After a torrid start, Bronson Arroyo is still looking for win #10. He failed in his 8th consecutive try this week. One might think that would cool off fans upset that the B's traded him for Wily Mo. Well, put me firmly in the camp of people who say this trade was still a mistake.
To be fair, I'm willing to give Pena more time to pan out. You can't judge a trade when the key player in it has been on the DL for most of the time since the deal. But here's what I wrote about Arroyo back on March 20th.
Far be it from me to question Theo and the gang. But Arroyo was a pretty valuable player/trading asset, and Pena doesn't seem fair value, at least not yet. Arroyo is relatively young (29); under contract for three years in what should be his prime; puts up consistently good ERA and win totals (admittedly on a great offensive team); and is never, ever on the disabled list. (He supposedly has the proverbial "rubber arm; in fact, I read once that he doesn't even ice down after games, which is pretty much unheard of.) That's a great guy to have at the back end of your rotation or in your bullpen, particularly for $3m per year or so.
So far this year, Arroyo is 9-7 with a 3.31 ERA. Even if you assume his ERA would be significantly higher in the American League, particularly pitching in the AL East, I think it's safe to say it would probably be about where it was last year, when he went 14-10 and had a 4.51 ERA. But more significantly, here's the key stat: 157.2 innings pitched. That's better than any Sox pitcher this year -- Curt Shilling tops the list (152.1 innings), followed by Josh Beckett (134.1) and Tim Wakefield (119.2). No other Sox pitcher is over 100.
While Arroyo's innings would undoubtedly be fewer in the AL (just like his ERA would be larger), his durability would be a great asset to a team that has been throwing pitchers like Jason Johnson and Dave Pauley out there. Hindsight is 20-20, but wouldn't it be nice to have a 4th or 5th starter who could have pitched about 115-130 innings so far?
12 comments:
Why would his innings pitched be lower in the AL? No need to pinch-hit for him when you have a DH.
Without doing a numbers workup, I based that on the dual assumptions that he would likely be throwing more pitches to AL lineups (fewer easy outs pitching to pitchers vs DHs) and getting pulled from games earlier (due to more runs given up because of better quality AL lineups).
I think your first assumption is well taken, but offset by my point (NL pitchers exit the game before their arm is done). I think your second assumption is a form of double-counting -- higher ERA due to better-quality AL lineups means maybe that you stay in the same length of time and give up more runs, yes, but if you give up more runs and leave the game earlier then maybe your ERA is comparable. At at any rate, if the lineups are better in the AL, then there's no particular reason for managers to pull pitchers earlier for having given up runs.
Not sure any of that makes sense.
As I said, I haven't done number workups or anything like that. Your points are taken, and that could definitely be the case. For what it's worth, Arroyo is on pace to exceed his total innings pitched in any year so far.
But the main idea was simply that I would expect both his ERA and innings pitched to reflect the reality that he's an average (but durable) pitcher. And gee, wouldn't it be nice for the Sox to have one of those?
I was on the fence about this trade at the time, which I guess makes we one of its biggest fans on this board. The challenge in evaluating it seems to be one of short-term vs. long-term payoffs.
The upside of this trade is something like the 'Big Papi' scenario: Wily Mo becomes a regular outfielder/DH who plays decent defense and hits .300+ for power. The Red Sox have him cost controlled for several years before needing to resign him. Short term if Nixon, Crisp or another rotation regular gets injured and the team doesn't see as big a drop in productivity. He gives the team flexibility to trade Nixon, et al in the future.
The downside/risk of the trade was that Matt Clement, David Wells, Papelbon, Lester, et al were not going to be able to hold down the 4th and 5th starters positions. In spring training the team was widely seen as having far more pitchers to go around than they could possibly use. Since then something close to a worst-case scenario has happened: Clement, Foulke, Wakefield and Wells have all contributed far less than expected. Papelbon and Lester have done well, but as the closer and 3rd starter.
Wily Mo is leading the team in hitting and has played well replacing both Nixon and Coco when each was injured. Even so, it's easy for the trade to look bad now: the worst-case scenario happened in the short-term with our pitching staff, but not enough time has passed to see if Pena will live up to expectations.
In principal, you don't evaluate trades based on how things played out. You evaluate trades based on whether they were a good decision based on the limited information available at the time.
Sorry. I can't agree with your last statement. Nobody besides the person on the bad end of a trade evaluates a trade that way.
OK, let's play this game:
We're going to make a bet based on a coin flip. Except this coin has a 95% chance of landing heads, 5% chance of landing tails.
If it lands heads, you pay me $1.
If it lands tails, I pay you $1.
In this game-- regardless of how the coin flip turns out-- you'd always want to bet on 'heads'. Because that has the highest probability of success, given the limited information available at the time. That's pretty close to the definition of a 'right decision' in my book.
Nowhere in there are you guaranteed a good outcome. The person who bets on tails and then walks away with $1 is lucky, but still made a lousy decision. These people will have some short-term successes, but will do worse in the long-run than people who consistently place smart bets.
People who make good decisions will have both good and bad outcomes. People who made bad decisions will have both good and bad outcomes. Over time, however, the people who make good decisions will clean the clocks of the people who make bad decisions.
I have far less information than the Red Sox front office on the Pena vs. Arroyo tradeoff. One of the things keeping me from criticizing them too strongly is the confidence that they consistently play the odds in something like the manner I have described above, and have been doing it pretty well.
That's all fine and dandy. And your logic is impeccable. But nobody on earth judges a trade that way.
Trades are all about makeup of teams, long-term vs short-term benefits, and value. The best trades are ones where both teams derive substantial benefit from the trade for one reason or another. Or where one team gives up nothing, and gets a lot in return. Ultimately, it's that benefit by which the trade is judged, not the thinking behind it or the odds of success.
To wit: trading Jeff Bagwell for Larry Anderson. Sox management had a valid rationale at the time -- Scott Cooper was playing above Bagwell, and they didn't realize he would be a near Hall of Famer. One might argue that they should have known, but they didn't. So they traded a Double A ball player who was behind a guy they thought would be a fixture for the forseeable future. In retrospect, a dumb move.
Another example, but this one is not a trade: the C's utilizing the Phoenix pick in the draft where they took Johnson, Brown, and Forte. They evaluated the draft, and the players, and decided that it was a great opportunity to use the pick. Had they rolled it over, they'd have had Amare Stoudamire. That's another move that's judged almost exclusively in hindsight, even though there were valid reasons (in the C's mind) for doing it at the time.
That's all fine and dandy. And your logic is impeccable. But nobody on earth judges a trade that way.
Well, 'nobody on earth' seems to leave out me, the Sox front office, and a fair horde of stat-heads. I say the team should consistently make good decisions, and I'll live with the outcomes. Over time, the odds will work in our favor.
You seem to be saying that a trade is only good if the outcome is good. And while this makes some gut-level sense, this approach doesn't actually help GMs make decisions about which potential trades to make in the future. Because, obviously, it only works in retrospect.
Let's say Bronson Arroyo had a career-ending shoulder blowout a month into the season. Suddenly the trade for Pena would look fantastic, right? We got a contributing rotation player and gave up someone who was out of baseball a few months later.
But if you're a GM, you can't predict these things with complete accuracy. You only have a small set of information to work with. Back to me 95%/5% coin flip example. You can't know for sure what's going to happen until after the fact. Saying your team's GM should have bet 'tails' after the other team walks away with $1 doesn't help them decide how they make the next decision. How fair is it to yell at your GM for not betting tails when you'd bet heads in the same position?
I draw a different lesson from the Bagwell trade. The outcome of that trade was bad, yes. But the bigger problem was that for ~20 years an impressive collection of semi-incompetent and often really stupid people were running the Sox, making bad decision after bad decision. Some of these bad decisions worked out. Lots did not. Thankfully, we have better now.
And while I'm not at all defending the Bagwell trade, I'd point out that when the Sox made that deal they were in first place and hoping to make a run at the World Series. They had a HOF/All Star/Batting Champ 3rd baseman in Wade Boggs. They had a AAA prospect in Scott Cooper who would go to two All Star games as the Sox 3rd baseman after he made the bigs. And absolutely nobody in Boston was complaining when they sent Bagwell out of town. They'd all been yelling for the Sox to make some kind of deal to make sure the team made it to the playoffs.
Could the team predict at the time that Boggs would soon leave as a free agent, Cooper would have his career shortened by injuries, and the whole team would stink up the ALDS while getting swept by the As? Perhaps, perhaps not.
Panic, emotion, and 'keeping up with the Joneses'/Yankees can all cause bad decisions.
B. is judging trades ex ante. mmazz is judging trades ex post. Judging trades ex ante makes sense if you are concerned with modeling decisionmaking by team management and figuring out how to proceed in the future. Judging trades ex post makes sense if you are a fan and want to re-evaluate a done deal in light of what we now know.
In other words, carry on, both of you.
Well, leave it to T.S. to state the obvious. ;) What we're talking about is the difference between evaluating a trade and judging a trade.
I think it's obvious that GMs make calculated guesses when they are lining up trades. They evealuate the offers from other teams. Weigh what they'd be willing to give up. Some GMs go with their gut. Others use stats. And yes, some are better at it than others. Some are much better. No one would deny that.
But judging a trade -- that's all in the results. And while I've said all along that I understand why they made the Arroyo trade, I'm not sure I agreed with the logic behind it. In other words, I understand their evaluation, and I recognize the calculated gamble they were taking. I'm just not sure I'd make the same deal.
I also said -- repeatedly -- that I would withold judgement until we get a better look at Pena. I'm willing (and hoping) to be proven wrong.
Lastly, if Arroyo blew out his arm, then it truly would be a great trade. ;) (Of course, for Bronson's sake, I hope that's not the case.) But in all seriousness, even if Arroyo had to retire tomorrow, that was still a good trade for the Reds. They just had lousy luck.
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