Stars increasingly net meager returns
The trade deadline is one of baseball’s unofficial holidays, hyped by the league, fueled by its own media cottage industry and viewed as a source of hope for fans across generations.
Old heads might recall such heists like the Atlanta Braves acquiring John Smoltz from Detroit for Doyle Alexander, or the Houston Astros stealing their own Hall of Famer, Jeff Bagwell, from Boston for Larry Andersen.
Younger fans, accustomed to building their own franchises via video games or fantasy leagues, dream on incoming prospects and share with their elders a simple refrain: Better to trade a player than get nothing for them.
Yet increasingly, nothing is exactly what those clubs end up receiving.
A USA TODAY Sports analysis of 94 July trade-deadline deals from 2015 to 2019 that shipped 204 prospects from buyers to sellers confirms a strongly held feeling throughout the industry – that teams are holding their top prospects tighter than ever, making it
exceedingly difficult to extract value for star players.
Of the 204 prospects dealt in that five-year span, just 38 have amassed at least 1.0 Wins Above Replacement for the acquiring team.
The top five most valuable players traded in that time – pitchers Sean Manaea, Michael Fulmer, Zach Davies, Josh Hader and Matthew Boyd – were dealt in 2015, a year that proved anomalous for many reasons.
Since then, the lid on talent has tightened, cracking open only for the most desperate or overmatched executives.
“The hype has built up to where the return is hard to meet expectations,” Tigers general manager Alex Avila, who has been a buyer, seller and holder at the deadline in the past decade, told USA TODAY Sports. “It’s not reality.”
Avila’s words are worth heeding as the July 30 trade deadline nears and AllStars like Trevor Story, Max Scherzer, Kris Bryant and Jose Berrios are churned through the deadline-industrial complex. While everyone loves a big July trade – especially playoff-hungry fans of contenders – this thirst fails to account for the vicious cycle facing GMs looking to shop All-Stars.
Rival executives hew closely to projection systems and their own perceived future value of their own prospects. The win-at-all-costs owner is nearly extinct, what with luxury-tax ceilings to avoid and the reluctance to disappoint 29 peers bent on suppressing salary.
That can leave the selling GM – often under a mandate from his owner to clear that big, veteran salary no matter what – in a no-win situation.
The track record of players moved at the deadline since 2015 reflects this reality.
In all, 117 of the 204 prospects have made it to the major leagues, but 39 of them – nearly a third – have performed at worse than replacement level. While the jury is certainly out on many prospects – particularly those dealt in 2018 and ’19 – the cratering performance of traded prospects cannot be explained away simply by the calendar.
While 14 of 28 players who made the big leagues from July 2015 trades proved at least one Win Above Replacement – or, a minimum of utility – the percentage dropped to seven of 37 in 2016, nine of 48 in 2017 and, so far, just three of 59 from the 2018 July trade class. Two of those – pitcher Tyler Glasnow and outfielder Austin Meadows – had exhausted their rookie status by the time Pittsburgh ill-advisedly dealt them to Tampa Bay.
This analysis excludes a handful of deals made in recent Julys, most notably so-called “prospect challenge” trades, such as the Marco GonzalesTyler O’Neill swap between the Cardinals and Mariners, and the Jazz Chisholm-Zac Gallen Diamondbacks-Marlins trade. It also bypasses deals used largely to launder salary for luxury-tax purposes, such as the 2015 three-way deal between the Marlins, Dodgers and Braves.