Trades Ten Years Later - Ryan Doumit for Sean Gilmartin
Atlanta Braves receive: Ryan Doumit. Minnesota Twins receive: Sean Gilmartin.
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The Names: Atlanta Braves receive: Ryan Doumit. Minnesota Twins receive: Sean Gilmartin.
The Team Context: The blog is still pretty new - we haven’t even launched yet! Everything is still somewhat modeled off the first post, a trade that changed the trajectory of the Toronto Raptors forever. We followed that up with some splashy trades, including a three-team deal. Discussing the team context makes sense in those instances infinitely more than it does here.
Here are the “team contexts”: The Twins were a bad team. The Braves were thin at the theoretical-catcher position outside of recent promotion Evan Gattis and had just lost in the NLDS. So the Braves had more interest in a guy who could theoretically catch while occupying an MLB bench spot than the Twins did. We’re done here?
The Player Context: Immateriality of this trade aside, it warrants a blog post and some moments of reflection one decade later due to the notable figures involved. Doumit was the MLB player in the trade, a sorta-catcher with a solid bat whose poor defense caused him to spend frequent time in the corner outfield spots. Most notably, Ryan Doumit was a poor pitch framer, resulting in a discrepancy between his fWAR calculated by Fangraphs (which attempts to include pitch framing in its calculation for catchers) and rWAR calculated by Baseball Reference (which does not). By rWAR, Doumit was an 8.9 win player for his career, with his slightly above-average offensive contributions mildly detracted by his sub-replacement defense. By fWAR, Doumit was a calamitous 8.6 wins below replacement level, with his slightly above-average offensive contributions completely wiped out by catching defense that was twice as bad as any catcher from the pitch framing era.
Also, his official MLB headshots look haunted:
Sean Gilmartin had been the Braves’ first-round pick in 2011 after a strong college career at Florida State, expected to move quickly through the system based on his advanced development. He was pitching in AAA by 2012, but stalled there in 2013 as a combination of injuries and “being mediocre at pitching” limited his ability to get outs. He continued to work as a starter, but his prospect shine had faded.
The Trade: Apparently the Braves and Twins spent a week negotiating this trade. The same article (quoting Braves general manager Frank Wren) reported that the 15 baseball people assembled were pretty much unanimous that “this was the guy that would make us the best baseball team that was out there.”
Given my apparent interest with sports transactions, present unemployment, and law degree, I often hear the suggestion that I should “work for a sports team.” I think when people say this they’re imagining the job in far too abstract of a sense. But let’s really boil it down. The 2013 Braves were good and had been good for quite a few seasons. They lost in heartbreaking fashion in the playoffs, just like nine other teams that season (the second year of the Wild Card Game Era). On a Monday morning in December, you and your fellow colleagues on the Braves’ baseball operations staff trudge into a conference room with laptops and cups of coffee to sit down for one of those 15-person Monday meetings that you’re doubtlessly familiar with if you’ve worked an office job or consumed media covering the phenomenon. The topic of this meeting is “Which Guy Will Make Us The Best Baseball Team That Is Out There?,” just like it’s been every Monday this offseason. After a few minutes of concerted brainstorming, some hotshot who seems more well-rested than you (probably John Coppolella) suggests acquiring Ryan Doumit. The meeting roars with delight and cheers, partially because of mutual acknowledgement that Ryan Doumit would make the Braves the best baseball team that was out there, partially because the 66-96 Twins should be happy to trade an awful defender who makes $3.5 million in his upcoming age-33 season.
You then spend all week working furiously to consummate a trade for Ryan Doumit. There are numerous meetings and phone calls on the subject. Typo-riddled emails are exchanged. Eventually, after an intense but otherwise uneventful two hour meeting, the front office brain trust agrees that it would be worth it to accept the Twins’ latest demand and cut their losses with Sean Gilmartin, a player you guys spent two and a half similar weeks deciding to draft eighteen months ago. You are tired, but satisfied that at the end of the day it was all worth it. (The team’s record gets 17 games worse the next season and your boss gets fired).
The Reaction: The top comment on the Reddit thread reacting to the trade was “between Doumit, Willingham and Mauer, the Twins had a surplus of former catchers,” which 15 people upvoted. Everyone understood the functions of this trade, and some Braves fans even liked it, but nobody really cared all that much. On the Twins’ side, Aaron Gleeman assessed that “simply clearing [Doumit’s] entire salary off the books and removing him from the bad-fielder logjam is an accomplishment,” with any contribution from Gilmartin seen as a bonus.
There were some tears shed at Fangraphs at the end of Ryan Doumit’s reign as the worst-framing catcher in baseball.
The Results: The Braves failed to make the playoffs in 2014. GM Frank Wren was fired after the season (while the other unanimous approvers of the Doumit acquisition largely remained intact).
Doumit was especially bad, putting up a .197/.235/.318 slash line that was the worst of his career in any respect. He did not play after the 2014 season and the narrative of his Wikipedia page just ends with this trade, completely ignoring that he actually played in Atlanta. Doumit ultimately caught just two games with the Braves, an April 5 victory over the Nationals and an April 10 defeat to the Mets, before the team decided they had quite enough of that. His framing actually graded out pretty neutral in this meaninglessly-small sample, but Doumit did what he could to ensure that his bad-defense reputation stuck; he allowed two stolen bases to the Nationals and five to the Mets, including three to Eric Young Jr., throwing in a passed ball and a wild pitch for good measure.
Sean Gilmartin went on to have a bit of an MLB career, but not an especially significant one (and none with the Twins). After arriving in Minnesota he spent yet another season toiling at the top levels of the minors, then was selected by the Mets in the Rule 5 draft. After starting throughout his time in the minors, Gilmartin debuted out of the Mets’ bullpen in 2015 and was highly effective, with a 2.67 ERA in 57.1 innings. He made his first MLB start at the end of the 2015 season, taking a 3-0 loss to the Phillies despite pitching well. This was basically the peak of Gilmartin’s career, with the start being his 50th of 81 career MLB appearances, but if we froze the frame here the Braves would have felt pretty bad about this trade.
The Aftermath: Ryan Doumit’s last MLB game was a 2-1 win over the Phillies, where he played the whole game in LF despite going 0-for-3 with two strikeouts (all against Cole Hamels). Doumit’s troubles with framing led to his present notoriety when Fangraphs began incorporating catcher framing into fWAR in 2019. While Doumit was known as a “bad framer” before then, that discourse was limited to folks who cared to discuss catcher framing, and that population was stuffed into their lockers by bullies with enough frequency that their reach was limited. The 16-win decline in Doumit’s career value, occurring several years after his retirement, probably attracted more attention than any of the bad framing did at the time. Doumit currently is listed as an assistant coach at Big Bend Community College in his hometown of Moses Lake, Washington, which gives me an opportunity to circle back to this awesome section of his Wikipedia page (entire section snipped below):
Ahead of the 2016 season, the Mets sent Sean Gilmartin back to AAA and tried to develop him as a starter once again. It didn’t work, and he was ultimately waived by the Mets in June 2017. He got back to the MLB in 2018 and 2019 for a cumulative 29.1 innings with the Baltimore Orioles, then pitched 4.1 innings for the 2020 Rays. Gilmartin played independent baseball for the Long Island Ducks in 2021 and then spent time in the Twins minor league system before retiring that offseason. His final MLB game was a 2-1 victory over the Jays, where he was the second of seven pitchers used by the Rays and the only one to allow a run. The starting pitcher for the Rays was a 6’10” fellow named Aaron Slegers who was making the sixth and final start of his career that day.
Nothing else comes to mind to discuss about Sean Gilmartin’s career from 2016 on.
Upcoming trades:
December 18, 2013 (to be posted sometime after Christmas):
Red Sox receive: Jonathan Herrera
Rockies receive: Franklin Morales and Chris Martin
December 30, 2013:
Rangers receive: Miles Mikolas
Pirates receive: Chris McGuiness