The future
Big names could be moving at the trade deadline
There are two weeks until the end of the non-waiver trade deadline, and if you are a Phillies fan then you should be crossing fingers and praying the team gets scorching hot through the end of July.
This is not some hallucina- tion by someone who believes there is still hope for October baseball. There are straightjackets available for those deluded souls.
No, the reason the Phillies need to make a phantom rally coming out of the All-Star break is solely a value play — as in trade value.
Unless this happens, July 31 probably won’t carry with it as much desperation and activity on the trade market as many of you hope it will.
As general manager Ruben Amaro Jr. stated last week, it is tough to trade players who are underperforming, and even tougher to trade players who are spending at least some of July on the disabled list.
“If you have guys who are hurt, they don’t move anywhere,” Amaro said. “If guys aren’t performing, they don’t move.
“We have some guys who are performing, so we’ll see how much interest there is in those guys.”
The Phillies do have players who are performing. Mar-
lon Byrd has a .795 OPS, which ranks 19th out of 57 outfielders with at least 298 plate appearances this season, just a shade behind the OPS of Melky Cabrera (.801), Jayson Werth (.807), Adam Jones (.810) and Hunter Pence (.819). He also comes at value, even if reports out of Seattle that Byrd wants his 2016 vesting option guaranteed in a trade to the Mariners are true. That would mean Byrd costs $20 million to an interested team for 2½ seasons, which is far less money than any of the above players will make in the same timeframe. The Phillies are open to throwing a reasonable amount of money into a deal to make it work.
While the Phillies might want to deal Byrd in order to get younger, they do not have a need to trade the 36-year-old. If they don’t get the deal they want, they can repeat the process next summer if necessary. Considering they don’t have any young outfielders banging down the door to take Byrd’s place in right, this represents the most control they have of a trade situation.
Another player with solid trade value is lefthanded reliever Antonio Bastardo, who is making a humble $2 million this year and has another year of arbitration remaining before becoming a free agent. Over the last four seasons, only five relievers in the majors — Aroldis Chapman, Koji Uehara, Craig Kimbrel, Tyler Clippard and Kenley Jansen — have a better hitsper-nine-innings ratio than Bastardo’s 5.74.
The rest of the landscape is far less friendly.
Closer Jonathan Papelbon desperately wants to go to a contender, but his $13 million vesting option in 2016 is a big worry to interested teams, who don’t really want to pay much of his $13 million in 2015, either.
Kyle Kendrick might have been of sneaky value to a team needing a solid inning-eater in their rotation, but an ERA in the mid-4s and an annoying habit of putting his team in a first-inning hole makes the right-hander far less desirable.
Chase Utley and Jimmy Rollins have full no-trade rights that constrain the market for them, and neither staple in the middle infield has expressed a wild desire to make that change of heart.
Cliff Lee and Carlos Ruiz could have been intriguing trade chips, but both have been spending quality time in Clearwater on the mend. Lee’s contract remains far too massive to gamble on his ten- der elbow, unless he can make his three July starts with the Phillies sing a dominating tune. Considering he just allowed eight runs in his last rehab start, this doesn’t seem a reasonable expectation. The good news is he might make it through waivers this August.
Ruiz, meanwhile, is dealing with his latest concussion and has been slow to come around from it. The Cardinals are desperate to find a replacement following the devastating loss of Yadier Molina to a sprained thumb that required surgery, but a replacement has to be durable first and foremost. That does not fit Ruiz’s history at all.
The most disappointing thing about the first half of the season wasn’t the fact that we have clear and undeniable proof that advancing age and a catastrophic Achilles’ tendon injury have rendered Ryan Howard a 260-pound albatross. It isn’t Domonic Brown going from an AllStar to a ditch in the side of the road. It isn’t even Lee feeling a twinge in his elbow that has all but nuked his chances of being traded in the next six weeks.
The most disappointing thing has been the utter lack of progress in figuring out whether the few position players within the organization either expected to be big-league ready now or by season’s end.
The plan was for Freddy Galvis and Darin Ruf to be at the ready in case any of the veterans needed their playing time pared, or if their performances warranted increased opportunities. Jokes about Galvis’ woeful performance at the plate in the few weeks he was in the majors aside, the biggest problem with the starcrossed infielder has been his inability to stay off the disabled list, from broken bones to, of all things, a MRSA infection. Ruf has had similar issues, although his latest injury arose when the Phillies somehow decided they couldn’t find him enough playing time on this offensive juggernaut and sent him back to TripleA, where he fractured his wrist crashing into a wall.
Then there is Maikel Franco. After tearing it up in Clearwater and Reading last season, then impressing the coaching staff with his tools in spring training, there were many in the organization who were prepared to give the young corner infielder a chance to be the Manny Machado or Yasiel Puig for the Phillies. Instead, Franco struggled badly in the opening three months, so much so that the organization had to pass on the moment even when an obvious opportunity to have him push into the big-league lineup — a disabled-list stint for Cody Asche — arose.
Those delays only further muddy the vision Amaro and Co. can have when figuring out their organizational needs. The Phillies need outfielders for certain, but not every contender has much quality in their system in the outfield. Pitching depth never goes out of vogue, but as the Phils are learning the hard way this year, even the best pitchers can’t keep an offensively inept squad in games.
In truth, the fixes required go well beyond July 31, or August. The winter will be busy, and it remains to be seen if Amaro will be the one to handle moves that a hot two weeks in July won’t fluff.