Mariners, Brewers Swap Extraneous OFs; Brewers a Good Team to Swap Extraneous OFs With
Last year, Domingo Santana was coming off a 3+ win season, punctuated by 30 HRs and a slash line of .278/.371/.505. He’d recently turned 25. Did the Brewers build around this young slugger, limited though he was due to contact and defense issues? Well, no, they went out and got Christian Yelich in trade from Miami, and watched him put together an MVP-winning season. They got Lorenzo Cain in free agency, deciding that they wanted to win right now. And win they did, even if it meant relegating Santana to the bench, the minors, and now, a year later, to a minor trade with a rebuilding club.
Last year, Ben Gamel was coming off a shockingly respectable season highlighted by a slash line of .275/.322/.413. His BABIP-fueled first half didn’t carry over into the second, but he seemed to be showing the line drive, bat-to-ball skills that made him a target of the M’s back in 2016. He was fast…ish, and had solid walk rates plus a lower than average K rate. Sure, the power was low for a corner OF, or really anybody in 2018, but if you squinted, and I get the feeling the M’s FO did this a lot when they watched him, you could sort of see 1990s M’s killer Rusty Greer. Low power, low Ks, but tons of line drives all over the park. The M’s talked up Gamel’s game in the offseason, but when the season started, a comedy of errors kept him out of the line-up. In April, it was Ichiro that took his spot in LF. With Dee Gordon in CF, he was relegated to platooning with Guillermo Heredia, and neither was doing all that well. When the season fell apart, the M’s decided to move on from the guy who epitomized their desire for a “more athletic” OF – a corner guy who didn’t hit like a corner guy, but slapped the ball around and put things in motion.
The Brewers simply don’t have room for Santana. The M’s now have plenty of room for Gamel, but they’ve realized – correctly – that their new, rebuilding club has no real *need* for a player like Gamel. I’ve been the low guy on Gamel for too long, and I will be the first to admit he’s been better than I would’ve ever guessed. But he is, in the absolute best case scenario, a complementary player – a nuisance 7th/8th hitter in a really good line-up. He will get to fill that exact role in platoon situations for a good Milwaukee club next year, and that’s great. The M’s need an underpowered 7th hitting corner OF like they need payroll excuses right now.
So having given up their vaunted athleticism, what have the M’s gotten here? Why pick up a good team’s scraps? Remember the 30 HR season thing? Seriously, it was just a couple of paragraphs up. The M’s get a high-variance hitter in Santana who’s quite capable of being a 4-5 hitter on a bad M’s team, and a guy with serious projection left. Santana is actually younger than Gamel by a few months, and while he’s coming off an abysmal year, he’s put up the better big league season in recent years. Neither of them are ever going to win a gold glove, but it’s worth mentioning that Santana’s clearly a worse defender. He’s also got a lot of swing and miss in his game, and so he represents a big change in philosophy for the M’s; it’s been a while since the M’s have gone out and targeted a hitter who’s going to strike out in 30% of his PAs. But after years of getting low-ish K guys and hoping to teach them power, it’s probably worth getting some guys with power and trying to teach them to make incremental improvements in pitch recognition.
The M’s also sent P Noah Zavolas, their 18th round pick out of Harvard last year, to Milwaukee to complete the deal. Zavolas is cool and all, but this deal doesn’t hinge on him. He wasn’t a top prospect in the M’s org, and won’t be one in Milwaukee. The odds are stacked against him becoming more than an org arm, but hey, he was decent in the NWL after pitching well in the Ivy League. How many of us can say that?
Ultimately, this is a very sound move for Seattle. They increase their volatility, getting a decent shot at a middle of the order hitter, and all it cost them was an enigmatic corner OF who’s been a platoon guy on decent M’s clubs. Could Gamel add some pop and make the M’s regret this? It’s possible, sure. If that’s ever going to happen, Milwaukee may be the place to do it; Yelich was a young corner OF who hit too many grounders to have corner OF power, and whose 2013-2015 look mighty Gamelish. He’d improved by the time of the trade, but clearly, Milwaukee tapped into power no one knew he had, and suddely Yelich was a complete player. Let’s be clear: Yelich already showed more power than Gamel can ever produce, but the Brewers have been excellent in developing hitters – so much so that their surplus of them made this deal possible. I’d love to think that the M’s are a great org for a player like Santana, but I don’t, at least, not yet. This is a great project for the new M’s hitting coaches, and a great way for them to show how their new approaches/pedagogy can work with a developing young team.
It Is Done
The Cano deal was finalized, and in the end the M’s “only” sent $20 million to New York in addition to taking on the contracts of Jay Bruce and Anthony Swarzak. To wrap a bow on this increasingly desperate tear-down (it’s not a rebuild quite yet), the M’s have finalized a trade to send Jean Segura to Philadelphia in exchange for 1B Carlos Santana and SS JP Crawford. Jean Segura and Robinson Cano made up a great middle of the infield, and for a brief moment, the M’s had one of the best keystone combinations in the game. That’s completely done now, and at the moment, the M’s can look forward to Dee Gordon resuming the 2B position and hoping Crawford can hit the way he was supposed to instead of the way he has in Philadelphia.
With the Cano/Diaz deal, you could argue that by getting Kelenic and Dunn, the M’s didn’t hurt their return for Diaz by including Cano. That’s debatable, of course. I think there was no way the M’s were getting, say, 1B Peter Alonso in any deal, but the point is the M’s got a couple of solid prospects even with all of the financial gyrations involving Cano/Bruce. With this second blockbuster, though, all doubt is removed: the M’s clearly – CLEARLY – hurt their own return by adding Juan Nicasio to the deal, making it harder for the Phillies to add in another young player. The M’s apparently asked them to, the Phillies refused, so the M’s sent them James Pazos as well (?). I…I don’t know either, folks.
Patrick Dubuque’s article on the trade at BP talked about the novelty for M’s fans of watching a true salary dump player like Bruce. As it turns out, Bruce wasn’t the only such player the M’s would acquire this week – now they’ve got Carlos Santana, who was an attractive free agent only a year ago, but now a player the Phils were desperate to move on from. I don’t think there’s anything really wrong with either player, and you can make the case that Santana in particular is due for a bounce back. But if the point of this frenzy of activity is to bring in and identify the next successful M’s core, then all of this is counterproductive. In a desire to shed themselves of completely fair contracts (Segura’s was more than fair, and even Cano’s wasn’t any kind of albatross, as he’s still a very productive player), the M’s have taken on the salaries of OTHER, less productive players, and forgone the opportunity to add a prospect lottery ticket or two. The M’s aren’t saving much in the next couple of years, and they hurt their odds to be competitive in the years beyond that. I don’t get it.
Apparently, the M’s clubhouse’s decline rankled the M’s front office, and they’ve prioritized remaking the culture and chipping away at the 2019-20 budgets more than bringing in new talent. I’m not sure there’s any other way to spin this. Even if you buy the premise that the M’s couldn’t win without a massive change in that culture, that seems like a slap in the face to the coaching staff, who are theoretically tasked with building/shaping a culture, and not-at-all-theoretically need to share the blame if 2018 was more toxic than we’d heard.
JP Crawford was a first-rounder in 2013, and was a potential target for the M’s. He’s a great defender, and had very good bat-to-ball skills, but his power was, shall we say, developing. In the minors, he showed a keen batting eye and limited Ks; pair that with his defense at SS, and he became a top-20 prospect in the game. He began 2017 in a huge slump, but turned it around enough to make his MLB debut. The Phils essentially gave him the starting job this past year, but he again kicked off the year by falling apart at the plate. He went on the DL, came back, and then broke his hand, so he doesn’t have much of a big league track record.
The one thing that jumps off his stats page is that his K rate has skyrocketed in his limited MLB duty. He can still take a walk, and he still plays SS, but the whole bat-to-ball thing…it hasn’t translated. M’s fans know a bit about this phenomenon from watching the travails of Dan Vogelbach, who maintains solid K rates and hits for average in the minors, then comes north and strikes out a ton. Crawford’s just 23 and is still a premium talent, but for a big-league-ready youngster, there’s more risk here than you’d like. He’s more than capable of making adjustments, and it sounds like part of the problem with the Phillies was that people were constantly tweaking his swing. The M’s could get a very Segura-like player, or Segura-plus-OBP if everything breaks right, but given everything that’s happened over the past 72 hours, they NEED everything to break right. There’s no plan B here; the M’s don’t really have any SS prospects above the Dominican League.