Why Trading for Top Prospects Is Less of a Win Than MLB Teams Seem to Think
The hot stove is sweltering, but our research shows that promising youngsters who are dealt underperform compared to their non-traded peers. That’s bad news for prospect hoarders, but points to a competitive advantage for teams that sell high on their touted minor leaguers and adopt a win-now approach.Why Trading for Top Prospects Is Less of a Win Than MLB Teams Seem to Think
The hot stove is sweltering, but our research shows that promising youngsters who are dealt underperform compared to their non-traded peers. That’s bad news for prospect hoarders, but points to a competitive advantage for teams that sell high on their touted minor leaguers and adopt a win-now approach.
It wasn’t quite Joe DiMaggio for Ted Williams, as the Yankees had (perhaps apocryphally) contemplated 65 years prior, but in January 2012, New York and Seattle completed a stunner of a trade. And a rare one, too—Jesús Montero for Michael Pineda represented an exchange of a lustrous prospect and potential slugger for a just-graduated prospect and potential ace.
The first player was Montero, a 22-year-old catcher whom the Mariners, like the entire public-facing prospect industry, thought would develop into a star. In a September call-up with New York in 2011, he hit .328/.406/.590 with four home runs in 69 plate appearances, after which he ranked sixth on Baseball America’s prospect list and seventh on Baseball Prospectus’s—his third consecutive top-10 appearance at each site.
“I can just remember looking at the video of Jesús Montero,” says Tony Blengino, then a special assistant to the general manager for Seattle and now a baseball writer, “and watching what he was doing to quality pitches, both at Triple-A and in his brief time with the Yankees at the end of the season before we traded for him. It looked like Pujols.”
Montero ended his MLB career with 28 home runs, fewer than Albert Pujols tallied in 14 separate seasons. Last year, Baseball Prospectus ranked him the second-biggest bust in MLB history. “In retrospect,” Blengino says, “you can look back and say perhaps they did know something.”
Indeed, the Yankees did know something, or at least suspected that Montero wasn’t quite the prize he seemed from the outside. Despite Yankees general manager Brian Cashman publicly comparing Montero to Mike Piazza and Miguel Cabrera and saying he “may well be the best player I’ve ever traded,” New York possessed internal concerns about the young catcher’s framing ability and body, and thus his overall future, says Will Kuntz, who was named the club’s new manager of pro scouting that month.
Yet Kuntz, who is now an executive for the soccer team LAFC, notes that New York figured the Mariners knew something, too. “A guy like [Pineda] isn’t going to be available but for the fact that they feel there’s something wrong with him, also,” Kuntz reflects. “If they were sure about him, there’s no chance he’d be available.”
While he didn’t bust like Montero, Pineda didn’t fulfill his towering destiny, either. Before he threw a single inning for New York, he underwent shoulder surgery and missed two full seasons, and despite pitching with erratic success after his return to the mound, he capped his Yankees career with an ERA north of 4.00.
Two young players with extraordinary potential switched teams, and two young players saw that extraordinary potential remain unfulfilled. “I wonder,” Kuntz says, “had they known what we knew and had we known what they knew, would we still have done the deal?”
Montero for Pineda wasn’t the only deal, in hindsight, that posed such a question. This particular trade was an exception because it involved promising youngsters exchanging sides, yet in another sense, it wasn’t an exception at all, but rather a warning about the perils of trading for untapped talent. Every year, a handful of teams divest themselves of top prospects, and every year, a new set of fan bases convince themselves that their new young talent will soon shine. The question is how often those dreams are dashed, and whether it creates opportunities for shrewd teams to take advantage of their competitors’ prospect lust.
In this dollars-per-WAR era of player analysis, the most valuable asset in baseball is a young, cost-controlled star, and as such, prospects rank among the most desirable commodities in the modern game. Front offices know this, fans know this, and the baseball media knows this; where there was once just one industry prospect ranking, courtesy of Baseball America, there are now veritable handfuls of lists, including ones from BA, BP, FanGraphs, ESPN, MLB.com, SB Nation, and more.
With increased attention comes increased scrutiny, so when a well-known and highly touted prospect is traded, the entire sport takes notice. The more interesting part is what happens after the initial transaction analysis ends.
In the span from 1990 through 2011—when Baseball America started ranking prospects to the latest year for which nearly all of the top-rated prospects have completed six years of major league service time—BA ranked 697 different players as top-50 prospects at least once. Out of that group, which was made up of 309 pitchers and 388 position players, 103 (or 14.8 percent) were traded either while ranked in the top 50 or just before entering that tier. (For instance, Jeff Bagwell, whom the Red Sox traded to Houston in August 1990, is included in this sample because he was traded in advance of his no. 32 BA ranking in 1991.)
What teams want most out of a top prospect is production in the first six years of service time, before he hits free agency. Comparing performance over that time for traded prospects to non-traded prospects can show whether the two groups trace different paths in their post-prospect careers. (Determining a given player’s first six seasons involved finding the year the player cleared his rookie innings or plate appearance threshold and counting five years into the future. It’s a rough estimate of pre-free-agency service time, but it works as a close approximation across the sample.)
The first finding of note is that prospects of all flavors bust: More than half of all top-50 prospects in this sample accumulated less than 6 WAR in their first six seasons, and even top-10 prospects—the best of the best—failed to record even 1 WAR per season more than a third of the time.
But within that broader result, a trade-centric pattern emerges. Through their first six MLB seasons, the non-traded prospects accrued an average of 27 percent more WAR than their traded counterparts, with sizable advantages for both pitchers (who saw a 25 percent gap) and position players (31 percent). It’s a statistically significant difference, too, which suggests that the discrepancy stems from a real effect and not mere chance.
This effect matches one Ben Lindbergh found in 2012 when looking just at top-10 prospects: Those who are traded tend to underperform compared to those who aren’t. Mashing hundreds of players into one average might not be the best way to judge success, as prospects produce a wide range of outcomes, but the most obvious differences between the two groups appear at the extremes.
On the most disappointing end, 28 percent of traded prospects were worth negative WAR over their first six seasons. That’s a huge number—just 18 percent of non-traded prospects can say the same—and another 29 percent were worth between zero and six WAR, which says that a fan base excited about a touted youngster joining its farm system has almost a three-in-five chance of its new favorite becoming a bit player or worse.
And on the most successful end, traded prospects were three times less likely to develop into stars than their non-traded counterparts. Just 2.9 percent of traded players accumulated 24-plus WAR over their first six seasons (or 4-plus WAR per year, meaning consistent All-Star-level production), versus 8.8 percent of non-traded players, and a gap appears in the 18-24-WAR group (3-4 WAR per year), too.
One thought is that these results might stem from the most highly ranked prospects not being traded as often as those toward the back end of the top 50. But the average ranking of traded prospects was 27.8, compared to 25.0 for the non-traded group—that’s a minor difference, and regardless, the correlation between relative ranking on the top-50 list and future performance is itself rather small (only 0.26 on a scale where zero equals no relationship and one a perfect pairing).
It’s still a relatively small sample, of course, as the traded group includes only a handful of players each year, out of a broader population that struggles anyway. But the results are there, and they are compelling: In no metric do the traded prospects look better than non-traded ones, and in almost all of them, they look worse.
The obvious explanation is an information gap: Teams that watch a player every day know more about him than those that want to trade for him—and especially more than public prospect rankers.
Every source interviewed for this story readily agreed an information gap exists and pointed to a player’s makeup as the chief area it manifests. Even statistically oriented baseball minds know the importance of a prospect’s individual quirks when forecasting his future. “Unquestionably, teams know much more about their own guys from a work habit, lifestyle standpoint than other teams do and certainly more than I do,” says Eric Longenhagen, lead prospect analyst for FanGraphs. “Those people are always learning about an individual in ways that other orgs cannot because they’re not in the weight room watching guys work on their body and they’re not following them to a restaurant to see what they’re ordering.”
Makeup also includes mental intangibles, like eagerness to learn and adaptability during slumps, and day-to-day access to these traits affords the prospect’s organization an incredible advantage in trade negotiations. “Good scouting from the other teams will help them know some of these things,” Blengino says. “But the organization that the player is with knows a great deal more and has it reinforced over time.”
An on-field gap exists, too, but sources agree that at least for numbers like velocity, spin rate, and release point for pitchers, the advent of technology has narrowed this gap within the industry. “TrackMan changed the game,” Kuntz says, referring to the extensive radar system installed on fields within the past decade. Now teams can access a centralized database containing magnitudes more numbers than they had access to in the past.
But while TrackMan and high-speed cameras help even the playing field, Longenhagen suggests that wearable technology—anything that measures biomechanical information, like force plates that measure pitcher leg movements and Motus sleeves that measure arm slot and speed—now adds another layer of remove from the giving team to the receiving team. Where tech shrunk the gap just in the past few years, it might now widen it anew.
A club that wants to leverage its information advantage in potential trades must follow a few steps. “Job one in a lot of places is to know your own talent first,” Blengino says. “You have to know everybody else’s talent for sure, but you better know your own talent first.” In a variable game like baseball, where development isn’t always linear and, again, even the top prospects fail an inordinate amount of the time, that’s not always possible, but it makes intuitive sense that teams would better gauge their own young players than those who compete for other teams.
Step two is a bit of a meta game: Teams must try to predict how other teams view their own prospects. For instance, Club A will reference public lists, which are informed by analysts’ conversations with team scouts, to intuit its competitors’ valuations of Club A’s prospects.
“You’ve got to do two assessments,” Kuntz summarizes. “What do we think this guy’s value is based on our scale, and what do we think his industry value is? And those can be two different things. … When you do your own prospect evaluations and then you look at Baseball America’s, you say, ‘All right, we’re not necessarily all lined up on the same page here.’ And you hope that Baseball America’s evaluation is a reflection of what the industry value is because then you have a real leg up.”
And step three is to determine the players whose value judgments vary the widest, and who might work as trade candidates. Not all prospect trades involve implied disagreements—sometimes a team has just one top prospect and has to part with him to complete a deal—but the most advantageous arise from such differences. Teams can track which competitors’ scouts attended a game in which a certain pitcher threw particularly well, for instance, which might provide an entry point to talk about a deal.
Yet other times, names come up organically and negate the need to actively shop players whose prospect rankings outpace their internal evaluations, says Blengino, who, during his front office career, ended up on both sides of a trade for an eventually disappointing prospect: first in Milwaukee, where his team secured a wondrous half-season of CC Sabathia for Matt LaPorta, and then in Seattle, where his team added Justin Smoak and Montero. As general managers talk, Blengino says, “Other organizations will bring up other players repeatedly, and you just make a note of it: ‘They’re on this guy, they’re on this guy.’ It might be a guy as an organization you’re not really that high on, so that’s important information. If you can sell high on a guy you’re pretty low on, it’s all about perceived value.”
Clubs can also prey on their competitors’ broader organizational preferences. If Team A knows Team B is enamored with high-velocity arms, whether by identifying they have a “type” in the draft or observing their other trades, it might try to trick the latter into taking a prospect with a blazing fastball whom it knows suffers in other, less visibly apparent areas.
Asked if teams try to sell high on a player before competitors learn disquieting information a team already knows, Kuntz agrees without hesitation. “Yeah, for sure,” he says. “That’s definitely a thing that happens.”
If teams operate with an internal competitive advantage, that leaves outside observers who want to decipher their strategies and opine about their moves even further in the dark. Greater sophistication of strategies from smart baseball minds has rendered in-game second-guessing more difficult, and the data suggests that challenge manifests with front office moves as well. When educated fans seek information about a traded prospect—either one their win-now team surrendered or one their win-later team gained—they consult the public rankings, but if those rankings don’t actually reflect teams’ views of their own players, there may be less to gain from such explorations than fans think.
Longenhagen views a prospect trade as more of a fact-finding mission than an outright declaration that he might have judged a player wrong. “Certainly, I don’t change my opinion of a player if they’re just involved in trade rumors or even if they’re just traded,” he says. “In the event that a trade seems very lopsided, I might start asking questions … like, ‘Is there something I need to know about player X?’”
The calculus changes somewhat when a trade seems to reveal something about a team’s relative evaluation of different prospects it knows well. “I guess knowing where teams have players internally would influence how I thought about them,” Longenhagen says, “and if I knew that in, say, a one-for-one trade, a team would surrender Prospect X but not Prospect Y, then I would take into consideration the way they have them lined up, especially if it were an org that I perceive to be sound logically in that regard.”
Last month provided a perfect test case, as the Yankees were apparently willing to part with pitcher Justus Sheffield but not outfielder Estevan Florial for a current star. The very idea of an information gap suggests, then, that Mariners fans should be disappointed their team secured the rights to Sheffield in the James Paxton trade but not Florial, a high-risk, high-upside 21-year-old who missed half of last season after fracturing the hamate bone in his right wrist.
Another tangible, related area where past prospect outcomes can inform future rankings is in the split between pitchers and hitters. In recent seasons, FanGraphs has pushed pitchers as a group down its leaderboard—the current list has 11 batter names before the first pitcher—because of their relative attrition compared to position players. This trend appears especially true for traded pitchers: A sample of 43 fits the parameters of this study, and in that group, only Adam Wainwright was worth 18 total WAR in his first six seasons. When just one player in a 20-plus-year sample reached an All-Star level consistently, there might be reason to further doubt pitching prospects like Sheffield, whose teams let them go.
But even with those precedents in mind, it’s still far too early to know if the Seattle faithful should be upset about the return for their ace. Prospect judgment is complicated, and as is, FanGraphs’ rankings still prefer Sheffield to Florial, as Longenhagen says he doesn’t “automatically flip-flop” Prospects X and Y by deferring to a trading team’s authority. Baseball Prospectus’s rankings agree, largely because of Florial’s injury. “It’s data,” Jeffrey Paternostro, BP’s lead prospect writer, says about trades. “It’s information. I wouldn’t say it’s going to sway my opinion, but I consider it.”
Another factor prospect analysts and the fans who read their work might wish they had the ability to consider is that the information gap is likely not the only reason a gap between traded and non-traded outcomes emerges. Perhaps the team context plays a role. A top-50 prospect by nature has thrived in his environment to gain that lofty reputation: He’s probably worked well with his coaches and meshed with his organization’s specific minor league philosophies and grown comfortable with a group he’s known since he was (for many players) a teenager. A trade represents a shock to that familiar system, thrusting the young man into a new organization, with new coaches, teammates, and best practices.
“I think it’s just entropy, right?” Longenhagen says. “It’s just that now the situation has changed and it’s more likely to change for the worse, since things were going ideally to this point, than it is to improve … I definitely think that that rocking the boat like that can be a negative for an individual player.”
MLB players succeed often after trades, however, and even the more dramatic adjustments at the minor league level don’t serve as an automatic path to failure. Figuring which players will stumble then becomes a guessing game; it involves, again, the concepts of makeup and player personality, and the disconnect between public and private information on that front can make predicting outcomes sound impossible in such circumstances. But that’s just part of the largely volatile business of prospect projection.
“I’m never going to have perfect info,” Paternostro says. “And even if I had perfect info, that’s not necessarily going to bear itself out over the next year of baseball because … these players are still developing, changing, improving, regressing. … But I’m always going to look bad on, you know, 34 different dudes on a top-101 [list] in the next 12 months. That’s just the way it works.”
If traded prospects more consistently fall short of expectations, the obvious follow-up question is why more teams don’t take advantage of this apparent opportunity to sell high on prospects and improve the major league club in the present without much of a long-term cost. The history of such trades suggests they are a justifiable risk; it’s easier to lose a bold-faced prospect when said prospect is unlikely to produce meaningful value in the future, anyway.
Even as front offices grow smarter and information floods the sport, the tendency for traded prospects to underperform persists. Though they don’t qualify for this study because they weren’t ranked in the top 50 until after 2011, a small number of more recently traded prospects are now either established All-Stars (Anthony Rizzo, Trevor Bauer) or still-promising while still-young (Gleyber Torres, Eloy Jimenez), but the success stories are again dwarfed by the tales of those who never, or at least haven’t yet, panned out. Mike Olt and Jonathan Singleton busted, Lewis Brinson—who was twice traded as a top-50 prospect, hopping from Texas to Milwaukee to Miami—looks no different, Anderson Espinoza has pitched all of eight games for the Padres’ farm since being traded in 2016, and the less said about pitchers like Jake Thompson and Aaron Blair the better. Even the brightest prospects traded this decade, from Yoán Moncada and Lucas Giolito to Dansby Swanson and Daniel Norris, have plenty of work to do to fulfill a fraction of their minor league sheen.
And if anything, even trades involving the prospects who have proceeded to enjoy the most successful careers have worked out in some fashion for the teams surrendering said youngsters. Here’s the full list of top-50 prospects from 1990-2011 who were traded:
Traded Prospect Production
Besides Kenny Lofton and Bagwell, who were traded so long ago that all of today’s top prospects were years from being born at the time, there aren’t any thefts at the top. Boston traded Hanley Ramírez for Josh Beckett, who helped win a World Series; ditto for the Marlins, who traded Adrián González for Ugueth Urbina; the Yankees traded Austin Jackson for Curtis Granderson, a better center fielder. Few teams regret such a move completely.
In decades past, teams might have undervalued youth and made excessive win-now trades that discarded future considerations. But, “you can even make the argument now that it’s gone so far in the other direction,” Paternostro says, “that it’s a bit of an untapped market inefficiency: trading your best prospect, as silly as that is to say. Just because it’s the only way you can get a return of that level.”
Boston couldn’t have added Chris Sale without losing Yoán Moncada, who was a month away from being named BA’s no. 2 overall prospect, and Michael Kopech (no. 32). And the Cubs couldn’t have added Aroldis Chapman and José Quintana without losing Gleyber Torres (no. 5) and Eloy Jimenez (no. 4), respectively. That the highest-profile prospects traded in recent seasons came from Boston’s Dave Dombrowski and Chicago’s Theo Epstein isn’t a coincidence, Paternostro says—those executives have the reputation and job stability to take risks. For the average GM, though, “If you miss on that trade, it’s kind of a PR nightmare with your fan base now, because they can click one button and get reports on these guys and go, ‘Oh, you idiot, you traded Eloy Jimenez. BA or BP says he’s a likely above-average regular, potential All-Star.’”
Widespread, easily accessible information about prospects might serve as a paralyzing factor, giving teams even more reason to maintain a conservative course instead of trading possible future contributors for present-day gain. But “possible” is the operative consideration there, as prospects aren’t the certain productive major leaguers their minor league evaluations might suggest in the moment. And in these recent cases, even if the young players do subvert the low expectations set by history and meet the high expectations set by their prospect rankings, the trading teams already won their sides of the deal. The Cubs won their first World Series in more than a century after trading Torres for a closer, and since trading for Sale, the Red Sox have enjoyed two seasons of the best pitcher in the sport in that span plus another title, while the White Sox have seen Moncada lead the majors in strikeouts and Kopech head for the operating table in need of Tommy John surgery.
So the next time a well-regarded prospect is traded, it’s possible to think the team overpaid in future value and that the minor league stud it traded will haunt his original club as a “what-if” for decades and eventually wear a different cap in the Hall of Fame. But it’s far more likely that his hype will fizzle in short order—and that the trading team might win the World Series soon and forget all its worries regardless.
