In a recent Open Thread, commenter NMK suggested – snarkily, in my reading – that the Mets trade Edwin Diaz for Zack Wheeler. It’s a trade that has zero chance of happening. But that doesn’t mean we can’t find value in discussing this as if it was a possibility, examining the pros and cons of such a deal for the Mets.
Diaz was the best reliever in baseball in 2018 and he was much, much closer to being the worst reliever in 2019. He had a strong bounce back season in 2020, recovering from a shaky opening to the year, which included losing his closer’s job, to finish the abbreviated campaign with a 1.75 ERA, a 1.247 WHIP and a .596 OPS. Those are terrific numbers and if given a chance, everyone would sign on the dotted line to get those results from Diaz in 2021.
Trading Diaz would create a big hole in the bullpen, which currently has a huge cast of characters but few good late inning options. But there are several good reliever options available on the free agent market, all likely to cost fewer dollars than, say, Trevor Bauer.
Meanwhile, the Mets’ rotation has two givens and a bunch of question marks. It’s a foregone conclusion that the club will acquire at least one solid or better SP and no one will be surprised if they added two. So, would they be better off with Wheeler or Diaz moving forward?
Wheeler has put his injury problems in the rear-view mirror. He has 71 starts the last three seasons, just eight away from the leader and just one fewer than Bauer. His 10.8 fWAR ranks eighth in the majors. Interestingly, Bauer is right ahead of him, ranked seventh with an 11.6 total. Wheeler is durable and able to go deeper in games than when he was younger. In his first three seasons in the majors, Wheeler had a 4.0 BB/9. In his last three years, he’s posted a 2.4 walk rate.
In a vacuum, starting pitchers are more valuable than ace relievers. No club in this era is going to give out a nine-digit salary to a closer, which is what Wheeler got from the Phillies a year ago. And Wheeler is far from the highest-paid starter around. If Bauer opts for a long-term deal and gets the same number of years, he’ll likely pull down a larger contract than Wheeler did. And if he opts for a shorter deal, you’ll have no problem finding other starters in the league being paid more, including one already on the Mets.
If you don’t like looking at salary as a judge of a player’s value, there’s always WAR. There were 34 starters with a higher fWAR than the top reliever in 2020. Think WAR discriminates against relievers? The top four WPA marks in 2020 belonged to starters, despite closers’ huge edge in leverage.
No matter how you slice it, starters are worth more than relievers. In order to think that Diaz is more valuable than Wheeler, you have to believe – and prove – that he’s a significantly better reliever than Wheeler is as a starter and/or that in the particular case of the 2021 Mets, that a closer is more of a need than a starter.
We’ve already seen how Wheeler is one of the top starters in the game. Perhaps you can argue that Diaz is a better reliever, that he’s a top-five closer while Wheeler is a top-10 starter. But, if that’s true, does that make up the difference in the edge that starters hold? Given Diaz’ 2019, in addition to his 2017 campaign, where he had a 3.27 ERA and a 4.02 FIP, it’s hard to claim him as a no-doubt top-five reliever. Does he have that type of talent? Yes. But relievers are fickle and two of the last four seasons, Diaz hasn’t been one of the elite relievers and last year was a truncated season.
Diaz has the edge on Wheeler in age and salary and those are no small things. But with or without this trade, the Mets need to make moves to fill out the rest of the roster. If they keep Diaz, are they going to be able to get a starter of Wheeler’s age and talent for fewer dollars? The answer to that is clearly no. Bauer is a great match in age and talent but he’s going to get more money. On top of that, you know how Wheeler will do on and off the field in New York. How’s Bauer going to do? Is he going to rub teammates or fans or even ownership the wrong way? And what if some other team gets Bauer? The dropoff in available starters after Bauer is noticeable.
Currently, the Mets have a huge hole or two in the rotation. They’d have a hole in the bullpen if they traded Diaz but it’s hard to say that the non-Diaz relief corps would be a bigger hole/problem. Is it easier to fix a rotation hole or a bullpen hole? That may differ from year to year. If nothing else, we know that multiple good relievers, even closers, are moved every year at the trade deadline.
In my opinion, Wheeler fills a bigger need, he’s displayed more consistency the past three years and if the bullpen is a problem at the trade deadline, that’s an easier and less costly proposition to fix. It’s good to have Diaz on the team. But I’d trade him for Wheeler if that was an option.
No question, don’t even have to think about it. Zack Wheeler. 32 games from a quality starter trumps Diaz.
Is this a trick question? Did Wheeler fall off a ledge somewhere and is hurt?
It would depend on which Edwin Diaz we’re talking about if it’s the shut down closer I think that’s the guy that would be more valuable only because he can have an effect on the team every day and if we sign Bauer then we won’t be missing Willer
I’d trade Diaz for Wheeler. As Brian said there’s really only Bauer available that has similar talent and you don’t know what his intangibles will be in NY. You could then look to add a couple quality relievers like Hand and/or Hendricks to join Lugo and May and form a strong bullpen. If we don’t sign Bauer the only other way to get a top notch starter is through trade and you’d likely be mortgaging the future again.
With Lugo, May and even Betances, Familia and Castro (with major bounce back required) the Mets have solutions in a post-Diaz universe. Meanwhile… a rotation starting with deGrom, Wheeler and Stroman makes the General Manager’s job of building a winning team.
I’m still hoping for Tanaka.
I’d trade Diaz for Wheeler in a heartbeat.
McCann talks interesting.
If we are going to look at it strictly from a value perspective, then i think you need to factor in the salary
Mlbtr has Diaz at $7 mil arbitration. Wheeler is making $22.5 mil in 2021. So the question is can you get another player or players, which doesn’t have to be a pitcher, that add up to $15.5 mil in cost whose combined value exceeds Wheeler. I would probably say ‘Yes’.
You could also get more complicated if you wanted to consider the alternatives. Say if you trade Diaz, your alternative to replacing him is Shreve @ 500k salary. If you don’t trade for Wheeler then you use Matz @ 5mil. In that case the equation then becomes if Wheeler + Shreve is greater than or less than Diaz + Matz + $11 mil. And if you repeat this exercise with different combinations of players you can see how this could get convoluted quickly, even more so if you start including players at different positions.
On a sort of unrelated note (but it’s about Wheeler), i noticed Fangraphs has created a bridge from their fWAR metric to RA9-WAR, which isn’t exactly bWAR (my preferred pitching value metric) but closer in number and theory.
My interpretation between those 2 metrics is that they try to isolate the effect of luck in
1. BABIP and
2. Sequencing (one could call this the “clutch factor”)
2018 -> fWAR 4.2, BABIP 0.4, Sequencing -0.6, RA9 4.0
2019 -> fWAR 4.7, BABIP -0.8, Sequencing -0.8, RA9 3.1
2020 -> fWAR 2.0, BABIP -0.3, Sequencing, 0.5, RA9 2.2
Totals -> fWAR 10.9, BABIP, -0.7, Sequencing, -0.9, RA9 9.3
What we can see is that fWAR claims that he’s been more unlucky than the average pitcher in both allowing hits and the timing of his hits so it gives him “extra” credit in the short term because in the long term it thinks that he’ll get average luck. But if you look at the career stats of Wheeler he is consistently negative for both BABIP and sequencing so it’s not just a short term aberration but rather he is a pitcher who does give up more hits and runs in pressure situations (aka unclutch)
This also contradicts the valuation of hitters because we do recognize that different players have different “average” BABIP levels and don’t attempt to normalize luck.
Ex. It makes sense that Wright, who is a hitter who uses the whole field and hits line drives, has a career BABIP of .339 vs a straight pull hitter like Duda, who has a career BABIP of .269
wOBA (which drives fWAR for hitters) doesn’t try to adjust for BABIP in which case Wright would be unfairly penalized for being “too lucky” and Duda would be unfairly credited for being “too unlucky”
/And that ends my annual rant on why pitching fWAR stinks.
Looking at Wheeler’s placement using RA9-WAR which uses actual results, he ranks 21st out of 75 in the last 3 years. Normalizing for IP, he drops down to 30th where he is among the likes of guys like Miles Mikolas, Mike Fiers, Jose Berrios, and German Marquez. Solid guys but not thought of guys who should make 20+ mil.
/And that ends my continual rant on why Wheeler is overrated.
The sad reality is that the Wilpons refused to get serious with money for Wheeler and while we all rationalized that he was not worth the $120 million or so he got from the Phillies, the per year is not crazy in today’s market even with uncertainty of how many fans will be allowed in to see games live. It is my assumption that Cohen would have resigned him as a smart baseball move, not just because he could afford to. You have to hope that Diaz is over his one year NY funk and what we got last year was what we will get going forward. A shut down closer in the 9th, in my opinion, is worth more than Wheeler every 5th day. He’s no Rivera, but that’s the kind of star we need at the end of games to make up for starters only going 6 innings and then depending on 2-3 others to keep getting guys out until he comes in. Had he had a 2019 like he did in 2018 we’d be having a different conversation now. So despite how much I liked Wheeler, the Phillies can keep him.