In some last-minute shuffling mere days before pitchers and catchers report, the Yankees have acquired outfielder Justin Maxwell from the Nationals for minor league righthander Adam Olbrychowski.
Olbrychowski, 24, is a reliever who’s pitched as high as Double-A, while Maxwell has already played in 122 games in the majors.
Maxwell, 27, had already been designated for assignment by Washington, who apparently ran out of patience with the career .201/.319/.379 hitter. Maxwell has showed the ability to walk and hit for power, but he has yet to learn how to hit for any sort of average, with a career strikeout rate of 37.9%. He’s now at an age where results need to show up, and a 41.3% K% and .144 batting average in 2010 were not the desired results.
Given Maxwell’s struggles and previous DFA, the Nationals should be happy that they found a way to get someone back for him, even if that someone is a relatively uninteresting minor league arm. Olbrychowski doesn’t have overly impressive strikeout or walk rates, and while he’s managed to avoid allowing many home runs, he doesn’t have the reputation or overall groundball rate of a pitcher likely to keep that up.
Olbrychowski does throw fairly hard, in the low 90’s, and adds a nice changeup, but his breaking stuff isn’t very good and his command comes and goes. At 24 and coming off a 4.02 ERA in High-A, he’s really just an organizational filler type who could wind up as an extra arm if everything breaks right.
The Yankees clearly got the better of the two players in the trade, since Maxwell has plus defensive ability to go with his strong walk rates and gap power–incredibly, he manages to be a decent backup despite the putrid whiff rates and batting average.
Still, that doesn’t make this a “Yankees win, Nationals lose” trade.
As I said before, the Nationals have to be happy that they got a non-terrible arm for a player who they could have easily lost for nothing. The Yankees, on the other hand, had to make room for Maxwell on the roster in addition to trading away Olbrychowski, and to do so, they designated outfielder Jordan Parraz for assignment.
Parraz is a year younger than Maxwell, and while he doesn’t have the same sort of power, he hit .266/.350/.410 in Triple-A last year and .298/.358/.426 the year before. He’s got a fantastic arm, solid speed and defensive ability, and better contact skills than Maxwell. Parraz, in short, is a similarly solid extra outfielder–unlike Maxwell’s skillset of many extreme pluses and minuses, he’s solid across the board.
So Parraz for Maxwell is basically a wash, and giving up Olbrychowski would seem to tip the scales away from New York here–why move sideways and give up a commodity, no matter how insignificant?
Of course, there’s a chance Parraz simply goes unclaimed and the Yankees wind up with both Parraz and Maxwell vying for backup outfield time, with only Olbrychowski gone. That would then be a clear win, as Maxwell is obviously more valuable than Olbrychowski.
Obviously, this deal isn’t going to make or break the seasons of either New York or Washington. The Nationals won’t have any regrets about letting the disappointing Maxwell go and getting someone else, while New York could have added to their outfield depth provided that Parraz clears waivers. If Parraz doesn’t, it’s still easy to see why the Yankees did this move–they took a gamble that they could get two solid fifth outfielders in camp instead of one, and even if they lose out, that doesn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t worth the risk.