Trade Analysis: The Zack Greinke Deal

So, I’m the resident trade expert around here. I’ve covered dozens of deals in the past year, and I feel I’m pretty good at that stuff. Other people do too, apparently, which is why I write the trade analyses here.

But this? This, I just don’t know about.

Not that I’m ill-informed about Zack Greinke or the four players Milwaukee sent Kansas City’s way to acquire him and Yuniesky Betancourt; instead, I’m struggling with how to evaluate this deal.

It wasn’t long ago that a pitcher like Greinke commanded half a farm system. Dan Haren brought back six big names from Arizona; Erik Bedard drew a huge haul from Seattle.

That’s the way the stuff worked. There was always a team or twenty out there willing to give up several top-end prospects for a major league stud.

But more and more, that just isn’t the case. Texas sent a lot of guys to Seattle for Cliff Lee, but the other two times Lee was dealt, the return was underwhelming. Roy Halladay didn’t fetch that much, and the return for Haren from the Angels was pitiful.

Back when I started out analyzing trades a few years back, I almost always sided with the team getting the prospects, because the prospect packages were so massive. But now, the tide seems to have turned, and it seems that GMs aren’t willing to trade the farm away for one guy (understandably so).

In that case, there’s less and less of a chance for a team like Kansas City to hit home runs on these deals, and my job as an analyst gets more complicated.

There’s no doubt that between them, Alcides Escobar, Lorenzo Cain, Jeremy Jeffress, and Jake Odorizzi have some potential. But none of them are likely stars. It’s not like the old days, where you’d trade an ace for three “potential aces,” and if two of those guys panned out, you were sitting pretty.

So the first question is: was this the best deal the Royals could get for Greinke? Only Dayton Moore & Co. know, but it’s nowhere near in the class of the original Oakland-Arizona Haren deal or the Bedard trade. I used to be able to use deals like that as precedent, but I think it’s clear that we’re at a new paradigm, so that high standard needs to be pretty much thrown out.

With that out of the way, the question is if the Royals got fair market value for Zack Greinke. That might sound like the most obvious question ever, but given that just about every deal used to bring back potentially fair market value and more in these sorts of swaps, it’s really only becoming relevant now that executives have gotten smart and stopped overpaying (I guess the Rays set a pretty clear example).

Greinke is at least a five-win pitcher (5.3 WAR this past year, 9.4 the year before (!)), and going to the NL and facing the Pirates a fair amount can’t hurt. He’s obviously a big upgrade for a Milwaukee staff that has had lots of trouble that last couple of years, and he and Shaun Marcum should combine with Yovani Gallardo for an epic 1-2-3 punch.

With two years left on his deal, Greinke gives the Brewers two chances to get everything right, and they also have time to trade him if things to awry, a la Lee in Seattle. Milwaukee didn’t give up anybody who really was going to be an All-Star (most likely, anyway), and they bought themselves a couple of years to get talent into the system before the current core breaks up/ages.

So that makes sense. I totally understand Milwaukee here. The one downside: Odorizzi was the system’s only bigtime prospect, so they’re really short down there now.

Anyway, to the more complex side…

Alcides Escobar is an upgrade over Yuniesky Betancourt for a couple of reasons. First, he’s far better. Second, the front office doesn’t seem to be completely deluded about his abilities.

Escobar is younger, cheaper, and better than Betancourt, especially on defense. They actually had equal 0.6 WAR totals in 2010, but there are indicators that Betancourt was lucky (his odd power surge) and Escobar was unlucky (a very low BABIP despite good speed and a good line-drive rate). Betancourt, 28, isn’t likely to improve any further, while the 23-year-old Escobar will continue to improve.

Then again, Escobar has never shown much plate discipline or power, so it’s not like he’s a titan–at best, he’s a .300/.350/.380 hitter with plus shortstop defense. That’s nice, particularly compared to Betancourt, but not earth-shattering; not the sort of player you’d expect to be the second-best commodity acquired for two years of Greinke.

Like Escobar, Lorenzo Cain has played in the majors, and while he shows nice potential as well, there are warts with him too. His power ceiling caps out around 15 homers, and he strikes out way too much for a player with just gap power. He did cut his strikeouts down a fair bit in the majors (28 in 43 games), but his walks, also usually strong, were down too–it was likely a symptom of pitchers challenging him with lots of pitches in the zone, which would make his .306 average a Brennan Boesch-esque anomaly that’s likely to decrease.

Cain will turn 25 right after the season starts, so he’s not the youngest guy around. He is a solid defensive center fielder and excels in the outfield corners, although he doesn’t really have the bat for them. He should be a decent if unexceptional center fielder. That’s not great, but the Royals are a bit short on OF prospects, so Cain fills a positional priority. Like Escobar, he comes with the added benefit of being a bit MLB-tested–barring injury, he’s a near-lock to contribute something over the next few years.

Odorizzi is the best commodity of the four; he came in at #37 on my Top 100 Prospects. I said this about him:

Odorizzi is yet another pitcher who carved up Low-A in 2010 despite being born in the ‘90s. The Brewers’ best prospect by a fair margin, he utilizes a tough running fastball in the low-to-mid-90’s, and he’s developing an out-pitch curveball. Odorizzi whiffed over ten batters per nine innings while keeping the ball down and limiting walks. He may wind up becoming Yovani Gallardo 2.0 for the Brewers, who could really use some plus starting pitching in the near future.

That’s good. Maybe not ace-level good, but Odorizzi could be a very good #2 starter. It’s important to emphasize that he will not be Greinke. As good as Gallardo? Perhaps, but certainly not much better. Odorizzi is highly unlikely to win a Cy Young without some luck.

Then there’s Jeremy Jeffress, who’s a weird prospect. There’s the well-documented multiple suspensions for marijuana use, which has him at the brink of a life suspension. He’s also got a rocky past with his control, mainly in 2009 when he completely lost it, but before that to some extent as well.

Jeffress is routinely cited as throwing 100 mph, but he averaged just 95.4 on his fastball last year in his first taste of the bigs. He’s been moved to relief permanently because of the control problems, and the move worked wonders for him, as he stopped walking everyone and made it to the bigs at 22 last year, throwing ten “meh” innings. Jeffress also has a nice curve to go with the fastball, so if he isn’t smoking weed, he could smoke plenty of batters in the late innings for years to come, provided he’s throwing strikes.

There’s not a lot of huge impact talent here. Odorizzi’s nice, but he’s just shy of that one huge prospect you always want to see. The other three? A nice reliever and two decent position-player starters. Meh.

Kansas City did, however, save them from themselves regarding Betancourt, address the SS and OF needs of the organization, add a high-upside starter, and managed to get fairly low-risk guys throughout: only Odorizzi has yet to see the majors, but only Escobar has any sort of significant service time, so the Royals are getting low-risk young players for at least five years each.

So, there are a number of small positives there. They combine to make this a…passable deal for Kansas City. This whole not-mortgaging-the-future-for-the-present paradigm is still taking some getting used to. But if this really was the best offer, and that’s just how these things are going to work from here on out, then Dayton Moore applied sound logic.

“Dayton Moore applied sound logic.” What a weird way to end a piece…