The Josh Donaldson Black Friday Sale
Plus, find out which player fell through the roof of his barn.
November 24, 2014
Los Angeles Dodgers receive: Juan Nicasio
Colorado Rockies receive: Player to be named later (Noel Cuevas, named December 16, 2014)
When we discussed Andrew Friedman’s first trade with the Dodgers in our last post, we didn’t pay much mind to the fact that the targeted players were both relievers. Maybe it cancelled out perception-wise because both of the guys that the Dodgers were trading away were pitchers too. Whether or not we choose to acknowledge it, Friedman’s most-clear area for improvement was to add depth to the bullpen beyond stud closer Kenley Jansen. Incumbent Dodgers GM Ned Coletti had also prioritized bullpen additions in past offseasons, spending heavily to bring in former closers like Brandon League, Brian Wilson, and Chris Perez in boondoggle acquisitions.
None of those three pitched in MLB after their stints on the 2014 Dodgers, though League and Wilson still combined to earn $18 million in 2015. In fact, League and Wilson both played the final regular season game of their career on September 27, when they were among eight pitchers who appeared in the Dodgers’ penultimate game of the season against Colorado. Of those eight pitchers, four were pitching in their last regular season MLB game. Clearly, the addition of two relievers from Tampa Bay was not going to come close to filling the holes in the bullpen.
The Rockies also used eight pitchers in that September 27 matchup, all of whom would pitch for MLB teams in 2015 including Latroy Hawkins, who was 41 at the time. The second pitcher who came in was Juan Nicasio, a face who was somewhat familiar to Los Angeles by then. Nicasio debuted for the Rockies in 2011 and had earned a regular spot in the rotation by 2013, pairing an intriguing fastball with consistently mediocre results. He had been sent down to the minors in June of 2014, and when he returned in August, he broke a streak of 69 consecutive appearances as a starter to work from the bullpen instead. This went better, but not so much better that the Rockies wanted to pay Nicasio a couple million dollars in arbitration. Nicasio had been designated for assignment a few days before and the two sides were running out of time to come to an agreement on compensation, so they just announced that Nicasio was traded for cash or a player to be named later.
Since we’ve paid attention to the first transactions made by new general managers in our recent posts, it’s worth acknowledging that Jeff Bridich had been hired as new GM of the Rockies. There’s a bit of an asterisk here in that nothing ever really changes with the Rockies organization. Bridich was only the third GM in franchise history and had joined the organization in 2004. His job title was “Director of Baseball Operations” by 2005. Bridich has since resigned (the Rockies have never fired a GM), and his replacement Bill Schmidt has worked in the Colorado front office since 1999. This organization is different than most sports franchises. Officially, we can note that this was Bridich’s first trade as Rockies GM, since it was, but let’s not kid ourselves into actually thinking that’s a meaningful distinction.
Noel Cuevas was announced as the player to be named later a few weeks after Nicasio’s trade was announced. Cuevas was a 21st-round pick who seemed to take a leap forward during an impressive 2013 season, followed by a sizable step back during a subsequently disappointing 2014 season. Cuevas was a center fielder with good defensive abilities, but his decline in stolen bases from 38 in 2013 to 6 in 2014 was an ominous trend.
Nicasio was an initial success in Los Angeles, bumping up his strikeout rate dramatically as a full-time reliever. His ERA stayed below 2 until June, but continued trouble with walks and an elevated rate of batting average on balls in play led to much worse results. The Dodgers ultimately left him off the playoff roster and non-tendered him after the season, limiting their upside to this trade to a couple of non-critical months of an effective relief arm. He continued to work as a reliever and held down a job in MLB for the rest of the decade. Noel Cuevas pushed through the minor leagues and made his debut in the majors in 2018, hitting so poorly in his 75 games there that he was only allowed to play one more MLB game in 2019.
November 28, 2014 (Black Friday, 2014)
Miami Marlins receive: Aaron Crow
Kansas City Royals receive: Brian Flynn, Reid Redman
We’ve discussed, in general terms, that working in a sports front office is not a good job for work-life balance. During the season, hours are explicitly irregular to track the 162-game marathon. During the offseason, you have basically just as much work to do.
It seems like the MLB took a bit of a Thanksgiving break in 2014, with the Nicaso swap taking place on Monday and our next two trades coming on Black Friday. But the only way a trade can go final on Friday is if the two sides are working to agreement in the week leading up to that Friday, so you can be relatively certain that people in the Marlins front office were spending at least part of their Thanksgiving days talking to their coworkers and people in the Royals front office.
By the time you’ve ascended in the MLB front office hierarchy sufficiently to be a part of the Thanksgiving trade negotiations, your family probably knows the deal. When your work phone rings and you slink off to your aunt’s spare bedroom to have an unplanned conference call, everyone in the house is aware that there’s transactional intrigue. Even if they try not to talk about it to you during the free moments when you’re able to emerge and rejoin the festivities, they’re certainly discussing amongst themselves, speculating what sort of franchise-altering news you’re preparing to make today. When you finally agree on Reid Redman as the minor-leaguer to be included and help balance the scales, you happily saunter back out to the living room as a conquering hero. “I can’t talk about it yet, but it should be official tomorrow,” you say, relishing the mystique that your hard work has resulted in.
The next morning, you see that news of the trade has broken ninety seconds after Ken Rosenthal has tweeted about it and give someone the signal to read it to the rest of the family: “Marlins acquire RHP Aaron Crow from Royals for LHP Brian Flynn.” You smile proudly, but silence lingers in the room for a second too long. “Oh!” your mom exclaims in a rising tone, showcasing her kind heart and lack of acting ability. “Nice upgrade,” your uncle ventures, having only heard of one of the two players. Your younger cousin normally looks up to your cool job in sports, but he’s completely expressionless and avoids your eye contact like a matador. Your grandfather shouts “who was that?” and repeats the question twice after somebody repeats the players involved. He’s not much for picking up on social cues in his advanced age.
Clearly, your family just isn’t deep enough into baseball. Aaron Crow has been well-known for years in prospect circles, with his performance at University of Missouri sufficient for the Nationals to make him the 9th pick in the draft in 2008. The two sides couldn’t agree on a contract, so Crow went back to school for another year and earned another first-round selection when the Royals took him 12th overall in 2009. They were able to sign him that time, and Crow blazed through the minors to debut on Opening Day of 2011. An excellent rookie season that included an All-Star selection seemed to set the stage for future big league success, but was followed by a slight regression in 2012 and further regression in 2013. By 2014, his fastball velocity had declined and he was a liability in a Royals bullpen that had carried them to an AL pennant. Crow was due to earn an arbitration salary and the Royals apparently no longer felt he was worth the financial risk.
Brian Flynn had come to Miami in the trade that brought Jacob Turner to town and made his debut for the Marlins in 2013. Thus far, his MLB career consisted of five starts and one relief appearance, each of which fell somewhere on the spectrum between “bad” and “horrible.” Still, Flynn was younger and cheaper than Crow, with at least the possibility of being a starting pitcher someday. The two sides evidently thought Crow’s proven performance was worth a little bit more than Flynn’s potential, so they tossed in a converted third baseman named Reid Redman. Redman had arrived in Miami ahead of the 2013 season and had only been pitching since then, but had posted encouraging results at every level thus far. There were caveats – he turned 26 a week before this trade and “every level thus far” only extended up to AA – but there was also reason for intrigue.
The winner of this trade was “work-life balance.” Aaron Crow’s declined velocity turned out to be a symptom of larger arm troubles. On April 8, he underwent Tommy John surgery before appearing in a game for the Marlins. Brian Flynn’s 2015 season was more successful by the absolute slightest of margins. The day after Crow’s surgery, Flynn made his first appearance for the AAA Omaha Storm Chasers, faced three batters, and then ended his season by tearing his lat. Reid Redman only appeared in 9 games as a result of what also seems to have been an injury-shortened season, but was practically an ironman compared to his trademates. You spent your Thanksgiving swapping around mediocre arms and then they all exploded by Easter. Happy Holidays to you and yours.
Aaron Crow was non-tendered after the season and never returned to MLB, making this trade essentially an unmitigated disaster for the Marlins in which they paid $2 million and two pitchers for absolutely nothing. Reid Redman never made it past AA, but Brian Flynn was back in MLB by 2016 and had a strong enough season for the Royals to cement their victory in this trade. That offseason, Flynn fell through the roof of his barn and fractured three vertebrae, which sounds more like the kind of thing that happened to pitchers in 1917 than 2017. Regardless, Flynn only pitched in one MLB game that season and was less effective in the two remaining MLB seasons of his career.
I’d like to conclude our discussion of this Thanksgiving trade by reiterating that the guy who tore his lat in his first appearance with the new team and later fell through a barn roof was so much healthier than Aaron Crow that barn roof guy’s new team easily wins the trade.
Also November 28, 2014
Toronto Blue Jays receive: Josh Donaldson
Oakland Athletics receive: Brett Lawrie, Sean Nolin, Kendall Graveman, and Franklin Barreto
Some trades are probably worth interrupting a holiday for, and a blockbuster of this scale would’ve been, but it’s not clear that any interruption was required in this case. For one, news of this trade broke late enough in the day on Friday that a negotiation could plausibly have been finalized all in that day. For another, Canadian Thanksgiving fell on October 13 in 2014. This wasn’t necessarily work on a holiday weekend for the Toronto front office, this was simply a Friday night that kept them at work until 10 PM.
But even if Canada picks their own day to be thankful, they can’t quarrel with the position of American Thanksgiving as it relates to the Christmas calendar. November 28 may not have been the day after Thanksgiving in Toronto, but Canadians celebrate Black Friday on the same day that Americans do. If we had to describe the core elements of the Black Friday experience, it would be going shopping at a bizarre hour to run roughshod over others in the relentless pursuit of a once-in-a-lifetime bargain. Maybe the Blue Jays were celebrating Black Friday in the most appropriate way possible.
It’s hard to undersell the significance of this trade, so let’s start at the top with Josh Donaldson. Donaldson was a catcher when the Cubs drafted him 48th overall in the 2007 draft and was still playing the position when he got his first brief taste of MLB action with the A’s in 2010. He had a forgettable cup of coffee, and by the time Donaldson got another chance in the big leagues in 2012 he was 26 years old and more frequently playing third base. Things went well enough this time around for Donaldson to claim the starting job going into the 2013 season, at which point he suddenly ascended to become one of the best all-around players in baseball. Over the next two seasons, Donaldson hit at an excellent level and played defense at an elite one, leading all A’s hitters in WAR with 14.2 over those two seasons according to Baseball-Reference. The next highest total by an A from 2013-2014 was Josh Reddick’s 6.0, and the only player who outproduced Donaldson’s total in all of baseball was Mike Trout (in the best two-season stretch of his career).
Players like Josh Donaldson don’t get traded, for several reasons. The most obvious is that teams generally prefer to hold onto players who rank among the top 5 in baseball, particularly during the first two full seasons of their career. Those are usually the keepers. Donaldson’s situation differed from the typical player in that circumstance (to the extent that there are “typical players in that circumstance”) in that he wasn’t a mega-prospect whose arrival as an elite player was a foregone conclusion; he was an older player who baseball had largely forgotten about. There was no real indicator that Donaldson’s recent performance had been a flash in the pan, but the obvious risk of that meant that teams could have questions about trading a massive prospect package for him. In Fangraphs’ 2014 Trade Value rankings, Donaldson finished #17, with Dave Cameron referring to him as “one of the more challenging players to place on the list” and concluding his blurb with “in a year, this ranking will probably look dumb either way.”
There have been a single-digit number of MLB front offices in the 21st century that have had the combination of ego and cachet to trade away somebody like Donaldson, but these Billy Beane A’s would empirically make the list. The Moneyball magic of the A’s was premised on buying low and selling high. Indeed, Donaldson had come to town as one of the four prospects Chicago traded in 2008 for Rich Harden, who was in the midst of a career year for an Oakland team that remained playoff-competitive at the time. The A’s didn’t make the playoffs that year, but they got more of a trade return for Harden that summer than they would have at any other time in his career. If one of the pieces of that trade return had the potential to bring back his own massive trade return, the correct process would seemingly be to trade him away before increasing age and arbitration salaries diminished his value. This was particularly true given the team composition – while the A’s had been a feel-good story to start 2014, the reality is that they had gone something close to all-in on that season, flopped down the stretch, and ended up finishing several games behind the Angels in the division. In an explanation of the trade, Beane said that “we thought we had to do …something that wasn’t timid and that hopefully got us in a position that we had a team with a chance to get better each day as opposed to one that was maybe starting to deteriorate.”
The A’s were also intrigued by the possibility of adding a readymade replacement for Donaldson in the form of incumbent Blue Jays third baseman Brett Lawrie. Lawrie was drafted out of a British Columbia high school in the 1st round of the 2008 draft and made it to Toronto by 2011, earning high rankings on prospect lists all the while. He was 21 years old when he made his debut on August 5 and was an incredible hitter down the stretch, with his 3.3 WAR good for third-highest on the team (by a substantial margin over J.P. Arencibia’s 1.1) despite only playing in 43 games. Lawrie continued to play pretty well on a rate basis, but (a) not THAT well and (b) less frequently than full-time, as a variety of nagging injuries resulted in him playing less than two seasons’ worth of games over the next three years. Lawrie actually had more MLB service time than Josh Donaldson and therefore less team control, but was more than four years younger and would be paid substantially less in arbitration thanks to all the missed time. It wasn’t exactly reasonable to predict Lawrie outperforming Donaldson over the next few seasons, but it certainly wasn’t difficult to imagine realistic scenarios where that happened.
The difference in value between Lawrie and Donaldson was ostensibly made up for with the three other prospects included in the deal. Two were pitchers with some MLB experience in Sean Nolin and Kendall Graveman, who had combined to throw 7 innings for the Blue Jays in their very short MLB careers thus far. The third was Franklin Barreto, an 18-year-old infielder from Venezuela who had just put together a brilliant offensive season at Low-A in 2014. At Grantland, Ben Lindbergh described the package as “not an overwhelming return for an elite, affordable talent” but also noting that “there’s enough there to envision an outcome where the A’s aren’t unhappy” before concluding with the unshakable 2014 truth that “[Oakland’s] history of getting good value in trades where they give up the best present player has to count for something.”
The pre-2014 A’s script would involve Donaldson taking a step back post-trade while Lawrie took over his production and the other three prospects developed into quality MLB contributors. The A’s would take the optics hit and their fanbase would suffer the pain of losing the beloved player, but the on-field production and financial value would make it worthwhile. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was an understood part of the experience by now. The downside of being an A’s fan is that your favorite players get traded away before you’re ready to say goodbye, but the upside is that you get to reliably win those trades.
In 2024, the A’s no longer receive the benefit of the doubt, a reputational downfall that started right about now. Oakland’s most obvious problem with the results of this trade was Josh Donaldson, who posted his best offensive season ever in 2015 while winning an MVP award in his first year with the Blue Jays. If the guy you’re trying to “sell high” wins his first MVP award immediately after you’ve traded him away, that’s a strong indication that you’ve mistimed the market. Donaldson was a star on 2015 and 2016 Toronto teams that advanced to the ALCS each season, earning a combined salary of about $16 million for those two years. Dave Cameron’s ranking of Donaldson at #17 in his 2014 Trade Value rankings didn’t look so dumb at all – Donaldson placed #17 again in the 2015 edition of the list, with Cameron already noting that “while I’m probably more in agreement with the A’s depth-over-stars approach to roster construction than most, even from my perspective, [trading Donaldson] looks like a mistake.” Even as Donaldson’s salary grew through arbitration and his remaining cost-controlled years shrank, he was up to #14 on the 2016 version of the list.
Oakland’s second-most obvious problem with this trade was Brett Lawrie, and he was such an obvious problem that he gave MVP Josh Donaldson a run for most obvious. Lawrie overcame the health concerns to play 149 games in 2015, but then fell into a more intractable problem of “mediocrity.” His defense and offense both got worse as pitchers exploited his declining plate discipline and fed him endless breaking balls. He finished the season with a sub-.300 OBP and was shipped to the Chicago White Sox, where he played his final season. Lawrie may have been four years younger than Donaldson, but his MLB career ended seven years sooner.
The A’s basically went 50/50 on the two pitchers. Sean Nolin made six starts for the A’s in 2015 before being released on waivers, but Kendall Graveman stuck in the rotation for the next few years. Graveman had the profile of a mid or back of rotation starter and performed in that capacity, realistically, but because this coincided with a period where the A’s traded everybody away and were noncompetitive, Graveman was the opening day starter in each of 2017 and 2018. The latter season ended after seven bad starts led to Tommy John surgery that summer, which also ended Graveman’s time with the Athletics. Graveman re-emerged with the Mariners in 2020 and has had a second career arc as a late-inning reliever, missing substantial amounts of time since then with concerning maladies like “shoulder discomfort leading to labrum surgery” or “benign bone tumor in cervical spine.” Sean Nolin hasn’t returned to the majors on a long-term basis, though he’s made pop-up appearances with the 2021 Nationals and 2023 Marlins.
Even as this trade turned into an apocalyptic downgrade at third base in exchange for a few seasons of Kendall Graveman, A’s fans held out reason for hope in the form of the still-young Franklin Barreto. In response to the generally shocking trade of Donaldson, Barreto was cast as the lynchpin to the deal, described as “one of the most universally praised and known players to clubs among those that hasn’t made a full-season debut yet.” Although still far from the majors, he entered Top 100 prospect rankings that spring and was universally regarded as a Top 50 prospect in 2016 and 2017.
When Barreto made his debut on June 24, 2017, the A’s were coming off back-to-back last place finishes and the Jays were coming off back-to-back playoff runs. During those seasons, Donaldson had been worth 14.3 WAR for Toronto and the A’s side of the package had returned 6.0. But both of these teams were in last place on June 24, and while Donaldson was still productive, it wasn’t impossible to think that Franklin Barreto could close the gap. When he knocked a home run in his second plate appearance to put the A’s up 6-0, it almost seemed like those Oakland A’s had done it again.
They very much had not “done it again.” That home run was one of 38 hits that Barreto would record in Oakland on his way to a .180/.210/.360 career slash line with the team across four seasons. The fourth season was 2020, by which point the A’s had given up on Barreto so thoroughly that they basically stopped using him as a normal baseball player. In the first fourteen games Barreto appeared in that year, he never entered before the 7th inning and was exclusively a pinch runner half the time. On the rare occasions he was allowed to bat, he didn’t get on base and usually struck out. He was given a start at second base in his final game with the A’s and added three more strikeouts, resulting in a ridiculous season statline of 0-for-10 with seven strikeouts — and five runs scored due to all the pinch running. Barreto was then flipped to the Angels for recent friend Tommy La Stella, ending his A’s career with -0.7 WAR and cementing this trade as a franchise-defining loss for the Oakland Athletics.