10 Degrees: Trade season will be a test for Phillies GM Ruben Amaro Jr.
The Philadelphia Phillies, an ill-constructed, iller-conceived punch line of a baseball team, are gearing up to enhance their disastrousness even further. June is nigh, which gives us the gift of trade season, that glorious intersection of truth, fiction and feverish, carpal tunnel-inducing refresh-button clicks on MLB Trade Rumors.
Starring in this summer’s show is Ruben Amaro Jr., the Phillies’ general manager who has overseen the systematic implosion of a franchise that won five consecutive National League East titles. A half-decade streak of dominance is impressive. The ability to turn upwards of half a billion dollars into a pair of 73-win seasons and wherever this year ends up when it’s done circling the toilet bowl is eminently tougher.
How Amaro has kept one of the best gigs in baseball is the sort of business-school case study that belongs alongside New Coke. The Phillies have the worst run differential in baseball at minus-70 and are on pace to lose 102 games – and that’s before …
1. Cole Hamels gets traded. Which, as much as it seems an inevitability at this point, remains in the hands of Amaro, meaning: Are we really sure the guy who has spent the last two years egregiously overvaluing his best trade asset can find a match?
The last two trade deadlines ended with the Phillies not pulling off a single deal. Amaro held tight on free agents-to-be on 73-win teams. That’s not intractable. That’s irresponsible, an abdication of duty, which calls for him not just to field the best team possible today but position the team for tomorrow.
And that’s the shock of Amaro still holding the Phillies’ reins: Nobody can reasonably expect him to be GM of the team in another two years, so why is he in charge of the trades so key to Philadelphia’s rebuild? Amaro already played chicken with Cliff Lee and drove that trade asset Thelma and Louise-style. Every start Hamels makes is another in which he could get injured, another risk simply not worth taking anymore.
The offers are going to start coming in soon, and they should be strong. Hamels, 31, is throwing harder than ever, his changeup still one of the five best in the game, the three years and $73.5 million on top of the $15.4 million remaining this season a reasonable sum for a legitimate ace. If the Phillies don’t want to eat money, they don’t have to. If they do – and considering their TV deal is worth $5 billion in rights fees and equity, they’ve got every bit the ability to spend down acquisitions like the Dodgers have – the market will flourish. Of course, Amaro may be busy spending all his free cash to get ...
2. Ryan Howard out of a Phillies uniform. Life remains in the former MVP’s bat, as his 10 home runs exemplify. Except …
He’s 35 years old. And he still swings and misses more than anybody but Jimmy Paredes and Avisail Garcia. And his walk rate is roughly the ABV of a light beer. And he plays first base with the quicks of a sloth. And – this makes all the others seem like hangnails compared to a heart attack – he’s still owed $35 million next year, presuming his option for 2017 with a $10 million buyout is declined.
Tack on the $17.1 million that remains this year, and the next year and change of Ryan Howard will cost well over $52 million. That last sentence should not exist. It does, and it is Amaro’s indictment. Even if Howard keeps popping home runs, the market won’t exist until the money the Phillies kick in starts with a four and ends above five. Howard is an American League-only player at this point, a DH when DHs don’t get paid, a luxury item paid like he’s indispensible. He’s got the sort of contract …
3. Justin Upton will surge past this offseason, when he’s the most coveted free-agent hitter on the market. His brilliance – at Petco Park, no less, where he’s hitting .360/.414/.708 with nine home runs and making a mockery of the notion right-handed power doesn’t exist at home for Padres players – is only compounded by his age this offseason: 28.
Considering the Padres’ place in the standings, not to mention the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants doing their best re-enactment of 1962, a trade of Upton is well within the realm of possibility.
“We saw what A.J. did this offseason,” said one interested general manager, referring to A.J. Preller, the Padres’ wheeling, dealing GM who spent his whole offseason having a hard time holding his alligators down. It’s more than possible that Preller could get a better return for Upton than he gave the Atlanta Braves, and the greatest barrier may not be winning. The Padres are averaging more than 5,325 fans per game more than last season, and dumping Upton before he even finishes a full season would foster concerns that the Padres are nothing more than a West Coast version of the Marlins.
Hurt feelings shouldn’t play into baseball decisions. They’re despondent in Milwaukee, and …
4. Carlos Gomez is likely on his way out the door, a monster asset for a Brewers rebuild that needs to
start now. Between his dirt-cheap $9 million salary for next season and the prospect of reaping a compensatory draft pick should he leave in free agency, Gomez could be worth every bit as much as Upton. He’s still just 29 and plays Gold Glove-caliber centerfield, though it’s worth keeping an eye on his groundball rate, which has returned to the levels of his pre-All-Star self.
If Gomez goes, it seems to make sense that catcher Jonathan Lucroy would follow. The Brewers’ farm system is a mess outside of 20-year-old Double-A shortstop Orlando Arcia, the younger brother of Twins outfielder Oswaldo. Sinkerballer Tyler Wagner may be a back-end rotation piece, but likely little more, and the pitching in their system is otherwise a wasteland.
Lucroy for a gang of prospects, then, makes all the sense in the world. One executive, though, described the market for a catcher as “barren.” And a view of both contenders and non-contenders seems to back up that contention. Catcher is a strong position around baseball today, full of usable pieces, and while Lucroy at the dirt-cheap $9.5 million for the next two seasons would be an upgrade over everybody not named Posey, the price might be too exorbitant for buyers. It’s a similar situation with …
5. Aroldis Chapman and a Cincinnati Reds team that doesn’t want to let him go but may be forced to because the circumstances make little sense to keep him. If the Reds look at 2016 as a bridge year – something they might be loath to do with Todd Frazier in his prime, Devin Mesoraco back and healthy, and Joey Votto likely nearing his decline phase – it makes less than zero sense to bring Chapman back.
In arbitration, he’s going to make around $13 million. As the Reds learned with Francisco Cordero, a small-market team spending eight figures on a closer for a team likely to struggle is a bad idea. It’s even worse when Chapman, the best closer in the game, will bring far more in return than the draft pick they’d reap when he leaves after next season.
The Royals’ ascent, and the Yankees’ success, due to lockdown bullpens makes teams salivate over the idea of Chapman pitching the ninth. He’s good enough to displace every closer in the game, meaning the Reds’ market is as big as GM Walt Jocketty can dream. The race for ...
6. Johnny Cueto, on the other hand, may not be as feverish as expected a few weeks back. A bout of elbow soreness will do that, not to mention lop tens of millions of dollars off a potential free agent’s market until he can again remind teams of what he’s capable.
Cueto is expected back this week after missing two starts with his troublesome right elbow. An MRI showed no damage physically; how much the mere fact he slipped into a tube for an imaging damaged Cueto’s value will be interesting to see. Because like Chapman, he fits almost anywhere.
Kansas City, with its mess of a rotation? Sure. Houston, going Cueto and Dallas Keuchel back-to-back in the playoffs? First, yikes. And second, typing Houston and playoffs in the same sentence remains discomfiting to the fingers. The usual contenders could jump in on Cueto, too, like they’re bound to with …
7. Ben Zobrist as they search for versatility amid a landscape that values it more than ever. Zobrist is
your classic does-nothing-great, does-everything-well ballplayer. While he has pitched in at second base and both corner-outfield spots this season, Zobrist can man shortstop, patrol center field and, in a pinch, acquit himself at third.
More important is whether Oakland is in sell mode. Baseball is a vicious game. The A’s run differential going into Sunday was minus-2 and their record 19-33. The Chicago Cubs, who have shown interest in Zobrist, had a run differential of minus-3. Their record was 25-22. Essentially the same offensive and pitching output, and one team is 14 games under .500 and looking to sell while the other is three games over and ready to buy.
Oakland isn’t flying the flag quite yet, an M.O. they share with the Colorado Rockies as they figure out how this …
8. Troy Tulowitzki situation is going to end. It’s not likely to be at this deadline, and not because the Rockies are in any sort of contending position. Even after their recent surge, they remain under .500 thanks to the worst pitching staff in baseball by ERA. The Rockies walk the most hitters in baseball, strike out the second fewest and play in Coors Field. One of those by itself is bad. Two together is dreadful. All three is criminal.
Amazingly, Tulowitzki has been nearly as big a mess as the Rockies’ pitchers. Forget light beer. Tulo’s walk rate is lower than beer in Utah. His lack of plate discipline is stark considering last season, on his way to a .340/.432/.603 slash line, Tulowitzki walked 13.3 percent of the time.
His career swing rate, around 43 percent, is closer to 50 percent this year. And they’re not good swings. Tulowitzki is hacking at 37.1 percent of pitches outside the strike zone this season and connecting on less than two-thirds of them. Not only is he taking worse swings, he’s not making contact when he does.
If Tulowitzki wants out – and despite the latest détente, there’s every indication he does – playing like this is not the way to facilitate it. After this season, $98 million remains on his contract for five years. Tulowitzki turns 31 in October, so the prospect of a steeper slide remains. In the midst of such struggles, he can only hope he pulls an …
9. Aaron Harang and rediscovers himself before his career is over. For the second straight season,
Harang has started with flashes of brilliance. And while last year’s run ended at the one-month mark, Harang is two months deep into the 2015 season and owns the eighth-best ERA in baseball behind some awfully good company: Zack Greinke, Shelby Miller, Max Scherzer, Dallas Keuchel, A.J. Burnett, Sonny Gray and Felix Hernandez.
Amid his signings of Jerome Williams and Grady Sizemore, Ruben Amaro managed to get Harang at $5 million. It wasn’t flashy. It wasn’t exciting. It was pretty much the contract matching the guy who received it.
The specter of regression looms over Harang’s every start. He profiles this season as an extreme flyball pitcher who doesn’t give up home runs. Unfortunately, that player exists about once a decade. Harang has a 33.7 percent groundball rate. Over the last decade, the lowest home run rate on a pitcher who allows that may flyballs was 4.1 percent. The average was 9.65 percent. Harang is allowing homers on 2.3 percent of flyballs.
Which is to say: Get him out while you can, Ruben. Whether it’s in a solo trade or part of a package with Ryan Howard or …
10. Cole Hamels or, if we’re getting real crazy, both. For years, Amaro has been implying that he’s smarter than the public thinks. Among the Phillies’ lack of analytics for decision-making, the Howard and Lee contracts, and the latest – Amaro saying Phillies fans “bitch and complain” before he apologized and said he didn’t mean to say they bitch and complain – he is doing an impressive job of proving the exact opposite true.
And yet with one bold trade, one great maneuver, Ruben Amaro Jr. can silence the naysayers who time and again have argued he should have traded Hamels. Keeping him has worked out quite nicely. Hamels is the starting-pitching prize, and as Amaro learned twice in dealing for Lee and Roy Halladay, starting pitching costs.
If Scott Kazmir’s shoulder proves healthy, he’s Hamels Lite, which gives teams an alternative to parry back at Amaro’s asking price, which is going to start off every bit as silly as it did over the winter. His willingness to negotiate – to play that game and play it well – is his test. Cole Hamels needs to go to start a rebuild that should’ve been in motion long ago. If Amaro doesn’t want fans to bitch and complain, it’s high time he gave them a reason.
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