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revisiting Omar-era deals
| iramets Dec 01 2007 06:54 AM |
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Let’s review Widey’s somewhat optimistic but rather thorough assessment of various Omar deals as of last June 27th. The stuff in red is my current comments on Widey's comments:
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| Gwreck Dec 01 2007 09:06 AM |
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[u:c668fbefe8]Good (so far)[/u:c668fbefe8]
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| smg58 Dec 01 2007 09:28 AM |
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I remember this thread.
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| iramets Dec 01 2007 09:40 AM |
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Sanchez has given you a half-season of good relief pitching, about 50 IP, in the last two years, so I'm having a hard time viewing his acquisition as a big advantage over keeping Jae Seo, especially given the Mets' fifth spot in last year's rotation. It's an overall plus, I guess (Seo wasn't very good for the Dodgers), but I can't make this one into a success story.
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| Frayed Knot Dec 01 2007 10:12 AM |
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Re: Green/MacLane
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| iramets Dec 01 2007 10:31 AM |
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Are you comparing Green's numbers to the average NL player, or to the average corner outfielder with the arm and range and soft hands of a tree stump? Because if you're an outfielder who can't play the outfield, and can do a little filling at 1B in a pinch, you'll need some offensive production well above your average NL player with some defensive value.
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| seawolf17 Dec 01 2007 10:50 AM |
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You can't compare Green to comparable OFs, because Evan MacLane wasn't going to get you Vlad Guerrero in a trade. MacLane for Green is a definite plus for the Mets.
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| iramets Dec 01 2007 11:50 AM |
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You got to compare him to someone. By your standards, anytime a team trades a prospect for a veteran, they can run around thumping their chest for a few years, screaming, "We totally pwned those dumm Dodgers, giving us Green bwahaha for a guy who's still in the minors--ha, ha, we are the smartest, toughest negotiators EVAH! Dodgers suck! Mets are jeanyesses! We rool!" but I can't award that full credit for logic, sorry.
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| seawolf17 Dec 01 2007 12:54 PM |
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But you have to say that, because you don't know for sure what else you could have gotten for him. You can't say "the Twins would have given the Mets Torii Hunter for MacLane," or whoever, because we'll never really know that. Not that trades happen in a vacuum, but they are what they are.
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| Gwreck Dec 01 2007 03:23 PM |
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Also we got Green from the Diamondbacks, not the Dodgers.
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| iramets Dec 01 2007 03:36 PM |
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You, sir, are correct. Please substitute "dumbass motherfuckin Snakes" in all above uses of "Dodgers." Thank you. Now, as to my point: do you really want all trades where you get a veteran for a prospect to be labelled as unqualified successes until ten or fifteen years down the road? Because if you do, we might as well just cease to pursue this line of inquiry altogether, or prepare to take a few asswhuppings whenever the Mets next get prospects in exchange for veterans.
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| Frayed Knot Dec 01 2007 04:35 PM |
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Seeing as how all trades are being evaluated as to their outcome "so far" let's either evaluate as to how they've worked out [u:409cca15d3]so[/u:409cca15d3] [u:409cca15d3]far[/u:409cca15d3] or just admit that they all belong in the 'inconclusive' file until each and every one of the players involved are at least 8 years into retirement and are therefore incapable of coming back and possibly tilting the balance one way or the other.
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| Nymr83 Dec 01 2007 04:40 PM |
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i think we can call green/maclane a success because so far maclane has been bad even in the minors. its not like it looks like he's going to come around any time soon and pitch well in the majors.
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| iramets Dec 01 2007 05:02 PM |
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Me, I'd rather put it in the inconclusive pile. I'd put it in the "good trade" pile if Green had had better years here, as good as could have reasonably been expected by realistic optimists, (playing in 120-140 games during 2007, say, and hitting 15-25 HR--remember all that crap last spring about his power swing returning? Were you posting "This is crazy talk!!" If so, I don't recall--) and maybe driving in 70-90 runs, too.
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| Gwreck Dec 01 2007 06:42 PM |
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To a certain extent -- yeah. We can safely put Kazmir/Zambrano on Jim Duquette's "bad" list but we really won't know HOW bad until Kamir has a few more years under his belt. Or a lesser example, the deal we made in '02 where we lost Jason Bay was a deadline deal. He hadn't hit the majors yet, and it probably wasn't until mid-2002 -- 2 years after the deal -- in the middle of his rookie of the year season where we could safely say "Oh shit, didn't we have this guy? What the fuck?"
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| Elster88 Dec 01 2007 07:02 PM |
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Maclane is not going to put in a decent multi-year career. I know, you know it, a retarded monkey knows it. Actually the last one is me again. But you catch my drift. Also, circumstances come into play. We needed Green's production RIGHT NOW when we got him. Thoughts?
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| Elster88 Dec 01 2007 07:05 PM |
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And in 2007 everyone stopped caring again. (.247/.327/.418//.745)
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| John Cougar Lunchbucket Dec 01 2007 08:47 PM |
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I think the time horizon makes an enormous impact in the motivation for trades and is one rason why so few of them are judgeable right away. Even this trade, you could argue, involves a more immediate payback for the Mets in that Church would be more predictable a success for next year than Milledge. Can anyone see Omar and/or Willie hanging onto their jobs if they don't win a division or playoff spot in '08?
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| smg58 Dec 01 2007 10:45 PM |
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He's a predictably OK platoon corner outfielder. And Schneider can be counted on for mediocre offense by catcher standards. Is this going to be good enough?
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| iramets Dec 02 2007 03:47 AM |
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You can also view the reason someone sneaks into your house to bugger you is that he caught a glimpse of your ass and just has got to have you NOW!!! as his motivation, but that doesn't really matter to you, does it? So WIllie and Omar are motivated to trash the entire organization, down to the office furniture, if it wins them a few extra games in April, 'cuz they need to get the team off to a fast start to dispell talk of the team's collapse, but that doesn't mean that every trade they make towards that end will make sense, does it? Most of you hated, and continue to despise, the Yankees for trading their best prospects year after year to get veterans from other teams, dating back to Balboni or, for some of you, to Lew Burdette. I know that's a big reason the Yankees represent to me evil bullying and thuggery and very little fun. WTF's the point of buying pennants on a lopsided playing field? Even if you win, it' feels kinda hollow, as any honest Yankee fan will admit. To the Yankees' credit, they did use this strategy and actually win a shitload of pennants, though--what's the Mets' slogan? "We don't win jack but we're despicable bullies anyway." To me, the real fun lies in seeing kids develop into stars, and the real pain lies in seeing them do it for other teams. I know the agony of watching Amos Otis, and Nolan Ryan, and Ken Singleton achieve success long after the short term fixes that cut short their Met careers had retired --the solace from that nightmare period made me think "Okay, well, at least we've learned not to trade kids off like they were bags of balls for veterans of established mediocrity." But now that may as well be written in stone above Citifield's archway as the club's official policy. I understand why the team does it, I certainly understand why the guys whose heads are on the block in the short term are pushing and justifying it, I understand that the rest of my life will probably be a frantic and desperate push to make the playoffs THIS SEASON without a real long-term or even medium-term plan for the organization, and I get why I'm not having any fun watching this team anymore. YMMV, of course, but for me rooting for this team is like rooting for Enron. I love watching the Milledges of the world develop into stars, and the Kazmirs, and the Wiggintons, too. That's fun. This is not. I'll swallow a little of this, grudgingly, if the deals seem sensible to me at first blush, or if in the long run, pennant after pennant is the end result--but tell me again why I should accept it blandly if the deals themselves seem colossally stupid when they're made and the end result reconfirms the initial reaction? Anyway, if the whole point to a trade is to get crappy "talent" that's useful to your team right this second at the cost of developing far greater talent from your minor league system, we'll just mark up every such deal as an unqualified success, and note that the deals are being considered from Omar's perspective exclusively, and not the point of view of someone who will be here long after Omar and WIllie have left for other jobs. That's the real rub in this short term perspective. It's in Omar's interest and Willie to view the Mets' interests as coinciding with their own, which stop at the end dates of their contracts. You, however, are going to be here way past then, so why don't you adopt a longer perspective?
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| metsmarathon Dec 02 2007 08:20 AM |
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...says the man who would have traded david wright to the marlins but that's besides the point. relative to this thread, not every trade can be made with a long view. sometimes you need to make a move to trade off potential future production for more certain present production. not that this justifies teh milledge trade - it doesn't, and i'll need to hear a lot more bad things about milledge's value in the eyes of other teams and see him fail to develop in washington before that can even begin to happen - but it does lend itself towards the green trade. evan maclane doesn't look like anything, and he netted the mets an improvement in right field that i would think helped stabilize the offense at the expense of lastings milledge who was not yet ready to produce daily on a competitive baseball team. oh, shawn green's 2006 OPS was 0.776. the average nl right fielder's ops was 0.775. this year, 0.782 for green, 0.795 for the nl average.
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| iramets Dec 02 2007 09:17 AM |
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Sorry, can't let you get away scott-free with a malicious misrepresentation of what I said, and what we arguing about. I was clear that I loved Wright on the mets, but my point was that for a price, a crazy-high, stupid, ridiculously inflated price (in this case Cabrera AND Willis), you'd have to consider anyone, even your favoritest Mets, as tradeable. Your point, which I still find utterly indefensible, except from a Marlins' point-of-view, was the opposite.
OK, so if Maclane ever makes the majors, is there a level at which he could perform that would make you go, "The D'backs totally robbed us"? Because if there is no such level (and that's what I'm hearing), Shawn Green's warm body in right field made this trade a permanent success the day it was announced That's pretty myopic. Looked at another way, is there any level at which Shawn reen could have performed over the last two seasons that, even given Evan Maclane's lack of progress through the minor leagues to date, you would have said, "This guy sucked so badly that I'd rather have Maclane now, and hope that he could turn his career around"? Because if there is no such level (and that again is what I'm hearing) then again this trade was a done-deal no-brainer from day one.
A little confusing. Can you cite your source for stats?--it's not clear if this year, Green is being compared to the average NL player, or the average NL RFer. If the latter, what you're showing is that over his Met career he was under the average NL RFer's offensive production, (and we know he was below the midpoint of NL RFers in defense). I have him at .779 for the 2006-7, and the NL's RFers, according to your numbers, at .785. I don't know what replacement value offense in RF would be, but there is definitely a point at which it makes more sense to pick up someone off the waiver wire, or promote your best minor league RFer, instead of swapping prospects for suspects. If Green exceeded the replacement level RFer (and I think he has) it's far from clear how much he exceeded that level by--it's certainly crystal clear to me that fans (i.e., CPFers) were hoping for better numbers during Green's stay. (Is there a "Green Acquired" thread anywhere for perusal?) This trade was clearly not a bad trade to date, but I'm not ready to cite as a shining acquisition either. Put it in the "good" category, if you like, but there's much about it that's pretty mediocre.
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| metsmarathon Dec 02 2007 09:42 AM |
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sorry. source for stats, espn.com. i only looked at green's 06 total, not his metly split, though i think they were rather similar.
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| iramets Dec 02 2007 09:55 AM |
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Thanks. I'll also revise, to cop to classifying this one as a good trade, given that Maclane shows no signs of ever becomng a MLB player, and Green was clearly above replacement value. That's a standard that works falsely in evaluating Omar, and other short-term dealers: as a rule, Omar makes trades that, by the design of the trade (prospects for vets), look to be excellent at best and inconclusive at worst during Omar's tenure as GM. It's only long after he's left the job, and no one really cares about evaluating his performance, that the occasional has blossomed and turned in a career that dwarfs the mediocre year or two Omar picked up long ago. The only way I'd give Omar a pass on swapping propects for suspects is if he had a track record of evaluating young talent far better than your average GM, and it's far from clear that he can recognize talent (Keppinger, Bannister, Lindstrom, Flores, etc.) with unusual perceptiveness..
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| OlerudOwned Dec 03 2007 02:05 PM |
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What's so bad about the Gotay trade? I can dig the goat.
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| Gwreck Dec 03 2007 02:33 PM |
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Keppinger had a pretty kick-ass 2nd half in Cincinnati last year:
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