MLB’s July 31 trade deadline is the culmination of a weeks-long midseason stretch when we revel in the thrill of knowing next to nothing. Not only are we in the dark about which moves will be made, but we can’t clearly foresee what most of those moves will mean. Some moves will facilitate playoff appearances and championships thanks to timely injections of veteran talent. Others will spur rebuilds as prospects pan out. Many more will have no discernible impact on either the current season or future seasons. As we wait to see which transactions are consummated before today’s 4 p.m. ET deadline, we can trust in only one truth: Whatever trade your team makes, it probably won’t look as good, one year later, as the Rays’ return in the Chris Archer trade looks today.
With minutes to spare before the deadline on July 31, 2018, the Rays sent then-29-year-old homegrown starter Chris Archer to Pittsburgh for Tyler Glasnow, Austin Meadows, and a player to be named later, who turned out to be Shane Baz. Although we won’t be able to evaluate the trade in full for years, it’s a real rout thus far. Archer, the two-time All-Star with an escalating salary, a slowing fastball, and a shoulder odometer that recently ticked past 20,000 pitches, has amassed 0.8 Baseball-Reference WAR in 29 starts with the Pirates. In 2019, he’s allowed an NL-leading 25 homers, fueling the second-worst ERA (5.58) and worst FIP (5.74) among pitchers with at least 100 innings pitched.
Glasnow (25) and Meadows (24), meanwhile, have racked up 4.5 WAR in their 19 starts and 96 games, respectively, with Tampa Bay, with Meadows making the 2019 All-Star team and Glasnow boasting a 1.86 ERA and a 2.32 FIP when he hurt his elbow in May. To make matters worse for Pittsburgh, Baz—who’s struck out almost 28 percent of the hitters he’s faced in A-ball this season, en route to a 3.40 ERA and 3.36 FIP—ranks 64th on FanGraphs’ list of the top 100 prospects in baseball, and fifth in the top-ranked Rays system. In emptying the farm for Archer, the Pirates immediately lost a win-now trade.
In January 2014, writer Sam Miller mocked the stat-savvy fan’s tendency to reflexively favor the Rays’ end of deals, tweeting, “LOVE this trade for the Rays. Who’d they give up? And who’d they get?” The Rays’ reputation for swindling teams in trades was built on the back of long-ago transactions like the Delmon Young deal and the swap with the Cubs that brought Archer to Tampa Bay, but the trade that shipped Archer out has already taken its place in the pantheon.
According to many a media report, every team today is aiming for a haul like Glasnow, Meadows, and Baz. The Blue Jays allegedly envisioned an Archer-trade return for Marcus Stroman. Cleveland could fantasize about an Archer-trade payoff for Trevor Bauer. The Mets could command an Archer-trade windfall for Noah Syndergaard. In what may be the most caustic commentary yet on Mets ownership, the New York Post’s Joel Sherman wrote that the Wilpons “might not appreciate the quality” of a prospect package equivalent to the one the Rays received for Archer. The implication was that only incompetents could fail to see the wisdom of a windfall like that.
Of course, it’s unlikely that any team, with or without the Wilpons, will pull off an Archer-caliber bonanza. The Archer trade has quickly become the new standard for a fleecing, the absolute best-case scenario for a so-called seller. We don’t see that sort of exchange every summer. The website BaseballTradeValues.com allows users to get a feel for the fairness of hypothetical trades based on the site’s assessments of the players’ surplus value, which are derived from a proprietary model that incorporates projected performance, salary, injury risk, years of control, expected inflation, and other factors. Plug in the Archer trade today, with the players appraised in the revealing light of 2019, and the site says the Rays’ side of the deal is worth almost five times as much as the Pirates’ side.
Click “Validate Trade,” and the site essentially tells you to get a grip and stop wasting its time with what sounds like the deluded dream of a biased fan from a team message board.
So no, odds are we won’t see a swap that produces so clear a winner this week. But by studying the Archer trade, we can still learn a few lessons about how notable lopsided trades get made, and about how cautious we should be when grading deadline deals.
Obvious Mistakes Are Increasingly Rare
One reason the Rays’ heist has already attained such legendary regard is that we rarely see teams make moves that seem inexplicable. “When the Shelby Miller deal happened, my jaw dropped,” one high-ranking team executive says. “But those are few and far between nowadays.”
The Diamondbacks’ December 2015 decision to send first overall pick Dansby Swanson, Ender Inciarte, and Aaron Blair to Atlanta for Miller and minor leaguer Gabe Speier flummoxed fans and analysts the moment it was made, and the results more than justify that contemporary consternation. Miller fell far short of even modest expectations, producing negative-1.3 WAR for Arizona, while the Braves’ trio has amassed 14.2 WAR and counting. Even that trade, though, was the product of a different period, one when there were still suckers on the market—or, at least, executives who evaluated players in a dramatically different way than some of their counterparts, which paved the way for WTF trades.
Arizona’s old-school GM at the time of the Miller trade, former player and agent Dave Stewart—who described himself as “kind of relieved” when the Diamondbacks fired him less than a year later—has no close equivalent among current team-runners. The same uniformity in front-office thinking that’s slowed free-agent activity over the past two winters has made it less likely for a major mismatch to develop on the trade front. Every team has a model that says something similar about the surplus values of the players in any proposed exchange, and if the combined values on either side of the swap diverge to a great degree, the deal won’t get done. In this era of increasing information symmetry, “Makes sense for both teams” is the most frequent refrain in trade reactions. Against that bland backdrop, an outlier like the Archer trade—one with a winner we can all identify from afar—stands out even more than it might have in a more freewheeling environment.
Perceptions Change Quickly
Although the Rays overwhelmingly won Year 1 of the Archer trade—the year that, in theory, should be most likely to favor the buyer in a present-for-future transaction—fewer jaws dropped when this move was made than had after the Miller trade. Today, Pittsburgh media members are calling the trade a fireable offense and a “complete disaster and absolute failure,” and Yinzer Brian Cuban—brother of Mark Cuban, who says he isn’t interested in buying his hometown team—is predicting that the trade will go down as one of the worst of all time. A year ago, though, the takes were more measured, both locally and nationally.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Paul Zeise, who on Monday called the deal a “complete disaster,” admits within the same column that the deal was “lauded by many” and confesses, “I had no problem with the trade at the time.” Hours after the trade, Jeff Sullivan wrote for FanGraphs that “there’s risk on both sides of this move,” noting that “the Pirates are taking a big chance by making a splash” but also that “the Rays are also taking a big chance by dealing a valuable and popular starting pitcher, right when the team thinks it’s on the verge of getting good.” Although he acknowledged that the trade might backfire for Pittsburgh, he concluded, “you have to admire their courage.”
In his deadline recap at SB Nation, Grant Brisbee wrote, “if you’re making me bet on the cumulative WAR for Archer over the next three years and the cumulative WAR for Austin Meadows and Tyler Glasnow, I will probably choose Archer.” Elsewhere at SBN, Alex Kirshner called the trade “the kind of move every fan should hope their team makes” and “the perfect win-now-but-also-later move for a team that needs to take chances but can’t afford to get burned.” Both Brisbee and Kirshner—as well as The Ringer’s Zach Kram—critiqued the trade not because it was clear that the Pirates had overpaid, but because it seemed out of step with Pittsburgh’s previous moves (trading Andrew McCutchen and Gerrit Cole in January 2018) or non-moves (standing pat at the deadline in years when the team was arguably closer to contention). Compare that to the avalanche of quotes condemning the Diamondbacks’ end of the Miller trade, which ranged from Sullivan’s “clear, obvious mistake” to an anonymous executive’s “worst trade I’ve ever seen.”
The Archer trade was defensible on the day it was made in part because the Pirates controlled the righty’s rights for what looked like a bargain total of $27 million through 2021. Even if Archer didn’t propel the Pirates to the playoffs in 2018, the team would have three more opportunities to compete with its big trade addition playing a prominent role. This, then, was a trade that the jury should have been out on for a few years, yet it didn’t take more than a month for a verdict to be delivered. The Archer trade isn’t the worst of all time, but it may be the one that moved the most quickly and convincingly from neutral to negative.
In his first three outings for the Pirates, Archer allowed 11 runs in 14 1/3 innings, yielding an .827 opponent OPS. In his first three outings for the Rays, Glasnow held hitters to three runs in 12 innings and a .534 OPS, striking out 20 against only three walks. While the two pitchers were tracing contrasting trajectories, Meadows hit .344/.396/.771 (223 wRC+) with 10 homers in 96 at-bats in Triple-A in August. In the middle of the month, a Pirates prospect writer reported that Baz, the Pirates’ highly regarded 2017 first-rounder, would round out the trade, which swayed public opinion toward Tampa Bay’s side. Team-wide wins and losses steered the discourse, too: The Pirates went 10-17 in August, while the Rays went 17-10. One month after the deadline, deliberate breakdowns of the deal had graduated to outright rubbernecking. The Archer trade reminds us how quickly what looks like a reasonable (if risky) trade can run off the rails.
Irrational Exuberance Can Come Back to Bite Teams
When the Pirates pulled the trigger on the Archer trade, they were 55-52 and sported a roughly 13 percent chance of making the playoffs. Almost all of that percentage was tied up in winning the wild card, which was 3.5 games away. Nothing about the scenario argued strongly in favor of an all-in move, but the team had gone 15-4 in its last 19 games leading up to the deadline, outscoring its opponents by 46 runs over that span. According to MLB.com beat writer Adam Berry’s story on the trade, that hot streak was enough to goad GM Neal Huntington and president Frank Coonelly into making a move.
“Huntington and Coonelly said the Pirates’ turnaround, during which they won 15 of 19 games, pushed them in this direction,” Berry wrote. “A month ago, they were thinking about ‘Scenario A,’ as Coonelly put it: building up their organizational depth with an eye on 2019. Then the Bucs stormed back into the playoff picture, pushing them toward ‘Scenario B,’ adding players for the present and future.”
Granted, Archer’s contract ensured that the trade wasn’t made with one season in mind. But it wouldn’t have been made if not for that one season—and, specifically, for a red-herring, three-week stretch within that season. After committing to one course, the Pirates allowed a small-sample performance to talk them into another. While going for it is fun and more fan-friendly than the team’s typical austerity, the Pirates got caught in between two paths that might have been more likely to lead them to success.
“The well-run teams are realistic and have a good feel for their talent and how it stacks up to their competitors,” an unnamed executive told Ken Rosenthal this week. “The poorly-run teams do not.” Ironically, Rosenthal was writing about the last-place Pirates of the present, whom he argues may be deceiving themselves again at this year’s deadline by expecting to contend in 2020.
Beware of Abandoning Post-Hype Prospects
Entering 2017, Glasnow and Meadows were both top-10 prospects in baseball, according to MLB.com, ranking ninth and 10th, respectively on that site’s preseason list. At the time, it would have been almost impossible to pry them loose. Having raised their stock significantly since the trade, they’d be similarly untouchable in 2019. The Rays—who stole a slumping Tommy Pham from St. Louis on the same day they dealt Archer—struck during the brief window when both players’ value was temporarily depressed.
In 2017, Glasnow had posted a 7.69 ERA in 62 innings for Pittsburgh, losing the plate and walking more than six batters per nine innings. Although he’d dominated in Triple-A after a disastrous start in the majors, he’d looked lousy again at the end of the year, turning in three ugly relief appearances post-September promotion. He’d pitched much better out of the bullpen in the majors in 2018, but he’d still suffered from wildness, walking 34 in 56 innings prior to the trade. Meadows had batted .214 in his first exposure to Triple-A in 2016 (albeit with good power), but his OPS had declined in his second crack at the level in 2017, to a worrisome .670. The beginning of 2018 had marked only a modest improvement: Meadows managed a .733 OPS in Triple-A to start that season, hitting only one homer in 32 games, although he recorded a respectable .292/.327/.468 (111 wRC+) slash line in Pittsburgh between a May call-up and the trade. Both remained promising players, but as Miller wrote shortly after the trade, “Neither has quite the shine he used to have.”
In retrospect, they should have shone as brightly as ever. BaseballTradeValues.com founder and editor John Bitzer says he’s used real trades to help fine-tune the statistical model his site employs. The Archer trade, he notes via email, “has proved instrumental as a reference point for valuing tweeners—guys who may have officially graduated from prospect status, and so no longer are being rated as prospects by the major services and therefore falling into a bit of a gray area—but more importantly as a bulwark case against devaluing stock-fallers too much. The lesson learned there, from our perspective, is that if a former top prospect’s stock falls, it isn’t linear, and you can’t assume it’s going to continue to fall in the same pattern. They may be working on something that turns that ship around, as both Meadows and Glasnow did. So when we see former top prospects today who are struggling a bit (e.g., Franklin Barreto), we may dock their value, but we also know not to dock their value too much.”
Post-Trade Development Matters
In May, FanGraphs’ Dan Szymborski wrote that he’d believed the Archer trade to be “eminently reasonable for both sides” when he’d seen the parameters the previous summer. As he noted, though, Glasnow and Meadows had improved as players in the intervening months, whereas Archer had regressed. Szymborski included his ZiPS projection system’s estimates of the three players’ production during Pittsburgh’s team-control years at the time of the trade, entering 2019, and in May. The table below provides the present projections.
ZiPS WAR Projections: Archer, Glasnow, and Meadows
In the past year, ZiPS has upgraded its evaluation of Glasnow and Meadows by 12.3 WAR while downgrading its read on Archer by 6.2 WAR—and that’s the case even though the system still incorporates the trio’s pre-trade performance. That last lesson of the Archer trade is that transactions aren’t about shuffling players with predetermined career paths from place to place. Transplanting some players can alter career outcomes by unlocking latent talent, whether through the revitalizing shock of a clean slate—the fabled change of scenery—or because new instructors and philosophies better suit their skills.
The players the Rays acquired in the Archer trade haven’t made major mechanical overhauls or glaring changes to their approach, like a lot of the Astros’ recent acquisitions. Some of the adjustments Glasnow has adopted—including switching from sinkers to four-seamers, throwing fastballs up in the zone, and mixing in some sliders—originated during his time with the Pirates. But those teachings seemed to click in Tampa Bay, where he reentered the rotation right after the trade, leaving the bullpen (and his bouts with wildness) behind.
In Pittsburgh, Archer went away from his strengths, throwing more sinkers and fewer sliders in an apparent attempt to conform to the plan espoused by pitching coach Ray Searage: copious sinkers, ample pitching inside, and regular ground balls. Earlier this month, Archer told the Post-Gazette’s Jason Mackey, “I can’t forget the type of pitcher I am. I’m not a contact, ground ball pitcher,” adding, “I probably tried to change too much.”
In the first half of the decade, Searage developed a reputation for fixing pitchers, thanks to his success with reclamation projects like A.J. Burnett, Joe Blanton, J.A. Happ, Francisco Liriano, and Edinson Vólquez. In September 2016, though, I observed that the Pirates’ pitching magic may have worn off; that season, Pirates pitchers had underperformed. Since then, Charlie Morton and Gerrit Cole have blossomed in Houston—according to Cole, he had been “pulling out the wrong tools” because no one in Pittsburgh had told him to trust his breaking ball over his sinker—and now Archer has hit a wall while acclimating to the Pirates’ seemingly simplistic, one-size-fits-all strategy. At this point, the game appears to have passed the Pirates by; between the loss of pitching coordinator Jim Benedict after 2015 and changes in the game that they haven’t kept pace with—sinkers, for instance, are no longer in vogue—Pittsburgh isn’t a place where pitchers reliably go to get better, and Searage isn’t seen as a pitcher whisperer.
Although Glasnow’s UCL is said to be intact, he may not be back this season. Meadows, who outhit everyone except Cody Bellinger through May, has been much more pedestrian since. The Archer deal is notorious today, but that doesn’t mean it still will be in 2020; if the trade taught us anything, it’s what a difference a year might make, and how foggy the future is every July 31.
