Late Tuesday night the Marlins agreed to trade shortstop Yunel Escobar to the Tampa Bay Rays. Miami will get minor league infielder Derek Dietrich in return.

Image: Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

Escobar, who came to Miami in the blockbuster trade with Toronto last month, was probably never going to see the field as Marlin. Labeled a malcontent (or clubhouse cancer, or, at the very least, immature), Escobar has worn out his welcome both in Atlanta and Toronto, but is an elite talent both at the plate and in the field.

The Rays are taking a gamble that their strong clubhouse, lead by manager Joe Maddon, can keep Escobar in line. If so, Tampa could have a very strong middle infield with Ben Zobrist playing second. In 2012 however, Escobar struggled mightily at the plate, posting an OBP of just .300, a number 53 points below his career average. In 2011 Escobar put up a strong offensive performance with a .369 OBP and a .789 OPS.

Escobar fits well into the modest Tampa Bay budget as well, as he’s owed just $5 million in 2013 and there is a club option for the same amount for 2014 as well. With the trade, Miami will have just one player, pitcher Ricky Nolasco, earning more than $1.75 million next season.

On the plus side for Miami, Dietrich appears to have real talent and projects as a potential above average major league infielder at some point. The left handed hitting second baseman slugged 22 home runs in Low-A ball in 2011 and was Tampa Bay’s second round pick in 2010. He’s a year or so away in most organizations, but the way the Miami roster is shaping up, Dietrich might have a real shot at breaking camp with the big club.

The Miami Marlins happen to have a spare shortstop in Yunel Escobar. It makes sense then that the two clubs spent part of the day Monday discussing a possible trade that would ship Escobar to the AL West Champs.

Escobar was dealt to Miami in the 12-player swap with the Blue Jays last month. Image: John E. Sokolowski-USA TODAY Sports

Escobar is currently slated to play third base for the Marlins, but that assumes he’ll still be in South Florida when the season begins. He’s been a shortstop his entire career and he’s a good one defensively. Escobar is talented, but has been labeled as anything from immature to a clubhouse cancer.

He’s also coming off a very disappointing season at the plate; one which saw him post an OBP of just .300, 53 points below his career number. But at just 30 years old and one season removed from a .290/.369/.413 line, Escobar is drawing interest from a handful of teams despite his reputation.

While the A’s have a definite need and Escobar’s $5 million salary fits well within their budget, Oakland is continuing talks with free agent Stephen Drew, who came over to the A’s via trade last season. The A’s and Drew’s representatives will meet at the Winter Meetings on Tuesday.

Drew is just about six months younger than Escobar and coming off an equally disappointing season at the plate. He has a reputation as a solid defender, but is still recovering from a broken ankle that has limited his range in the field and sapped his power at the plate. Nevertheless, Drew is likely to earn much more than the $5 million Escobar is set to make, and with a much longer commitment.

All things being equal, Escobar is the better player at this point in their careers, but all things are not equal when considering Escobar’s checkered past. The Cuban-born Escobar needs a strong clubhouse around him. Should he land in Oakland, he would have a countryman in Yoenis Cespedes, which may help the shortstop mature a bit.

The thinking process that went into Escobar’s gaff is probably equivalent to that of a high school sophomore being swept up in inane activity, but really, who needs to write messages on their eye black on their cheeks? It wasn’t as if Escobar took out a billboard to issue a slur, but it does make you wonder who was his target audience. The strips of eye black used to reduce sun glare where Escobar wrote a homophobic slur in Spanish  are about a half inch wide. That means ordinarily the reader would have to get up in his face to digest the wording. Or, as it so happened, someone with a telephoto lens who took closeups of the .251 hitter while he was playing a game against the Red Sox in Toronto.

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May 23, 2012; St. Petersburg, FL, USA; Toronto Blue Jays left fielder Eric Thames (14) reacts after he struck out in the sixth inning against the Tampa Bay Rays at Tropicana Field. Mandatory Credit: Kim Klement-US PRESSWIRE

Expect Snider to take back the starting job, but the speedy Rajai Davis will be the starter in LF in the interim due to Snider’s injury. Davis, who is coming off of an awful 2011 season, has already stolen eight bases this year. His 97 wRC+ through 64 plate appearances is a little higher than his career average, but a lot of that has come from an early power boost that will not last (.424 slugging percentage). Still, he has a low .281 OBP mainly due to a .244 BABIP, so that will also normalize. At this point, he is a 0.5-1 WAR player.

Eric Thames, meanwhile, has been nothing short of awful. A poor defensive player, Thames has had a 75 wRC+ in 160 PAs this season and deserves his demotion after a 0.9 WAR rookie season. The Jays need some more offensive production out of their left fielder, especially considering how poor Thames is on defense. He is on pace for a .305 OBP and 15 homers, which isn’t enough. He had a solid 108 wRC+ last year, but his early start to the season shows that he needs to figure things out. Thames has a .308 BABIP and a .243 batting average, so there is more to it than regression.

The Blue Jays have called up Mike McCoy in a corresponding move to take Thames’s place on the roster. The 31-year-old infielder will help provide some depth due to injuries to Kelly Johnson and star shortstop Yunel Escobar. McCoy has had a meager .294 slugging percentage in Triple-A this year, but he has also been getting on base at a .381 clip and made up for a lack of power. Still, McCoy is nothing to write home about and is just veteran depth.

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There is one big difference between the two, age, Cabrera is 25 but Yunel is three years older and will be 28 this season. They both made their big league debuts in 2007 and have been full-time players since. Although in Cabrera’s case he’s struggled to stay healthy more so than Escobar has. Over the last three seasons Escobar has averaged 137 games per year and Cabrera has played an average of only 114 games. Their overall production, in terms of wOBA, has been almost identical the last two seasons and have taken similar ups and downs as well.

Both broke in with above average offensive production in ’07 as Escobar had a .367 wOBA in 355 plate appearances and Cabrera had a .340 wOBA in just 186 trips to the plate. They then both slipped up a bit in 2008 and met up on the chart in 2009 with almost identical wOBAs of .354 for Cabrera and .357 for Escobar. Last season saw both of them fall all the way down to .301 wOBAs in trying seasons were in Escobar was traded from the Braves to the Blue Jays and Cabrera missed 65 games, mostly due to injury.

Escobar has always had the better on-base percentage between the two, but even with Cabrera having just a .326 OBP last season, both of them have never had a below average OBP in any of their four seasons coming into 2011. The ups and downs mirror each other almost perfectly again with OBP as with wOBA. It might seem obvious that if they had similar wOBAs they would also have similar OBPs and the same thing is being pointed to twice, but look and read on and you’ll see they ultimately wind up getting those above average on-base percentages in different ways.

For the first two seasons of their careers, 2007-2008, Escobar had the higher batting average hitting .326 and .288 to Cabrera’s .283 and .259. They switched though in 2009 as Escobar hit .299 but Cabrera had his best season to date, average wise, and hit .308. Both slipped in 2010 but where Escobar was only able to hit .256, Cabrera held up his average a little better in his off year and hit .276. Escobar has still had the higher on-base percentage the past two year because of his better walk rates. It wasn’t the case early in their careers however, the 21 and 22 year old Cabrera drew more walks than the 24 and 25 year old Escobar back in 2007-2008.

Since then Cabrera’s walk rate dipped below average in ’09 and didn’t bounce back in 2010, Escobar on the other hand seems to have settled in nicely as a player who will always walk at an above average rate.

The last aspect of their hitting that is quite similar is their isolated power numbers over their careers. They’ve been almost identical year in and year out, neither has ever had above average power or hit more than fourteen homers in any season. Between their combined 3,810 plate appearances the two have just 66 homers. For every 600 plate appearances on their careers, Cabrera has hit 8 homers to 9.4 for Escobar and Cabrera has averaged 32.2 doubles to 26.2 for Escobar.

There is nothing to read into these similarities other than it being a coincidence and they both happen to play shortstop and both happen to have broken into the majors in 2007 and both just happened to have career worst offensive seasons in 2010. If anything, it does bode well for Cabrera and the Indians, as he’s been almost just as good an offensive player as Escobar at a younger age at a position where above average offensive production is hard to come by. Cabrera is just now entering his theoretical prime years of production and if he can stay healthy he could be one of baseball’s top offensive shortstops for years to come.

Escobar isn’t exactly an old man either, he’s just 28 and right in his prime and the Blue Jays will happily take a couple more seasons like the ones he had with the Braves from 2007-2009. Their both off to great starts and it’ll be interesting to see how much longer the two can share similar levels of production.

All the graphs and stats that were used were from FanGraphs. They have all sorts of stuff like this to play around with and make articles like this possible.

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It’s an interesting deal in several senses. First, it’s not that often that you see two established MLB starters at the same position traded for each other. Second, this is the rare deal that sees both teams adding established major league talent and minor leaguers.

As such, the proper way to evaluate this deal is to look at it in two components–the swap of major league shortstops and the trade of other players.

Let’s get to analyzing after the jump.

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