Cardinals acquire Matt Holliday for 3B Brett Wallace, RHP Clayton Mortensen and OF Shane Peterson

[RU Rah Rah]

Interesting tidbit from MLB.com story on trade: "Overall, Cardinals left fielders have batted .212 with a .294 on-base percentage and a .342 slugging percentage in '09."

[pitchleague]

and Holliday gets 4 hits in his STL debut. Great.

[JJHardy7]

Fangraphs had the CC deal as even for both sides. They had the Cards deal as the Cards giving up $25m to get $8m in value. That was just for Wallace, before other players were added.

Fangraphs is a nice tool, but I hate predictions on wins or losses in trades when prospects and draft picks are involved. We won't know who 'won or lost' for a few years.

[hawing]

and Holliday gets 4 hits in his STL debut. Great.

So who's in charge of polishing the division title and shipping it directly to STL?

[Invader3K]

With how bad the Brewers have been playing lately (6-13 over the last 19 games) it doesn't really matter what moves other teams make. If the Brewers can't consistently win, it's all moot.

[endaround]

Fangraphs had the CC deal as even for both sides. They had the Cards deal as the Cards giving up $25m to get $8m in value. That was just for Wallace, before other players were added.

Fangraphs is a nice tool, but I hate predictions on wins or losses in trades when prospects and draft picks are involved. We won't know who 'won or lost' for a few years.

 

If you buy a stock thats trading at $50 for $100 you overpaid no matter if that stock soard up to $125 or crashes to $12 in 3 years.

[monty57]

They can re-sign Holliday after the season, but it will be a market offer. No different than before the trade.

Probably true, but they won't have to give up a 1st round pick. I don't know anything about the prospects they gave up, but if Wallace is indeed headed for 1B, he is blocked by Pujols. Holliday helps them win the central this year and won't cost them a draft pick if they re-sign him or nets them a 1st rounder and a sammy if he leaves. There's an element of risk involved, and they may well have lost out on the deal, but this definitely increases their chances of winning this season, and with their core, they should still be good for the next few seasons if they can re-sign him.

If you buy a stock thats trading at $50 for $100 you overpaid no matter if that stock soard up to $125 or crashes to $12 in 3 years.

But that $50 trade would be on the market by matching bid & ask prices. If there were no market (NYSE, AMEX, etc), and stocks were simply done via private transactions based on firms' analysts, as is the case in baseball, prices of stocks would have a much wider variance. Stock analysts disagree all the time on a stock's target price. Fangraphs is simply one "analyst." The problem is that there is a growing school of people who see one way of valuation to be the only possible school of thought, take that as gospel, and assume that anyone who chooses a different valuation tool is an idiot.

I don't know who will win the trade in the long run, but it does seemingly make the Cards pretty likely to make the playoffs this season, and makes the Brewers' chances much slimmer. Right now, the best move for the Brewers would probably be to stand pat and see how they do with their current roster. At this point, I'd rather see them shop Cameron, Hoffman, Counsell, Kendall and anyone else on the final year of their contract, then have them trade away any of our future to try to keep up with the Cards, Cubs and the surprising Astros, who will probably make a big move of their own in the next week.

[MJLiverock]

Fangraphs had the CC deal as even for both sides. They had the Cards deal as the Cards giving up $25m to get $8m in value. That was just for Wallace, before other players were added.

Fangraphs is a nice tool, but I hate predictions on wins or losses in trades when prospects and draft picks are involved. We won't know who 'won or lost' for a few years.

 

If you buy a stock thats trading at $50 for $100 you overpaid no matter if that stock soard up to $125 or crashes to $12 in 3 years.

So you're saying fangraphs knows with certainty what each player is worth in the future and exactly how that transfers into wins? That seems pretty far fetched.

 

And in your example if you flip the stock at $125 you didn't over pay, a stock's value is whatever the market will bear so claiming it is worth $50 while the market price is $100 is just what your model predicts. That is why everyone didn't buy Microsoft in the 1980's they felt it was overpriced then because their model or way of thinking about it told them so.

[JJHardy7]

If you buy a stock thats trading at $50 for $100 you overpaid no matter if that stock soard up to $125 or crashes to $12 in 3 years.

I don't think that applies at all when comparing trades. Yes, you can overpay. There's just no way fangraphs can predict the future. You can see at time who paid more...but there's no way you can factor in picks from losing a type A free agent IMO. I guess to a certain extent you can 'value' a guy like Wallace in trade...but we have no clue what other packages he could've been traded for so in theory we don't know what is true market value was...only the trade that happened.

[Ennder]

If Felipe Lopez comes out and hits 1.000 the rest of the season it doesn't suddenly make the trade a huge steal for the Brewers, it means they got lucky.

 

At least that is how I look at things. The fangraph values are the same idea, obviously they can't be anywhere close to exact with prospects but then neither are the people who traded the players.

[snyttri]

If you can't give GM's credit for what they achieve because the results don't match models I think you're putting too much faith in the models.

 

If you buy a stock thats trading at $50 for $100 you overpaid no matter if that stock soard up to $125 or crashes to $12 in 3 years.

 

Stocks trade at a definite price while observers are only guessing at the trade value of players.

[Ennder]

Sure that makes sense on the prospect side of the equation since there really are no sure things. On the Holliday side of the equation they are getting less than half a season out of him so what kind of stats he actually puts up is largely going to be random.

[logan82]

If you can't give GM's credit for what they achieve because the results don't match models I think you're putting too much faith in the models.

 

Are you saying that we should give a GM credit if players perform well? I will not give Melvin credit for the unbelievable 2nd half CC had. CC performed way beyond reasonable expectations.

[snyttri]

Sure that makes sense on the prospect side of the equation since there really are no sure things. On the Holliday side of the equation they are getting less than half a season out of him so what kind of stats he actually puts up is largely going to be random.

I think you are mistaking the fan's fantasy world with the reality of a GM's job. There are definite, not random, results with consequences that affect all the other components of the team. If a GM acheives something over a number of years the luck involved is heavily outweighed by constant exercises of judgemt.

 

C.C.'s career half season was within the range of possibiliities Melvin could consider for someone regarded as perhaps the best pitcher in baseball; as was his collapse from overuse. Melvin deserves the blame for the unsatisfactory pitching we have now, too. He's making the decisions and contingency plans.

[Ennder]

I'd say the complete opposite, Sabathia's results were so far out of the range of expectations that to view that trade by what actually happened is borderline useless. We got extremely lucky that Sabathia had his best half season of his career after the trade, if he has what we should expect we probably miss the playoffs. I'm a bit Melvin backer but that trade was nowhere near as good as the results suggest most likely.

[snyttri]

I hope Melvin has a solid imaginary playoff appearance to compensate for his borderline useless real one.

 

There was no reason Sabathia should not have played at his unprecedented peak for 3 months for the Brewers. That is one of the possibilities Melvin was forced to make a decision on. He was in his prime and defending a Cy Young. Melvin also had to make decisions on the possibilities of the surprising peaks of Branyan and Nelson Cruz. GM's can depend on most players failing to perform according to models. They have to make decisions about performances that will fall like a splotchy Jackson Pollock painting instead of fit within color by numbers expectations.

[logan82]

If our GM is making trade decisions while counting on players to perform at the level CC did last year, he should be fired right now.

[True CryM]

Barton also hit .293/..389/.438 at AAA at the age of 21 in 2007, a full year younger than Wallace is right now. My point is that a 22 or 23-year-old first baseman slugging .450 at AAA isn't all that great, and it's not much different than what the A's currently have. If he can't handle playing third base then he's most like an average major leaguer offensively at that position.

 

Just curious, but why is it safe to say that Wallace will develop more power? He turns 23 in a month and I haven't seen any scouting reports on him that say he's more than a 15-20 HR guy.

Wallace has a line-drive swing. He's not going to "develop" more power, as he's been the same size for the past three years. If anything, he'll start swinging for the fences more often.

 

Wallace has also only been playing 3rd base for a season and a half (including his final college season), so it's not like he's in stick-or-switch mode.