On trading minor league pitchers for major league ones

In broad strokes, one of the riskiest gambles you can make in the MLB Draft is to take a high school pitcher in the first round. It’s a high-risk, high-reward proposition. More college pitchers go in the top half of the first round than high school pitchers in a normal year. Draft experts – which I’m not one – claim that this is shaping up as a disappointing year for college pitchers. It will be interesting to see if teams who normally wouldn’t take a high school pitcher early will change their tune this year.

In recent drafts, the Mets have taken a bunch of pitching in the first and supplemental first round. Kumar Rocker, David Peterson, Justin Dunn and Anthony Kay are the pitchers they’ve tabbed since 2016. Additionally, they’ve selected other pitchers with high picks, like Simeon Woods Richardson, Josh Wolf, Matt Allan, J.T. Ginn, Calvin Ziegler and Dominic Hamel. Is that a lot? Beats me, didn’t look at other teams to compare. But it feels like a pretty heavy emphasis.

With those 10 early-round picks on pitchers only three were drafted out of high school, with Woods Richardson being the highest selection at #53 overall. Perhaps Ziegler should be in this crowd, too, but TXNL Academy isn’t your normal high school. Either way, his inclusion doesn’t move the needle much, as he was picked 46th overall and his selection at that point was as much about him taking a below-slot deal as it was on his ability. Rocker was the highest pick spent on a pitcher, as he went 10th overall, even if the Mets chose not to sign him. Peterson and Dunn were collegiate first-round picks and Kay was a supplemental first from the college ranks.

Rocker debacle aside, this seems like a solid way to go about drafting pitchers high. The Mets have avoided taking high school pitchers in the first round and the ones they’ve selected early are ones that they drafted either higher than conventional wisdom from the prospect hounds – Woods Richardson in particular was seen as a reach – or manipulating the draft to give overslot bonuses to Allan, which allowed them to get a first-round talent in the third round.

And even with this solid drafting of pitchers, the Mets opted not to sign one and they’ve dealt five others. Is this part of the Mets’ approach, to draft pitchers in the Top 100 and then trade them while their value is high? People love prospects and sometimes overvalue them, too. None of us have any idea if this is an actual strategy of the club. Most likely it is not. But that still doesn’t make it a bad way of doing business.

The reason that it’s not likely a strategy is because when the Mets trade these pitchers, it’s by a different GM than the one who selected them originally. A new GM comes in and doesn’t have any allegiance to the previous regime’s guys. Brodie Van Wagenen dealt Sandy Alderson draft picks Dunn, Kay and Woods Richardson, along with non-pitcher Jarred Kelenic. Alderson/Jarred Porter/Zack Scott/Billy Eppler traded Van Wagenen picks of Wolf and Ginn, along with non-pitcher Pete Crow-Armstrong.

But getting back to strictly pitchers – did the Mets make the right move in dealing these minor league assets? Let’s start by seeing how the guys they gave up have done since leaving the organization

Dunn – Has been a league-average pitcher in his 101.2 IP but with a walk rate (6.0 BB/9) that caps his future value. He had a 3.8 BB/9 in the Mets’ organization.

Kay – Has a 5.50 ERA in 68.2 IP in the minors. You don’t want to give up too early on a LHP but at this point in time, Kay looks to have minimal value going forward. In his last year with the Mets, Kay was 7-3 with a 1.49 ERA at Double-A and had a 2.50 ERA in seven games at Triple-A.

Wolf – Sent to Cleveland as part of the Francisco Lindor deal. Hardly pitched with the Mets due to no minor league games in 2020. Last year in Lo-A had a 5.35 ERA and a 4.7 BB/9.

Woods Richardson – Pitched well for the Blue Jays in the half season after they acquired him. But after the Covid layoff, was terrible last year. He put up a 5.76 ERA for Double-A New Hampshire before being included in the Jose Berrios deal. After the trade, he posted a 6.75 ERA for Double-A Wichita in four games.

The Mets just traded Ginn so there’s no record yet as to how he’s performed since leaving the Mets. Ginn had a promising start to his professional career with the Mets last year. But so did Kay. Did the Mets make a mistake by giving up on Ginn before he reached Double-A? That’s certainly a defensible position at this point in time. It’s just that the Mets’ track record with the four previous pitchers that they traded in a similar position has been pretty good.

On the flip side, Marcus Stroman, received for Kay and Woods Richardson, performed well for the Mets. The expectation is that the Mets will get six good months from Lindor this year, rather than the four they got last season. And while he hasn’t been as good for the Mets as he was for the Mariners, Edwin Diaz has been an asset since being acquired for Dunn and others. The less said about some others in the deal, the better.

Obviously, one shouldn’t make any blanket judgments on a sample size of four. But perhaps without any intention of doing so, the Mets have stumbled onto a philosophy that they can use going forward. Draft pitchers high and then trade them before the sheen comes off.

A team like the Rockies has to draft pitchers because the best free agent pitchers won’t make them their top destination, or at least they haven’t since Mike Hampton. A bunch of other teams won’t be in play for the best free agents because they won’t pay the freight. The Mets are now in a position where they can afford to trade or sign for pitchers at the top of the market. If you were told a few years ago when the Wilpons were running things that the Mets would add two All Star pitchers in an offseason, you probably would have laughed. But here we are.

Max Scherzer and Chris Bassitt are both on the wrong side of 30, so it’s not like they join the Mets without any element of risk. In the long run, Father Time is undefeated. But the 2022 Mets are operating in a much-smaller window. Will Scherzer prove to be worth the huge financial outlay? Will Bassitt be worth the prospect capital given up to acquire him? Right now, all outcomes are on the table.

But regardless of how the Bassitt deal works out, my opinion is this was a good move for the Mets. Maybe Bassitt falls off early and Ginn develops into a better pitcher than Bassitt ever was. That’s certainly a potential scenario on how the trade unfolds. But my opinion is that it’s much more likely that Ginn never has a 3-Win season in his career, like Bassitt had in 2021.

The Mets need that 2.5-3.0 WAR pitcher now, not whenever Ginn might be able to deliver that in the future. Imagine if before the 1975 season, the Mets traded Craig Swan for Ken Holtzman. Swan would have given his future team back-to-back years with a combined 8.2 fWAR down the road. But Holtzman would have given the ’75 Mets exactly what they needed, a strong starter to go along with Seaver-Koosman-Matlack, as he won 18 games and posted a 3.6 fWAR that season.

Now, instead of Swan, imagine the Mets traded Randy Tate, the 99th player selected in the 1972 Draft, and who had reached Triple-A in his age-21 season in 1974. Tate only pitched one year in the majors and wasn’t good at all. That’s a potential outcome for Ginn, too.

Back in the early days of the internet, a nine-letter acronym became popular – TINSTAAPP. That stood for “There Is No Such Thing As A Pitching Prospect.” It wasn’t meant to be taken 100% at face value. Instead, it was a reminder that pitching prospects regularly fall flat, whether due to injury or not being able to improve and adapt at higher levels.

Ginn’s already had TJ surgery and needs to prove he can stay healthy. He also needs to show he can continue to thrive as he faces better and better competition. Maybe Ginn will be one of the ones who makes it and develops into a consistent average or better starter in the majors. Or maybe he ends up like Dunn or Kay or Wolf or Woods Richardson, guys who’ve lost a lot of luster since they’ve been dealt.

An All-Star pitcher like Bassitt, even if he’s over the age of 30 and with only one year of team control, seems like a solid, perhaps above-average return. You have to judge a trade in at least two ways. The first is what was thought at the time, did the teams receive good value for what they gave up. When the Mets traded Scott Kazmir, the deal was panned because they could have gotten so much more for one of the top pitching prospects in the game.

And the other is what actually happens in real life.

From the mainstream sources, no one feels like the Mets didn’t receive good value for what they traded away. Sure, there are people concerned about the club trading away perhaps its best pitching prospect in Ginn. But that’s a different thing than saying they could have gotten more if they dealt him elsewhere.

Now we have to wait to see how Bassitt does here and Ginn does elsewhere. If the worst happens, if Bassitt falls on his face and Ginn becomes a star, I’ll be frustrated. But that won’t make it a bad trade in my mind. That particular outcome, while a possibility, wasn’t something that was likely at the time the deal was made. It’s not like paying a 2B $100 million for his age 36-40 seasons, something that was obviously a bad idea at the time it happened.

Trades can unfold in surprising ways. No one thought Nolan Ryan would pitch until he was 46. No one thought George Stone would put up the best season among the three pitchers in that deal. And you can probably think of 100 additional examples.

If you guide yourself by what “might” happen, you’ll never make a move for fear of it blowing up in your face. All you can do is weigh all of the factors and try to determine the most likely outcome. The four projection systems at FanGraphs have Bassitt delivering between a 2.2-2.6 fWAR in 2022. Unlike my opinion, or the opinion of anyone reading this, that’s a non-biased look at his most-likely outcome.

It’s harder to project Ginn. He’s not likely to make the majors this year. But that doesn’t mean he can’t have value for the 2022 A’s. A dominant season in the minors this year and he’s a factor in 2023. Or he could do his best Woods Richardson imitation and be left for dead.

The ’75 Mets are a great example of a team that needed another starter. My opinion is that the 2022 Mets were in a similar position before the Bassitt deal. That, along with the recent track level of top-100-pitchers drafted and traded by the Mets, makes me view this as a good deal. We’ll see how it turns out in reality.

*****

There’s no hard-and-fast rule about how much you should judge a trade by what was thought at the time and what ends up happening in reality. My own POV isn’t set in stone with percentages, either. But my personal view is that it should always favor what was thought at the time by informed opinions. If Peter Gammons, Jay Jaffe, Keith Law, Ken Rosenthal and Jayson Stark all pan a deal after it happens, that should be a pretty strong indicator of informed opinions weighing in.