Trade Rumors and Reaction3: The Final Countdown

The Bay trade has been heavily denied by both teams. I dont think its true.

It’s still speculation, but I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt. You could still argue the LaRoche/Morris package was better (based on LaRoche’s upside at the time).

But we’re talking about 6 months of performance with an offseason in the middle where he hasn’t gotten better. To me that points to something that has become ingrained and won’t easily change. It could also point to an underlying injury problem where he’s not putting the same amount of stress on his elbow in throwing the pitch, which is the reason for less break. If I’m putting that much money on the line, I’m not just going to assume that he’s going to easily rediscover his former slider.

There’s less risk involved in Saunders, that’s the point I was trying to get at. If he goes down with an injury, you’re not stuck paying him the next two years. If he looks awful you can non-tender him. You don’t have that flexibility with Haren. Saunders is also still going to be paid under market value, so that’s still surplus value that Angels are giving up however you want to look at it. If they didn’t want to pay him, they didn’t have to, so I don’t see how trading him something positive in their favor.

The big question here is what’s more indicative, the past year or the rest of his career. I think if you asked most of the teams in the league they’d tell you the past year is more indicative because he’s not as good as he was in 2008 or the first half of 2009. My take is teams think he’s making a lot more bad pitches than he was back then. Maybe he’ll settle back into being the 4.3 win average he had from 2006-2008, but at that number his contract isn’t the huge steal it initially appears to be, and there’s a chance he could be worse.

As for the question on the slider, go check any of the pitch data on fangraphs. According to BIS, he was throwing a ton of sliders at his peak in 2008 (and it was his best pitch by pitch values), along with a few a few cutters. Last year, all those pitches suddenly became cutters, but the pitch value stayed relatively high. Now they’re all cutters and they have a negative pitch value. If you dig deeper and look into the pitch f/x data, you’ll see it still has him throwing a lot of sliders last year, but now all those pitches are being classified as cutters. If you look at the spin profile of the two pitches, you’ll see that the cutter has a more positive Z movement value, which means its getting less downward movement. Taking all of this together, you can see the hard breaking pitch he was throwing a bunch at his peak, that was his most effective pitch, has turned into a flatter pitch that’s getting hammered. I think that right there is the reason for his current struggles.

The main point most teams made was that the Phillies didn’t shop him around at all before accepting a sub par return from the Mariners. Because they didn’t want to have both on the payroll for any period of time, they moved Lee as fast as they could without seeing what the best offer would be.

The Dbacks on the other hand have shopped Haren for weeks, without there ever being a ton of interest in him. The rumors were that no one wanted to give up good prospects and eat the whole deal, and most teams preferred Oswalt. That tells me teams didn’t think his deal was nearly as good as the mainstream seems to think. There was a whole article about it on Fangraphs. People in baseball just don’t seem to value him the same as people outside baseball. That makes me think there’s some sort of disconnect caused by the asymmetry of information. They know more than we do, and they don’t think as highly of him, which makes me think they know something we don’t.

BTW, I also like Skaggs and Corbin more than most and I think in the end the deal won’t look nearly as bad as people think.

Not that you should assume he’s injured. If someone is struggling and one of their pitches isn’t working like it used to, I’m not going to assume someone can flip a switch and make it better. That goes double if I’m a team investing ~30 million in him.

On the slider/cutter, the only way to look at velocity movement relationship is to go through each individual game chart and look for yourself. The other possibility is you can look at the velocity charts for each individual pitches to see the range of velocities of each pitch type on a game by game basis over the course of a season. Just generally looking at individual game charts, it looks like he used to get some curves classified as sliders (which brought down the average velocity), he threw them around 85 back then (a little faster than now), and all in all he didn’t seem to have as many with fairly big positive Z movement values. The added velocity would also act to keep it flatter as it would me slightly less movement due to gravity.