The October 2014 Recap, Part 3
The final NFL trades of 2014 (both involving Tampa Bay) and first MLB trades of a new offseason (both involving Toronto)
Part 3
In the first part of our October recap (technically the second part, since the first part was just “nothing happened for two weeks”), I made the offhand mention that I was “pretty sure” October 22 was the NFL’s trade deadline day in 2014. This was the very last edit I made and came in mere minutes before publication. Without getting into the nitty-gritty of how I could make such a dumb mistake, let’s just hammer home how dumb of a mistake that was:
October 28, 2014 - NFL Trade Deadline Day
New England Patriots receive: Jonathan Casillas and 6th-round pick (#178, Matthew Wells selected)
Tampa Bay Buccaneers receive: 5th-round pick (#168, subsequently traded, Michael Burton selected)
Jonathan Casillas was an undrafted free agent who chose the right team when he signed with the New Orleans Saints in 2009. In terms of immediate material concerns, the Saints gave Casillas an opportunity to make the roster, establish himself as an NFL player, and ultimately contribute to a championship season. He even got a chance to start two games, even if those were two of the losses in a season that only included three. Then, in the Super Bowl, Casillas got a chance to attain immortality when, in the words of his Wikipedia page, “he was officially credited with recovering the Saints’ third-quarter onside kick to start the second half.”
The use of that precise verbiage is because Casillas did not seem to actually recover this kick; as the broadcasters called, safety Chris Reis fell on the ball and was still holding it when the pile was sorted out several minutes later. Everyone seems to have acknowledged that Reis “recovered” the kick as we would conventionally understand the term. Regardless of who happened to possess the ball, Casillas was certainly involved with the play and ultimately gets the record book credit for icing one of the most iconic plays in Saints franchise history.
A foot injury cost Casillas his second season and prevented him from ever becoming a full-time starter with the Saints. After the 2012 season, New Orleans transitioned from a 4-3 defense to a 3-4 defense and Casillas, a 4-3 linebacker, jumped ship to the division rival Buccaneers on a one-year deal. He played well for the first 75% of the season, then missed the rest with a knee injury and re-signed on another one-year deal for 2014. A few weeks into that second year, Casillas lost his job and all playing time with Tampa Bay, who were in the midst of a 1-7 start to the season and a defensive scheme change of their own (more on that later).
As we discussed last time, the Patriots were looking for replacements at linebacker. They almost got one in Akeem Ayers, but then they mostly played Ayers at defensive end, so I guess they were still looking for that replacement linebacker. Ayers had played well in his one game with New England so far, so why not try another addition to the defense in Casillas? Just like with Ayers, the Patriots targeted one of the worst teams in the NFL and got them to give up a proven veteran for just a late-round pick swap. The picks were earlier this time, but the swap was slightly smaller, going from an 11-spot swap in the 200s to a 10-spot swap in the mid-late 100s. Casillas didn’t quite have the same impact in New England that Ayers had, but still played well enough to sign a contract with the Giants for $10.5 million after the season and get described as “solid” by Patriots fans in the aftermath. Oh, and he also won his second Super Bowl.
In this case, the 10-pick swap ended up being quite meaningful. Tampa Bay traded pick #168 to the Lions, who used it to select fullback Michael Burton. The fullback is something of a lost position in the modern NFL, so Burton hasn’t stuffed many stat sheets, but he’s carved out an NFL career that continues to this day and included two rushing attempts this past Sunday. Burton has played for six franchises, won Super Bowl 57 with the Chiefs, and has scored two touchdowns in his 139 NFL games. New England used pick #178 to select Matthew Wells, a linebacker who never played in an NFL game.
No matter how little your team uses a fullback, you’d probably rather draft the fullback than the non-NFL player.
St. Louis Rams receive: Mark Barron
Tampa Bay Buccaneers receive: 4th-round pick (#109, subsequently traded, Clayton Geathers selected) and 6th-round pick (#184, subsequently traded, Kaelin Clay selected)
Now this was a real draft capital return! This was also an NFL player with significant pedigree. Mark Barron was a five-star prospect as a linebacker coming out of high school and stayed close to home when he signed with the Alabama Crimson Tide. After playing sparingly in his true freshman season, he took over as the starter at safety for the final three seasons of his collegiate career, culminating in a unanimous first-team All-American selection at the position. When the Buccaneers took Barron with the 7th pick in the 2012 draft, NFL Network draft analyst Mike Mayock infamously praised the pick by saying that Barron’s “floor and ceiling are the same thing. His ceiling is to be a Pro Bowl safety; his floor is to be a Pro Bowl safety. That’s how good this young man is.”
Mayock’s prediction may have been overblown, but Barron got off to a great beginning to his career and was the starter on the PFWA All-Rookie team. He returned as starter at safety for his second year with similar production, but playing for a Tampa Bay team that declined from 7-9 to 4-12 as coach Greg Schiano was fired. Like the other football players that we saw sent packing in October, this defensive scheme change had hurt Barron, even though the Buccaneers continued to run a 4-3 defense. In his first two seasons, Barron played as a run-stopping safety who focused on playing near the line of scrimmage and making hard hits. But new head coach Lovie Smith instituted the Tampa 2 defensive philosophy (named for its utilization on the Super Bowl champion Buccaneers from the early 2000s), which requires safeties to spend most of the game dropped into deep coverage. Ahead of the season, Smith said he was “very pleased” with Barron and that the Tampa 2 system would “absolutely” play to his strengths.
Smith would turn out to be incorrect, as Barron was among several Tampa Bay players who struggled to adapt to their namesake defense. As we just discussed, the Buccaneers were off to a terrible start and were looking to unload expendable veterans, even if that meant deeming a recent top-10 draft pick with another year on his rookie contract expendable. When the Rams stepped up with an offer of a 4th and 6th-round pick as compensation, fans were surprised both that Barron was still able to fetch this caliber of offer and that the Rams, off to a 2-5 start themselves, were the team willing to pay it.
Another person who would later admit surprise at the trade was Mark Barron himself. In 2016, Barron described the trade as disrespectful, indicating that he “didn’t even know [a trade] was being talked about” and “[didn’t] feel like it was the way it should have happened.” Barron found that success was the best revenge, as he transitioned back to playing his high school position of linebacker in St. Louis and exploded into the talent that his draft pedigree suggested he could become. During the 2015 and 2016 seasons (the Rams’ last season in St. Louis and first season in Los Angeles), Barron graded out as the second-best player on the roster by Approximate Value (after Aaron Donald, so first among mortals). He signed a $45 million contract extension with the Rams and played with the team until the 2019 season, when he spent a final year with the Pittsburgh Steelers. He never did make a Pro Bowl, and was better when he wasn’t playing safety, but Mike Mayock was correct in his general assessment that Barron was quite a good football player.
The Rams were no doubt content to turn picks #109 and #184 into the prime years of Mark Barron. The Buccaneers used the earlier of these picks in a trade along with #65 to move up to #61 and drafted Ali Marpet, who was one of the better guards in the NFL throughout his relatively short career. #109 was used on safety Clayton Geathers, who played with the Colts throughout his rookie contract and spent his final seasons as a starter. Tampa Bay kept pick #184 and used it to draft Kaelin Clay, a speedy WR who solidified his legacy in college:
Instead of Utah jumping out to a 14-0 lead against Oregon, they were now tied 7-7 and would go on to lose 51-27. Unfortunately for Kaelin Clay, this is still the top result when you search his name, despite a multi-year NFL career. Unfortunately for the Buccaneers, none of that multi-year NFL career was spent with them — Clay was cut from the practice squad a couple of weeks into the 2015 season before eventually creating a couple NFL highlights with punt return touchdowns for the Ravens and Panthers. Besides hopefully washing out some of the bad taste from his mishap at Utah, these highlights prove to the audience that Clay can learn and grow from his past mistakes. On the Ravens touchdown, he is still holding the ball mid-celebration when the camera cuts away nine seconds after he’s crossed the goal line. On the Panthers highlight, Clay crosses the goal line at 0:18 and runs around the end zone like a maniac, but is still clutching the football tightly as he calls teammates over to join his celebration at 0:30. It still looks cool. Just hold on to the football!
After dominating NFL trade deadline day, participating in all two of the moves that were made, the Buccaneers made two more in-season trades for the next decade.
This also marks the end of NFL trades for 2014, which in any case should be celebrated with slightly more ceremony than a half-thought “oh are we done” moments before publication! With the passage of the NFL trade deadline, teams are barred from trading until the start of the next league year in March of 2015. NFL teams surely discuss trade concepts amongst themselves before then, and deals may even be reported before they can legally be agreed, but we at Trades Ten Years Later stick to the official reporting schedule. We’ll get back to the NFL on or around March 10 (Sam Bradford for Nick Foles???).
October 29, 2014
There were no trades, but Game 7 of the World Series was played, thus signifying the end of the MLB season and the incoming relaunch of MLB trade season. What happened in Game 7, you ask? How should I know. This interview is over.
October 30, 2014
Toronto Blue Jays receive: Liam Hendriks
Kansas City Royals receive: Santiago Nessy
I guess we do need to stipulate that Game 7 of the World Series involved the Royals losing and that the unnamed winning team held their celebratory parade on October 31st, because that calls attention to the absurdity of the very concept of this trade taking place when it did. Game 4 was scheduled for October 25, but what also happened on October 25 was that the Royals successfully made a waiver claim on a utility outfielder named Moises Sierra. Sierra couldn’t be added to the playoff roster, so this was purely a forward-looking move by whichever person in the front office who got tasked with watching the waiver wire instead of the World Series. To give a roster spot to Sierra, the Royals had to take one from somebody else, so they designated Liam Hendriks for assignment. Hendriks hadn’t been on the playoff roster for any round, so this wasn’t going to affect the 2014 roster either.
Presumably, Kansas City was too distracted to seriously negotiate a trade during the 10-day window that Hendriks was eligible to be traded, and by the time the World Series had ended they had burned half of it. It seems reasonable to conclude they were also tired and sad, and potentially hungover (non-celebratorily). So the Royals took the easy path and traded Hendriks back to Toronto, from whom they had gotten him three months earlier. They received Santiago Nessy in exchange, a young catcher who had just pushed to Hi-A ball that season and would reach a pinnacle of 17 games spent at AA in the 2015 season. None of the limited audience that cared about this trade cared all that much about the particular players involved. Moises Sierra never played a game for the Royals, either. Three players with no meaningful impact on Kansas City franchise history.
Of course, Liam Hendriks was about to have the first of multiple breakout seasons in Toronto on his way to being regarded as one of the best closers in baseball for the Athletics and then White Sox. When we last discussed Hendriks in August, he was working to come back from Tommy John surgery after already coming back from a diagnosis of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. His rehabilitation was ultimately shut down before he could return to MLB, but he’s poised to return to the Red Sox next season if fully healthy.
November 1, 2014
Milwaukee Brewers receive: Adam Lind
Toronto Blue Jays receive: Marco Estrada
I’ve written about over 100 trades by now and it may shock you to learn that I wasn’t walking around with a complete set of them sorted by date in a psychopathic mental repository. Most of these timelines have been reconstructed from official transaction logs. Before making the calendar, I could probably only name a handful of trades that took place in 2014 off the top of my head and there’s even fewer where I could identify every player (note to self: try doing this for 2015).
No matter how short that list was, I’m quite confident that Adam Lind for Marco Estrada would’ve made the cut. I can’t entirely explain why this trade has continuously occupied space in my mind when neither player nor franchise is particularly relevant to my experience as a baseball fan, but I do have theories. Certainly, part of it derives from simplicity. The two names are all that you have to remember, while a phrase like “Lester for Cespedes” obfuscates that Jonny Gomes and a draft pick were also involved. Part of it probably comes from the timing — in a world that did not yet care about the whereabouts of Liam Hendriks, this was the first “real trade” of this particular baseball offseason. I wasn’t the only one excited to see names of baseball players moving around again, if only “to fill the baseball void.”
Beyond that, there’s an essential similarity between Lind and Estrada that’s difficult to fully articulate and rare to see in MLB trades. Estrada was born 12 days earlier than Lind (July 5 vs July 17 of 1983) and both were fairly established veterans by the time this trade took place. Lind had debuted with Toronto and signed an extension after a breakout season in 2009, during which he knocked 35 home runs and won the Silver Slugger award at designated hitter. The extension included a $5 million guarantee for each season from 2011 through 2013 and then club options that escalated from $7 million in 2014 to $7.5 million in 2015 to $8 million in 2016, “evidence of the team’s intentions of making the [then] 26-year-old a cornerstone of their rebuilding process.”
Things did not go according to plan; Lind was atrocious in 2010 and thereafter lost the privilege of being used as a designated hitter on a regular basis. Now playing more frequently at first base and falling firmly behind Edwin Encarnacion in the hierarchy of 1B/DHs, Lind limped through disappointing seasons in 2011 and 2012 where he didn’t offer much except the ability to hit for power. It became clear that Lind particularly struggled against left-handed pitching, leaving him best-utilized as a strict platoon bat. In the final guaranteed year of his contract, Lind got his act together and bounced back to produce his best offensive season since his Silver Slugger year, adding a few doubles and a couple dozen walks to still-consistent power production. The first club option was subsequently picked up by the Blue Jays.
In 2014, Lind had arguably his best season ever on a rate basis, with a .321/.381/.479 slash line and better adjusted numbers than in 2009. But that performance came in a 96-game season where he first missed a couple of weeks with a back injury and then more than a month as a result of a broken foot. The production also came nearly-exclusively against right-handed pitchers, with hilarious platoon splits of .354/.409/.533 against RHP compared to .061/.162/.061 in an admittedly small sample against southpaws (for good reason, clearly). Complicating matters further, Lind’s performance included just six home runs, a staggering decline from the mid-20s totals that he maintained even in his more remedial offensive seasons. Lind’s pre-existing defensive limitations made it difficult to imagine him sustaining sufficiently productive offensive performance in the absence of home run power, even if he had sort of just proven that he could do it in the right circumstances.
The Blue Jays were now up against the clock with Adam Lind. The World Series had ended three days ago, which meant their deadline to make a decision on Lind’s club option for 2015 was today. Meanwhile, they had just acquired Justin Smoak from the Mariners on a waiver claim and hoped to give the one-time mega-prospect an opportunity to get playing time at first base. This was a tricky situation; $7.5 million was probably too much to spend on Adam Lind for the currently-configured Toronto Blue Jays, but was good enough value that it would feel bad to pay him a $1.5 million buyout instead. Theoretically, that would make Lind a compelling trade target, but that meant finding a suitor who was willing to hand over the left-handed half of their first base job to a 31-year-old coming off an injury-riddled six-homer season. And for a Blue Jays team that wanted to take a step forward to compete for a championship in 2015, it ideally meant finding a suitor who could give up something that would help the MLB roster.
This brings us to Marco Estrada, which is going to eventually bring us back to his essential similarity with Adam Lind. The Nationals drafted Estrada in 2005 and he made his MLB debut in 2008, with another late-season cup of coffee in 2009. Neither of these big league opportunities were all that impressive, and Washington designated Estrada for assignment after the season. The Brewers picked him up on waivers and had a largely similar experience with Marco Estrada in 2010 — he spent most of the season in AAA and was bad when he got opportunities in MLB. But in 2011, Estrada stuck around on the roster as something of a swingman, throwing 92.2 innings across seven starts and 36 relief appearances.
For each of the next three seasons, Estrada threw more than 125 innings for Milwaukee while mostly working from the rotation. His relative consistency allows us to neatly compare the three categories that pitchers are said to be able to control (strikeouts, walks, and home runs allowed). In 2012, Estrada struck out 143 batters while walking just 29 and allowing 18 home runs. In 2013, two-thirds of those numbers were about the same – Estrada walked 29 again and allowed 19 home runs this time, albeit in 10 fewer innings. But his strikeout total declined by 25, working out to about one fewer per nine innings. 2014 was perhaps the most concerning season, as the strikeouts declined on a rate basis yet again (from 8.3 to 7.6 per 9 innings) while the walks increased and Estrada allowed more home runs (29) than any other pitcher in baseball.
By this time, Estrada was entering his final year of arbitration. His irregular usage early in his career meant that he wasn’t going to earn much money for that last year of team control. The 4.36 ERA he had just posted wasn’t charming and was accompanied by a decline in his peripheral numbers, but the upside of a cheap starter who could throw to an ERA in the mid-3s was tangible within recent memory. Unfortunately, there were 29 home runs allowed in 2014, all of which were in more recent memory than that upside.
If you aren’t sufficiently convinced as to the vibes-based case that Lind and Estrada were the same sort of player, then I suppose I have no choice but to try to make the argument in words. By 2014, both of these players were something of known, limited quantities. Each was early enough in their career that they hadn’t known true free agency, but late enough in their career that fans were hoping for them to “recapture” something they once had rather than grow into something unprecedented. Both players had a firmly-defined ceiling and floor that, if not as narrow as was once speculated for Mark Barron on draft day, likely limited them to being somewhere between the 10th and 20th best player on an MLB roster. Even if there wasn’t going to be a rush at the team stores for newly-printed Estrada or Lind jerseys, it was clear to see why each franchise believed that they could benefit from this exchange. When I learned about this trade, my heartbeat didn’t speed up until my head had nodded so vigorously that it became cardiovascular.
It shouldn’t be quite so surprising for a trade to “feel even” in a sport run by mostly-sophisticated front offices, but part of the dynamic at play is that baseball’s prospect currency minimizes the frequency of established players being traded straight-up for other established players. An even trade comes more often in the form of “Marco Estrada’s final year of team control” being traded for “a prospect or two whose expected surplus value(s) are likely to be similar over the course of team control,” which requires a degree of abstraction and at least a little subject-area sophistication to appreciate. It’s imprecise and likely to be incorrect with hindsight. There’s not the same thump in the chest that comes from just seeing two names you recognize swap back and forth. These were puzzle pieces whose complementary shapes could be seen from across the room.
Despite my halcyon memories of this trade’s inherent balance, the reaction seems to have been one-sided in favor of Milwaukee. The AL East and Rogers Centre specifically was seen to be a poor fit for the homer-prone Estrada, who was only defended by Brewers fans saying he might see more success when used out of the bullpen or neutral fans speculating that he might be utilized as a part of future trade packages. There were seemingly zero Toronto fans excited about this trade.
And that brings us to the final reason I love this swap, which is how well it worked out for everyone involved. 2015 was the second-best season of Adam Lind’s career, bouncing back to hit 20 home runs while maintaining the high on-base percentage that he had spent recent years mastering. Lind’s numbers would’ve been even better if the Brewers had actually platooned him rather than making him take 112 plate appearances against left-handed pitchers, which resulted in a predictably terrible (if substantially improved) .221/.277/.298 slash line with zero home runs. The Brewers exercised Lind’s final club option, which was a no-brainer decision by that point, but traded him to Seattle in December of 2015 in a deal that most notably resulted in Freddy Peralta going to Milwaukee. We’ll have more on that in December of 2025.
This was a tough standard for Marco Estrada to live up to, but boy did he do his best. Estrada spent the month of April in the bullpen, as most had expected, taking over a rotation spot after he kept a 0.84 ERA through six appearances. By June 14, Estrada had allowed seven home runs in eight starts and his ERA had increased to 4.24. Two starts later, Estrada kept a perfect game going into the eighth inning as he threw a 10-strikeout gem against the Rays. His ERA did not go above 3.6 for the rest of the season and ended at a tidy 3.13 after 181 innings. He finished 10th in AL Cy Young voting and signed a two-year extension with the Jays for $26 million that offseason. He was an All-Star in the first season (2016) and the Opening Day starter in the second season (2017), after which he signed on for another year (2018) at the same $13 million salary.
It’s probably best for Estrada’s Toronto legacy if we just cut off everything after Opening Day 2017. A quality start that day was followed by a season where Estrada’s peripherals caught up with him and he surrendered 31 home runs on his way to a 4.98 ERA. 2018 was even worse than that and basically spelled the end of Estrada’s MLB career except for five terrible starts for the 2019 Oakland A’s. Cutting off the clock at Opening Day 2017 also leaves Estrada’s six starts in the 2015 and 2016 postseasons intact, where he pitched to a 2.16 ERA in 41.2 innings. Sure, Toronto was only 3-3 in those six starts, but it’s tough to blame Estrada for a mediocre record when the Jays combined to score a grand total of zero runs in the three losses.
Neither Adam Lind nor Marco Estrada have played MLB baseball in several years, yet the congruences of this trade persist. Both guys are most likely to be remembered by Toronto or Milwaukee fans more than any other fanbase (with Washington as a distant third in each case). Both players benefited from the change of scenery in 2015 as their roles were stretched beyond what their old organizations thought was possible. Both were near the end of their careers and neither was ever that good in subsequent seasons. Estrada ended his career with 12.1 WAR and Lind ended his with 12.7, per Baseball Reference. Lind had 5,029 plate appearances in the big leagues and Estrada faced 5,220 batters. Lind hit precisely 200 home runs in his career and Estrada allowed 199. An even swap that will remain so for eternity.
How can you not be romantic about baseball trades?