New York Yankees: Reassessing the Stanton-Castro trade
By Bill Felber
New York Yankees: Reassessing the Stanton-Castro trade
On-the-Field Performance
The two principles, Stanton and Castro, both now have produced two seasons worth of data for their acquiring teams. Assessing that part of the trade is pretty simple.
The most commonly accepted and synoptic number for evaluating player performance in baseball is Wins Above Replacement, commonly known as WAR.
In 2018, Stanton produced a 4.0 WAR. Compared with his Miami track record, that was a solid but not spectacular number. In his eight seasons with the Marlins, Stanton’s average WAR was 4.4. He had three seasons with a higher WAR, peaking at 7.9 in 2017, immediately before the trade, when he was named the National League’s Most Valuable Player. The New York Yankees, in other words, bought high.
During his injury-plagued 2019, Stanton’s WAR fell to 0.4, raising his Yankee WAR to date to only 4.4.
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Castro, like Stanton a late-20s veteran at the time of the trade, played steady, injury-free ball for Miami in both 2018 and 2019. His .278 and .270 batting averages lacked Stanton’s power, but they still resulted in roughly equivalent WAR totals: 3.3 in 2018 and 0.8 in 2019. That totals to 4.1 for Castro’s two seasons in Miami, fractionally worse than Stanton…but only fractionally.
Interestingly, because he spent more time on the field, Castro’s counting stats stood up well in comparison with Stanton’s. Castro hit 34 home runs and drove in 140 runs for the Marlins; Stanton had 41 homers but only 113 RBIs for the Yanks.