Pittsburgh Pirates: Potential trades for Starling Marte
By Ryan Sanders
The Pittsburgh Pirates and New York Mets have restarted trade talks on star outfielder Starling Marte. Marte is an underrated superstar and won’t come cheap, so what would it cost and should the Mets or your team pay it?
With new executive Ben Cherington looking to rebuild the Pittsburgh Pirates, just about anyone from the major league roster is going to be in play for other teams to acquire. Reports indicate the New York Mets are interested in acquiring Starling Marte and that the Arizona Diamondbacks were interested earlier in the offseason.
#Mets and #Pirates recently reopened Starling Marte trade talks, sources said. A deal is not believed to be close at this time. #DBacks were among teams interested earlier this offseason.
— Robert Murray (@ByRobertMurray) January 19, 2020
Starling Marte has been a borderline superstar during his time in Pittsburgh. He may be heading into his age 31 season, but he has continued to perform. This past season, Marte hit .295/.342/.503 good for a 119 wRC+ and posted 3.0 fWAR. Since 2014, Marte has been the 11th best outfielder in baseball racking up 19.6 WAR. There’s no reason to believe Marte’s production will be slowing down any time soon. Marte remains an elite runner (92nd percentile from Statcast) and his expected batting average, slugging, and wOBA metrics are in the top 20% of the league so there’s plenty to back up his stats.
Marte is also signed to a team friendly extension that has two years remaining. He will make $24M over those two years, $11.5M for the 2020 season and $12.5M for the 2021 season. Marte can fit comfortably into any payroll and would be an upgrade for almost any OF in baseball.
Moving forward, Steamer projects Marte to be a 3 win player again in 2020. As he has consistently been a 3-4 Win player, a sudden drop off seems unlikely, unless he suffers some sort of injury. It feels reasonable to project Marte for another 3 wins in 2021. In total, an acquiring team could expect Marte to produce 6 WAR over those two years and using an $8M valuation, would produce $48M in on field value. Marte would have $24M in surplus value to the acquiring team. Thanks to FanGraphs’ research, we can estimate the value of the prospects to see what a fair return would be in terms of prospects.
Now that we have established Marte’s value as we’ve done for other trade candidates, we can trade him all over the league. Each team will have their own internal valuation of Marte and the Pirates will value him the highest of anyone since he is a key piece that will kickstart their rebuild. Since the Mets are the most recently rumored team, we can start with them.