The wisdom of trading "prospects" (part 2)
In hindsight, this may have been a shotgun trade that almost blew up in the face of both teams.
The 2018 Baltimore Orioles were a mess from top to bottom.
They featured, in no particular order, a general manager in the last year of his contract, a manager who was also playing out the string on his contract and who was generally at odds with the GM, and a number of players who had helped the team make the playoffs just two seasons earlier but were all approaching free agency. Together it seemed they were helplessly watching as the team cratered.
During that season the Orioles dealt off a number of their name players, among them relief pitchers Zach Britton, Darren O’Day, and Brad Brach, starting pitcher Kevin Gausman, and second baseman Jonathan Schoop. But the biggest name and first domino to fall was shortstop Manny Machado, who had been a star third baseman from 2012-17 before moving to shortstop once longtime fixture J.J. Hardy was let go after the 2017 season.
Machado came up just in time for the Orioles to make their mid-decade playoff run, which got them as far as the 2014 ALCS. But he was eligible for free agency after the 2018 season and there was no place for a contract that was presumed would be stratospheric on a team which probably knew in its heart of hearts after its horrible September, 2017 crash and burn where they lost 19 of their last 23 games that it was time to start over. They put on a brave face about contending again in 2018 but the reality of an 8-27 start slapped them with a cold hand.
The team hadn’t even returned from its All-Star break when it was announced July 18 that Machado - who was the Orioles’ lone representative in the game - was heading to Los Angeles to play for the Dodgers, who had lost their starting shortstop earlier in the season. Machado would be plugged into a Dodger team in a hot 4-team NL West race; ultimately he helped them prevail and win a second straight National League pennant after a three-decade drought. However, as predicted, Manny signed that massive contract but with a surprising West Coast suitor: the San Diego Padres, for whom he’s still playing, but with an opt-out clause after this coming season.
Because he turned out to be a rental for the Dodgers, he only accrued 2.5 WAR for them in a half-season (and made the last out in the World Series.) On the other hand, we have had a few seasons in which to evaluate the five-player return acquired from the Dodgers in that trade - a large portion of the fifteen prospects picked up by Oriole GM Dan Duquette in his 2018 swan song fire sale.
Of the five, the only one with any major league experience at the time was infielder Breyvic Valera. Valera had been in 20 games for the Dodgers in 2018, after he was picked up in a minor league trade with the Cardinals over the previous winter after five games in St. Louis, where he debuted in 2017. Breyvic didn’t turn out to be a piece of the rebuilding puzzle; after 12 (reasonably decent, as he hit .286) games for the Orioles during the remainder of the 2018 season Valera had his contract sold to the San Francisco Giants in early 2019. He gained a WAR of 0.1 for the Orioles.
The next to go was pitcher Zach Pop, who was at the high-A level at the time of the trade. But Pop was promoted to AA Bowie immediately by the Orioles and was turning into a dominant pitcher there when his 2019 season was cut short by injury. With no minor league season in 2020, Pop languished in limbo and was left unprotected by the Orioles in the 2020 Rule V draft; thus, he was plucked up by the Arizona Diamondbacks, who immediately sent him off to the pitching-starved Miami Marlins - a team that could afford to carry him on their roster all season and did so in 2021. Since then he’s been traded to the Blue Jays and has faced the team that initially traded for him.
Because he was lost like that, Pop was no gain at all for Baltimore. We’re still at 0.1 WAR.
While he finally made it to The Show in 2022 with the Orioles, infielder Rylan Bannon is also no longer in the organization. Like Pop, he jumped from the high-A level to Bowie immediately upon the trade, but struggled there. It took him most of the 2019 season to improve enough to make the jump to Norfolk, and missing most of the 2020 minor league season did him no favors either. (Bannon was a late-season addition to the alternate training site.) Likewise, 2021 was pretty much a lost season for Bannon as he hit well under .200 for the campaign; despite that he was brought up for four games in May of 2022 and compiled a (-0.2) WAR before being waived in August and claimed by the Dodgers. Since then he’s been waived by three teams in an off-season merry-go-round that’s currently spun Bannon to the Astros.
With Bannon’s negative number we’re now losing ground, with a (-0.1) total WAR.
As is often the case, the guy perceived to be the centerpiece of the deal turns out to be a cipher. Yusniel Diaz was supposed to be a five-tool outfielder who came to the Dodgers at a steep cost: extracted from Cuba as a defector after playing professionally there, the Dodgers gave Diaz a $15.5 million signing bonus. While Diaz was already playing at the AA level for the Dodgers, it was expected he would quickly get to AAA after getting his feet wet at Bowie and might have even made it to the 2018 Orioles as a late-season callup.
Instead, they got a guy who wasn’t much at Bowie in 2018, missed part of 2019 with injuries, then upon coming back in 2021, hit a whopping .161 between Bowie and Norfolk in 65 games. While there was significant improvement on that number this past season (he hit .251 in Norfolk) it’s likely the one plate appearance Diaz made on August 2 for the Orioles - a strikeout - may be all they get from him, as Diaz was allowed to be a minor league free agent after the 2022 season because several outfielders had passed him on the depth chart. He likely ends up with a 0 WAR for the Orioles based on his cup of Cuban coffee, keeping the total in the negative at (-0.1).
Thus, the success or failure of the Machado trade now rides on the right arm of starting pitcher Dean Kremer. Aside from Valera, he was the first to debut for the Orioles, coming up in the 2020 season to make four starts. While he also struggled in 2021, Dean was much improved in 2022, accruing enough WAR to bring his career total up to 2.5. Should he continue to build on that success in 2023, he would actually (and finally) pull the Machado trade to the good side of the ledger for the Orioles; as it stands at the moment the Dodgers are the slim 2.5 to 2.4 WAR winners of the trade.
As it stands, that whole 2018 fire sale has netted three decent pitchers for the Orioles: Kremer, Dillon Tate, and Bruce Zimmermann. That was hardly the step a rebuilding club needed.
But had the Dodgers been able to convince Manny to stay, it would have been another trade that defined (given he also traded future Cy Young winner Jake Arrieta away for next to nothing, along with several other eventual rotation pieces for other teams) the failure of Dan Duquette as a GM for the Orioles. The Machado deal may have worked out similarly to another off-season fire sale trade in which a team near and dear to my heart got the player a team decided it couldn’t afford and kept him around to see a Hall of Fame career unfold. That’s next week’s installment.