim’s Canyon High School at the same time as four other players who would be selected in the MLB draft. Joe Gault was taken by the Twins in the 22nd round of the 2003 Draft, Nicholas Casanova went in the 31st round of 2004, and Alex Curry was selected in the 32nd round of 2006. None of those three made the majors. Grant Green was selected in the 14th round of 2006, then was the 13th overall pick in 2009 after playing for USC. Green played 129 games in MLB and was below average in every respect at the big-league level. Even the high school baseball teams with numerous future professionals don’t necessarily contain future big-leaguers.
Vinnie Pestano was not drafted out of high school; he enrolled at Cal State Fullerton instead. According to an interview that a friend of Pestano’s published three days ago (nice timing!), the Canyon grad showed up as a freshman at Fullerton and was ranked the 14th-best of the 16 pitchers there after fall practice. The 15th and 16th guys ended up being cut before winter workouts. In order to adapt to tougher competition, Pestano made mechanical adjustments over the winter to move to more of a sidearm delivery and saw improved results, contributing to the Titans’ 2004 National Championship as a freshman. Pestano continued pitching out of the bullpen, keeping a 0.97 ERA in his junior year through his first 37 innings while racking up 13 saves. About a month before the 2006 MLB draft, where Pestano was expected to be an early-round pick, he felt a pop in his elbow and didn’t throw another pitch in college. It took three MRIs for Pestano to be accurately diagnosed with a torn UCL, a horribly-timed injury that caused him to fall to Cleveland’s 20th round pick.
Pestano returned to pitching midway through the 2007 season and quickly flashed the talent that merited his injury risk. Shortly after winning the AAA championship with the Columbus Clippers in the 2010 season, he was called up to the majors and struck out Billy Butler in his first appearance (a name that Pestano was able to recall as his first victim when interviewed 14 years later). Pestano spent the next two seasons as a highly effective reliever in Cleveland’s bullpen, pitched for Team USA in the 2013 World Baseball Classic (which didn’t go well), then finally got the chance to close games later that year when Chris Perez missed time with an injury. Unfortunately, Pestano had also nursed an injury that year, so this opportunity coincided with a run of diminished performance that resulted in his eventual optioning back to AAA in August.
That winter, Pestano was one of the few players in MLB who had a steep enough disagreement on their 2014 salary to go to arbitration with their team (Pestano asked for $1.45 million, while Cleveland offered $975,000). Salary arbitration is an ugly process that all parties would generally prefer to avoid. Both sides sit together in a conference room as the player builds up their career accomplishments and the organization does their best to tear those accomplishments down. The arbitrator ruled in favor of Cleveland after the team introduced past statements Pestano had made to the press as evidence against him. Pestano did not care for this approach. “You’re being honest and accountable and saying the right things and being there, and then later you find your own words in the paper, and somebody is trying to use your words against you to drive your value down,” Pestano said of the process. “I don’t really know if I can be as honest and up-front anymore. I’ve got three more years of arbitration left. I don’t know what they’ll pick to use against me next year or two years from now.”
The 2014 season got off to a rough start, with Pestano tagged for runs in each of his first three appearances before being demoted to Columbus. He spent the next two months working on his mechanics before he was called back up at the end of June. Pestano felt like he had figured things out and the numbers seemed to support that notion – in his next ten appearances, he accumulated nine strikeouts and didn’t walk a batter, with the only blemish coming on a Jacoby Ellsbury solo home run. Notwithstanding the strong performance, Pestano was sent to AAA after July 10 and never pitched for Cleveland again. He called his agent after the meeting that demoted him and said he wasn’t sure what else he could do to stay on the big league roster.
In exchange for Pestano, the Angels would send Mike Clevinger to Cleveland. Clevinger was a 4th-round draft pick in 2011 whose ascent as a prospect was derailed by elbow surgery, resulting in just 46.2 innings pitched across 2012 and 2013. Clevinger was back in 2014 with a relatively clean bill of health and the early results were promising. Five excellent starts in A-ball merited a promotion to Hi-A later that summer, at which point choppier results made things a little less exciting. There was potential to dream on with Clevinger, but he was a while away from making an impact at the MLB level. He was ranked as the 10th-best prospect in the Angels’ bottom-tier farm system at the time of the trade.
The Trade: We’ll try to get through a quick explanation of the post-deadline waiver trade mechanism, which was phased out of existence in 2019. A team wishing to trade a player would put that player on “revocable waivers,” allowing other teams the opportunity to place a claim on that player. If a player was claimed, the team that placed that player on waivers could either (1) revoke the waiver and keep the player, (2) release the player and their contract to the claiming team, or (3) work out a trade with the claiming team within 48 hours.
The claim process modifies the type of players that teams could trade for in August versus July. Teams needed to unload their deadline gems by the July 31 deadline in order to have a maximally competitive market that could produce a bidding war. When the Rays trade away David Price, they’d rather choose the best prospect package from multiple suitors than decide on a take-it-or-leave-it offer from the one team that claimed him. When Cleveland trades away Vinnie Pestano, the stakes are lower. They’re perfectly fine to have one suitor and get back an interesting pitching prospect. Waiver trades tend to shift leverage from the selling team to the buying team, so we typically see them involve the type of players that wouldn’t have given a selling team much leverage to begin with.
Vinnie Pestano describes the experience of being traded as “pretty quick,” but well-anticipated after his up-and-down 2014 that seemed likely to end on “down” without a fresh start elsewhere. Pestano was on a road trip in Scranton when he got the news of the trade and flew straight to join the Angels’ AAA team in Salt Lake City, leaving his possessions behind in Columbus. Despite growing up attending Angels games, playing baseball at an Anaheim high school, and the team winning a World Series when he was 17 years old, Pestano says that he wasn’t an Angels fan as a kid, which feels like a staggering failure by the team. That one should’ve been a layup!
In a theme that I expect will recur in August waiver trades, both fanbases felt that they weren’t giving up anything of value. John Sickels identified Clevinger as a “nice sleeper type” who was poised for a potential breakthrough while acknowledging that he might be limited to bullpen work in the long run.
The Results: The Angels got what they wanted out of this transaction. Pestano didn’t stick on the Angels’ MLB roster until September but was great once he got there, allowing just one run in twelve appearances. He pitched in two of the three playoff games that the Angels played that season and didn’t give up any runs. That’s exactly what you want when you trade for a reliever in the middle of the season, so it’s hard to come to the conclusion that this was a loss for the Angels.
And yet, we are absolutely going to do that. Pestano only pitched 11.2 innings for the Angels in 2015 and was comprehensively ineffective. The team designated him for assignment on July 28 and he closed out the season in AAA, never pitching in MLB again. Pestano’s meaningful contribution was limited to his 2014 stretch run performance and two appearances during a winless playoff series.
Meanwhile, Mike Clevinger took a step forward during a fully-healthy 2015 season and made his MLB debut in May of 2016. He had thrown more innings in Cleveland than Pestano had in Anaheim by August. An occasionally rocky first season was followed by three seasons that got progressively more excellent, with his ERA declining from 3.11 in 2017 to 3.02 in 2018 to 2.71 in 2019. Those three seasons from Clevinger would have ranked as the best three seasons by any Angels pitcher in that three-season span according to Baseball Reference’s Wins Above Replacement metric and it’s not particularly close. An Angels team that desperately needed effective pitchers suffered as they watched the young starter they had traded away flourish. This was a stark contrast from the insultingly pitching-rich Cleveland, who had at least one pitcher outperform Clevinger in all three of those years.
By 2019, Cleveland fans and neutrals were acknowledging “Pestano for Clevinger” as one of the foremost heists of recent memory. Clevinger was finally poised to be Cleveland’s ace in 2020, but a couple of things disrupted that ascent. The first was a meniscus tear in February that required a poorly-timed surgery. The second was the COVID-19 pandemic, which you’ve probably heard about. The third was an offshoot of the second; after an August game in Chicago, Clevinger and fellow pitcher Zach Plesac violated MLB’s health and safety protocols by going to dinner with a couple of Plesac’s friends. To avoid potentially exposing his teammates to the virus, Plesac was sent back to Cleveland via car service, but Clevinger didn’t initially disclose he had been with Plesac and flew back on the team plane. This earned both of them a disciplinary trip to Cleveland’s alternate training site as well as excoriation from their teammates. “They hurt us bad. They lied to us,” said fellow pitcher Adam Plutko.
For a franchise already prone to trading established players before they get too expensive, Clevinger’s violation of organizational trust was sufficient for Cleveland to begin exploring trade options. The asking price for Clevinger was described as “ridiculous,” a claim which was proven correct when the Padres agreed to send six players back to Cleveland for Clevinger and two minor pieces (we’ll get into more detail on those in 2030). The quality of the players that went back to Cleveland varies, but all six have played in MLB, Josh Naylor made his first All-Star team this year, and Joey Cantillo got six innings into a perfect game yesterday. Not a bad return for the final 22 MLB innings of Vinnie Pestano’s career.
The Aftermath: Basically everything in Mike Clevinger’s life has gone wrong since the calendar turned to 2020. He threw 20 innings for the Padres in 2020 and then required Tommy John surgery. The Padres extended his contract through the 2022 season and were rewarded with 114 innings of replacement-level pitching that season. Ahead of the 2023 season, Clevinger signed a one-year contract with the White Sox that included an option for the 2024 season. After signing that contract, but before the 2023 season started, he was investigated by MLB for alleged domestic abuse against his 10-month-old daughter and that child’s mother. MLB concluded its investigation without disciplining Clevinger, but being investigated for domestic abuse is about the worst first impression you can make when joining a team. The White Sox put Clevinger on waivers in August — not to trade him, just in hopes that somebody would take his remaining salary. Nobody did.
The White Sox declined Clevinger’s option for the 2024 season, but ended up signing him in April after no other suitors emerged for his services. He ended up making four starts in May, all of which were losses except for his revenge game against Cleveland. After that, he was placed on the injured list with right elbow inflammation, the solution to which somehow ended up being season-ending disc replacement surgery in his neck. He’ll turn 34 this winter and it’s anybody’s guess whether he’ll pitch in MLB again.
Vinnie Pestano signed a minor league contract with the Yankees in 2016, but by this point was battling shoulder injuries including a “tear in [his] labrum and hole in [his] rotator cuff.” He received cortisone shots and eventually felt good enough to pitch again, but was released shortly after telling his coaches that he could be taken off the injured list. In 2017 and 2018 he pitched in the Atlantic League, but his performance continued to fluctuate based on how his shoulder was feeling on a particular day. Once it stopped cooperating, Pestano called it quits and transitioned to his current career in real estate. Contact him if you’re interesting in buying a home in Dublin, Ohio.
Miscellaneous: Vinnie Pestano thinks we’re probably smarter than the aliens. Chris Perez received a year of probation and $250 fine after getting a package with nine ounces of marijuana mailed to his address in his dog’s name. Vinnie Pestano’s 15-pitch battle. The battle between Vinnie Pestano’s grandmother-in-law and her Pinterest algorithm.
Next up:
Los Angeles Dodgers receive: Roberto Hernandez (fka Fausto Carmona)
Philadelphia Phillies receive: Jesmuel Valentin and Victor Arana