Trade Analysis: Clint Barmes for Felipe Paulino

The Houston Astros’ shortstop situation is a mess. Tommy Manzella, the incumbent, is one of the ten worst offensive position players in MLB, and none of the team’s other options inspire any hope.

Still, just because the position is in bad shape is no justifying this trade.

The Astros have sent a quality young arm in Felipe Paulino to the Rockies for mediocre Clint Barmes.

Is Barmes an upgrade over Manzella & Co.? Sure. But this is still ridiculous.

Barmes just hit all of .235/.305/.351 while playing half his games in Coors Field at age 31. Moving to another home park and aging another year is unlikely to help that much. Sure, he’s occasionally hit better in the past, but he’s had just one good offensive year in the past five. He’s a nice defender at shortstop, but then again, Manzella and Sanchez aren’t terrible either. Barmes is due over $4 million this year–while he is an upgrade, he’s not worth that salary, let alone that salary and Paulino.

Paulino, of course, is gifted with a power arm that can ratchet fastballs up to 100 mph. He also has two plus breaking pitches in his tilting slider and big curveball. He’s good for over 8 K/9 and has a decent if unexceptional idea of where the ball is going, usually getting K/BB ratios of approximately 2/1.

With 1.7 WAR (per Fangraphs) in 2010, Paulino helped the Astros over four times as much as Barmes helped the Rockies. Add in the fact that he’s cheaper and more likely to improve, and this is an extremely lopsided deal.

Undoubtedly, Houston undervalued Paulino because he’s posted high ERAs the last couple of years, but that’s much more due to luck than lack of skill. It could be that he’s the rare pitcher who consistently underperforms his peripherals (career 4.37 FIP, 4.51 xFIP, but 5.83 ERA), but with just 208 1/3 career innings (essentially just one full season), it’s far too early to make that call. He gives up line drives very infrequently, so that would seem to help his case that it’s just bad luck.

Houston’s front office certainly isn’t known as saber-savvy, so it’s easy to attribute their giving away Paulino to that. To be fair, he’s had a lot of injury problems, and Houston’s downgrade from Paulino to someone else may be less than their upgrade from Manzella (-0.6 WAR in 83 games last year) to Barmes. Still, you’d have to think they’d be able to make up half the Manzella/Barmes gap by just signing a replacement level Quad-A player. Obviously, the pickings for Quad-A types are slimmer in the middle infield than, say, first base, but still, it’s something to consider.

And I don’t necessarily advocate the “get random minor league shortstop X” strategy in this case, anyway. There’s definitely a need to upgrade from Manzella, and getting a random shortstop to plug in isn’t the best strategy. The Astros tried it a bit with Sanchez and Oswaldo Navarro, and neither one did much.

The problem is simply that the Astros gave up too much for too little of an upgrade. I’d be very surprised if they couldn’t have given up less for Barmes, or given up Paulino for more. It’s as simple as that.

As for the Rockies, they get a pitcher with a repertoire eerily similar to that of ace Ubaldo Jimenez. Whether Paulino reaches Jimenez’s heights remains to be seen, but we’re talking about a similar grade of talent, albeit with similar, even exaggerated difficulty reeling that talent in. At worst, Paulino has the heat and breaking stuff to make for a fantastic shutdown reliever. At best, he turns into a poor man’s Jimenez…and all for a player best used sparingly off the bench.

With moves like this, one wonders if Ed Wade will be out once the Astros’ sale is complete.