As much as we can say that the Garcia-for-Reed trade looked great at the time (and we did, you can look it up), or they got good value dumping guys off left and right during the last three seasons, the total of everything they’ve received in trade is Mike Morse, Jeremy Reed, and Jon Huber. As a group of trades, you’ve got to look at that and wince.

I have a teensy nitpick- I think that when a guy gets released you can’t just cross him off your list of what we got. We did get a couple years of Foppert for example, they just didn’t amount to anything.

I say this only because I once saw someone trying to argue that we didn’t get anything for Langston because Randy Johnson left the team. All you ever trade is years of one guy’s service for years of another guy’s service. No one is immortal, not even Gilgamesh, uh Gil Meche.

27 (Conor): Thanks, if I hadn’t spent much of my day off work performing work (with work still to go) I’d have read it already. But I bookmarked it and have high hopes for 9pm or so.

29 (gwangung) and 30 (jimbob): gwangung is dead on that it’s bigger than Bill. But Bill IS the point guy. I didn’t interpret DMZ’s original post as any kind of attempt to validate Bavasi, though trades do have to weigh in somehow on how he gets evaluated for his performance. I mean, if you break down a GMs job duties, player evaluation/acquisition/retention with the ultimate goal being to produce that winning/championship team has to be his main deal – and the approach that he takes with regard to trades, drafts, promotions in the farm, releases, re-signs, etc. are all highly relevant. (Like, if he had competent bosses, they could say something like ‘Bill, you’re doing a heckuva job on X, but we need you to look at and possibly refine your approach to trades. If you do so, we think you can increase your (and therefore our) performance remarkably.’) I couldn’t fill in the X because, well, there’s been some recent eval work (I think on prospect insider) that suggests Fontaine’s drafts haven’t worked out all that well, so I didn’t really know what to pick for the ‘hey Bill, you’re really good at…’ part).

If the Mariners traded Ichiro tomorrow for a can of Sprite, and next week Ichiro tore his hamstring while the can of Sprite turned out to be delicious, that wouldn’t make that trade any better.

Hee! That one’s a keeper.

Yes, that was an excellent post on the general — but not universal — superiority of looking at trades “at the time” instead of after the fact, i.e. the “results of the trade”. Summed up the pros and cons real well.

If you’re taking economics or finance or operations research classes, this is an excellent example of the difference between looking at any decision made under uncertainty “ex ante” vs “ex post”. I.e. this applies to a huge range of phenomena, not just baseball trades. Decisions have to be made “ex ante” (before the fact); the results are not known until “ex post” (after the fact).

One time when it is perfectly obvious that “time of trade” is the only possible way to evaluate a trade is before it’s happened. Which is what really matters. There is no hindsight, no do-overs in baseball. It’s true: the Garcia trade has turned out to be crap. But Bavasi didn’t know that in 2004. If you’re evaluating his RESULTS, that’s one thing; but if you’re evaluating his SKILL, that’s another.

It’s definitely not a question of “choose one”.

Bavasi has had terrible results from trades. His skills probably tilt a bit more the other way, as some of the trades were at the time defensible. Still not a good record, but not as abysmal as the results.

What I think people are missing is that the results of the trade reflects on the ORGANIZATION, not the General Manager. Garbage In means Garbage Out, and if Bavasi is getting crap input and player evaluation (something that ALL GMs do), then naturally his trades are going to turn out badly.

Some of this may have to do with his philosophy and long term strategy (high risk/high reward, promoting aggresively); much certainly has to do with the entire organization not having the skills to evaluate players as well as the rest of the league.

Bavasi has his flaws (glaring at times), but they are overshadowed by the flaws existing in the rest of the organization, in my opinon.

And, unfortunately, the organization flaws will probably remain long after Bavasi is gone.

One time when it is perfectly obvious that “time of trade” is the only possible way to evaluate a trade is before it’s happened. Which is what really matters. There is no hindsight, no do-overs in baseball. It’s true: the Garcia trade has turned out to be crap. But Bavasi didn’t know that in 2004. If you’re evaluating his RESULTS, that’s one thing; but if you’re evaluating his SKILL, that’s another.

It’s definitely not a question of “choose one”.

Bavasi has had terrible results from trades. His skills probably tilt a bit more the other way, as some of the trades were at the time defensible. Still not a good record, but not as abysmal as the results.

I think the Mariners have a huge deficit in evaluating talent. Being able to tell whether an Ichiro or a Griffey or an A-Rod or a Felix is a good player isn’t very hard; it’s separating out the wheat from the chaff at more normal levels of skill, and foreseeing how that skill is going to play out over the next few years that is hard, and that the Mariners can’t do. There are lots of examples: Spiezio, Everett, Bloomquist.

They’ve had a lot of bad luck, too, but there’s luck everywhere, and every team has to deal with guys who just didn’t pan out. It comes down to evaluating talent. Can you do it? The Mariners as an organization cannot. This can be broken down further into specific skills they can’t recognize, emphases they have that are less valuable than they think they are, issues of career peaks and lengths, the whole concept of probability, what statistics are useful for evaluating the past, which are valuable for predicting the future, etc.

I’m still a little surprised they can even get fleeced by a guy like Bowden, but I guess that’s just the parable of the blind squirrel in action.

http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/the-best-and-worst-teams-of-the-trade/