2019 Phillies Season Discussion (part 2)

[andyb]

've never seen an idea where I have to ignore a players performance after 2 years because I could have waited and signed him in two years. It's borderline silly but mostly designed to make the counter argument have to fit through the eye of a needle.

Would you count Cliff Lee's post free agent signing years as part of the total value the Phillies got in the initial Cliff Lee deal? No. Of course not. We traded for 2 years of Realmuto. In 2 years he might easily sign somewhere else. Or he might sign with us for $20-$25 million a year. In either case that contract is beyond what we traded for. Contracts and controllable years matter. It is silly to ignore them because they are the basis of the majority of baseball deals these days.

[Philsmania]

Would you count Cliff Lee's post free agent signing years as part of the total value the Phillies got in the initial Cliff Lee deal? No. Of course not.

I draw the line at either acquiring the player and extending him or acquiring the player and re-signing him as a free agent, hence, continuity of team membership. Lee had that interruption after they traded him.

[EDmuch]

If we had Crawford and Alfaro on this team rather than Segura and Realmuto we would be in a battle with the Fish for last place.

[zambonir]

We can safely say, based on the 2019 team's record, that Klentak could have made no moves or some very different moves and still had an 82-win team (if we even are one). But I don't know that we can yet say Alfaro and Crawford would have been the long-term answer, any more than Franco, Altherr, Herrera and Williams have been. We also don't know how Santana would have done if he'd stayed here (I assume well, if not necessarily as well as he's doing in Cleveland). But in hindsight would have been okay to take another year to find out all those things.

I almost think you have to split Klentak's off-season into before Machado/after Machado. If he really knew it was going to be Harper would he have considered keeping Santana for the 3B experiment? And what if Machado had insisted on playing SS after all? (There was talk of moving to Segura to 2B and trading Cesar if so). Whereas it seems like by the time they got Realmuto Harper was their guy, though it was still a couple of weeks before (certainly if they'd wanted Manny they could have easily beat the Padres offer though)

It's all hindsight but I don't think there's any question they'd be better off right now if they hadn't made all of these moves. We are in a window that's closing fast on Segura, Cesar, McCutchen, Arrieta and Robertson (on whom it is already slammed shut), as well as Realmuto in theory (if he leaves, or if he's not nearly the offensive player he is after 2021).

And now they have to make the same decisions about CF, 3B and 2B. If the goal is to win big in 2020 Haseley, Kingery and Hernandez aren't (collectively) the answer and I'm not sure simply moving Kingery to 2B and acquiring a 3B is enough either. Haseley as a 4th OF who may be a cornerstone player from 2021 on? Yes. But he's also a trade asset.

Lauber's write-up of Corbin was pretty convincing to me too.

Did Phillies learn their lesson from not signing Patrick Corbin? | Extra Innings

Arrieta’s contract was shorter, but his average annual value is higher than Corbin’s. The Phillies are paying Arrieta a premium price ($25 million per year) for his age 32, 33, and 34 seasons. The Nationals are paying Corbin $23.3 million for his age 29-34 seasons.

The first half of Corbin’s contract will likely cover his prime years as one of baseball’s elite left-handers. The second half could include his regression. For the Nationals, that’s fine. They’re paying for what they get in the first three years, not the last three.

[andyb]

If we had Crawford and Alfaro on this team rather than Segura and Realmuto we would be in a battle with the Fish for last place.

What if we had Crawford and Alfaro and Corbin and Santana? And retained Sanchez for the future. That was the opportunity cost of the trades.

[zambonir]

I don't see how they would have changed their thinking on Corbin though, all that was going to cost them was money and years (and keeping Santana would have meant a higher payroll).

I get the short-term vs. long-term argument but just in terms of WAR, Realmuto and Segura have combined for 6, while Alfaro and Crawford are under 2 combined. And I don't think we can assume Santana would have provided more than 2 or 3 (obviously Cleveland suits him, and he'd lose WAR playing 3B). Not sure he's going to be that guy in 2020 either.

Losing Cutch and the collapse of Hoskins still the story of the offense, the 3B and CF holes would have been more surviveable (and more aggressively filled if the pitching hadn't taken us out of the division race so long before the deadline).

[Philsmania]

Seeing Hoskins commit that error earlier makes me think that he looks like a guy who's checked out on 2019.

[andyb]

I don't see how they would have changed their thinking on Corbin though, all that was going to cost them was money and years (and keeping Santana would have meant a higher payroll).

The example was more to list the potential assets. I assume they would have traded Santana somewhere else and if they did not like Corbin could have gone out and added a different pitcher.

On WAR you also can't count Alfaro and Crawford without counting Santana. With Santana the current year WAR is pretty even. If you are going to evaluate the value we dealt in a trade then you can't pick and choose. Crawford and Alfaro might have been better in CBP and in Crawford's case played a full season. We'll never know that. We did deal Santana in a trade however and ignoring his value because he was a bad fit for Philly kind of defeats the point of evaluating all parts of the trade. If we get all the credit for recognizing that Realmuto could improve, don't we get the demerit for not realizing that Santana was a better player than he had been in 2018 (and there were signs in terms of exit velocity and BB/K ratio that he was better than his 2018 stats).

[EDmuch]

Andy with all due respect, we would never have had that combo of players. The problem with Corbin was not amount of money, it was number of years. And McFail was never willing to go to 6 years.

[andyb]

The point is we would have had the financial flexibility to acquire some good pitcher. Let's not stress too much on Corbin. The 6 years was the cost of doing business there and if the team did not want to give that to anyone they should still have traded or signed better pitching than we ended up with (starting pitching anyway). We actually should have had a decent bullpen. That was mostly bad injury luck. The starting rotation was the incorrect evaluation that we did not need to improve.

[zambonir]

I'm not discounting Santana, I just don't think his WAR as Cleveland's 1B/DH would have been what he provided as our 3B (or even as our 1B, plus in that scenario you've still got Hoskins making a mess and no McCutchen).

Of course it still would have been better than what we got from all of our actual 3B combined.

I also think you overstate Santana's trade value. I mean, we are sitting here saying Hoskins doesn't have much trade value and he's still young and cheap. At the end of last year Santana looked like an overpaid, aging, declining player, offensivelly and defensively, and even his OBP was dropping.

Meanwhile, this is a rather sobering read. Among the highlights:

• This is as good as Harper gets, we'll never see 2015 or 2017 Harper again (probably true but you never know, just look at Santana).

• The Phillies won't win the division any time soon.

• They predict a Phillies-Padres wild card game in 2021 (while implying we won't make the playoffs next year either).

But we still got the better player so far.

Grading Bryce Harper's and Manny Machado's 2019s -- and predicting their next...

[andyb]

I'm not discounting Santana, I just don't think his WAR as Cleveland's 1B would have been what he provided as our 3B (or even as our 1B, plus in that scenario you've still got Hoskins making a mess and no McCutchen).

But you are implicitly. He was a 4 WAR asset we traded. It does not matter where we traded him to or whether he could have actually played 3B for us. He was an asset in the deal and if we count the WAR of other players in the deal then we should count his WAR too. It matters little that he was a bad fit for us before the deal (the 2018 free agent signing mistake). It only matters that we traded him and then he performed well. He was naturally going to get shuffled to a team that wanted to play him at 1B or DH. Nicasio's -0.1 WAR and $9.2 million salary count in the evaluation too.

[zambonir]

He was a 1.7 WAR player for us whose offense had declined for three straight seasons. That's the asset we had to sell, not what he became this year. I just don't believe there was another team out there that was going to give us anything for Santana. Had we traded him straight-up for what Seattle got that wouldn't have been a good trade. We were lucky Segura was also a bit of a salary dump (and viewed as a problem player) or he'd have cost more than Crawford in a stand-alone deal.

I do count Nicasio, whom I don't view as an asset, just some money we had to take in order to help move Santana. Another one of Klentak's mistakes, IMO (since it gave us four expensive aging unoptionable relievers once Robertson was also added).

We're just lucky we didn't give up even more than Crawford to try and also get Diaz.

[andyb]

I guess the difference is that I am not analyzing the motivations to make a trade. I am just looking at the results. Frankly Alfaro has underperformed this year too. One could have looked at 2018 and projected him to be a clear 2.0-2.5 WAR catcher. That was the asset we traded but we only count the 1 WAR he actually earned in 2019 in the evaluation.

Once a trade happens, you determine who won or lost based upon the results (and a little bit based on the financial flexibility that trade leaves you with). Nicasio was actually not a mistake. He was included in the deal because the Phillies would have to pay him $9.25 million. If he was not in the deal I assume the Phillies would have to put that much cash in the deal anyway. Given the choice he was a decent buy low risk that always could be released if things went south.

Segura in my mind might be where Klentak's analytical evaluation might have deferred to a scouting evaluation. He had a fair contract (roughly $60 million over 4 years). He was probably expected to outperform that contract at the beginning of the deal and underperform at the end. I was more hesitant because of the intangible factors that had always trailed him as not being the best team player. We have seen a little of that in some lack of hustle and I don't think he has been an incredible value in the clubhouse (however intangible that might be to measure). He had been traded several times while performing well and that tells me something.

[Philsmania]

For the record, if the Phillies fail to have a winning season, it will be the eight consecutive non-winning seasons, the Phillies most since 1933-1948 (sixteen straight non-winning seasons). Yeah, we are getting into historically bad mode.

[zambonir]

Except they weren't actually trying to win for three of those seasons, which is more than you can say about the Phillies after '93, or so many other eras. The problem is too little about the rebuild, by either regime, has paid off.

[bigegypt0417]

've never seen an idea where I have to ignore a players performance after 2 years because I could have waited and signed him in two years. It's borderline silly but mostly designed to make the counter argument have to fit through the eye of a needle.

It is silly to ignore them because they are the basis of the majority of baseball deals these days.

It is as silly as ignoring performance after 2 years to simply slant the field in your favor. It's the strangest argument I've ever seen from you and that is saying lots. I can no longer consider overall performance on a player simply because he wasn't signed for those years prior to the trade?

Yeesh.

[zambonir]

lol, I'm just wondering if they can win six games! Which would be 82-80. If you take away the ability for them to say this year was better than last year, even if it's just by a couple of games, I do agree that Kapler could be toast.

This was on September 17, when they were 76-72. Andy said they'd have to go 12-2 to get 88 wins, obviously no one really expected that (though the Brewers have basically played that well). Since then they've gone 3-5 and now have to go 3-3.

[Lawman]

Is it time to start the Official 2019-2020 Phillies Offseason thread?

[Philsmania]

Except they weren't actually trying to win for three of those seasons, which is more than you can say about the Phillies after '93, or so many other eras. The problem is too little about the rebuild, by either regime, has paid off.

1993 masked for that season what had been a rebuilding job that had failed. After 1988, the Phillies gave up on the patchwork approach, Giles stopped playing GM and they hired Lee Thomas to rebuild from the ground up. By 1992, it was clear the farm system was nowhere better than it was in 1988. So, for the rest of his Phillies tenure, Thomas went back to Giles's old patchwork strategy. It worked grandly in '93 but didn't work again. Finally, after 1996, the organization gave up that folly and went back to the drawing board. However, that time, they did things right and after some setbacks (2000 season) they emerged as contenders in 2001 and they would be a good contending team for all but one of the next eleven seasons.

What concerns me so much about this 2019 Phillies team is that we have a ML team that isn't very good and a farm system that is poor. Those are the two telltale signs of a failed rebuilding job.