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As non-waiver deadline time approaches at the end of each July, baseball observers divide teams into buyers and sellers, separating the soon-to-haves from the soon-to-have-nots. A few players from each team placed into the latter camp earn the dreaded “trade target” tag, dooming them to weeks of reading and hearing their names bandied about in various media by every rumormonger in the business, always unsure of where they’ll be playing their next game or spending their next night.

So how do we determine which players might be on the move when we construct our own hypothetical trade scenarios, or evaluate those concocted by others? Certain well-connected sources may get the choicest names straight from the horses’ mouths, but those of us with less enviable access resort to more conventional means of speculation, in addition to parroting the people with press credentials. Do we simply know trade bait when we see it, la Justice Stewart, or is there a more complicated calculus at work? Obviously, one need not be a GM to tell a buyer from a seller, and most trade targets share a few salient traits. Nevertheless, I thought I’d take a look at the players who changed hands this July to see if I could come up with a composite image of a player whose bags might well have been packed in preparation as the deadline approached. If we had to hire a police sketch artist to draw our prime trade fodder suspect’s Baseball-Reference page, how would we instruct him to fill in the fields?

The following table lists the players who headlined their respective deals, along with some relevant information about their old and new teams at the times of the swaps. The two rightmost columns list the number of games by which the respective squads trailed in their divisions when the trades went down (with dashes indicating division leads):

Name

Old

New

Old W%

New W%

Old Deficit

New Deficit

Ryan Ludwick

STL

SDN

.558

.588

Jake Westbrook

CLE

STL

.413

.558

15.5

Ted Lilly

CHC

LAD

.442

.519

12

7

Ryan Theriot

CHC

LAD

.442

.519

12

7

Lance Berkman

HOU

NYA

.427

.641

13.5

Kerry Wood

CLE

NYA

.413

.641

15.5

Rick Ankiel

KCA

ATL

.423

.573

14.5

Kyle Farnsworth

KCA

ATL

.423

.573

14.5

Cristian Guzman

WAS

TEX

.442

.587

13.5

Chris Snyder

ARI

PIT

.365

.350

23

21.5

Octavio Dotel

PIT

LAD

.350

.519

21.5

7

Chad Qualls

ARI

TBA

.365

.621

23

2

Javier Lopez

PIT

SFN

.350

.571

21.5

1.5

Will Ohman

BAL

FLO

.308

.510

34.5

6.5

Ramon Ramirez

BOS

SFN

.567

.571

7.5

1.5

Edwin Jackson

ARI

CHA

.369

.569

23

Austin Kearns

CLE

NYA

.408

.637

16.5

Roy Oswalt

HOU

PHI

.416

.549

14

2.5

Matt Capps

WAS

MIN

.431

.549

14.5

1.5

Jorge Cantu

FLO

TEX

.500

.588

7.5

Miguel Tejada

BAL

SDN

.314

.600

33.5

Scott Podsednik

KCA

LAD

.416

.535

14.5

6

Jhonny Peralta

CLE

DET

.416

.510

14.5

5

Dan Haren

ARI

LAA

.374

.515

22

7

Yunel Escobar

ATL

TOR

.591

.494

12.5

Alex Gonzalez

TOR

ATL

.494

.591

12.5

Cliff Lee

SEA

TEX

.398

.568

15

Bengie Molina

SFN

TEX

.513

.603

5.5

Average

.426

.559

15.5

3.2

 
As we might have expected, this year’s tale of the trading tape tells a story of the talent-rich getting richer. Ryan Ludwick may have been lucky enough to play for a first-place team both before and after switching area codes, as he was traded from the Cardinals to the Padres, but that kind of charmed life is far from the norm. The average acquiring team sported a .559 winning percentage at the time of its trade, while the teams bidding farewell to the players in question were putting up a collective winning percentage of .426 when their GMs pulled the trigger (on the trades, that is). The players lucky enough to be whisked away to bigger and better things went from an average of 15 1/2 games in back of their division leaders to an average of just over three games back (of course, some of these teams may have been closer to wild-card berths than they were to division titles).

So the typical seller was somewhere in the range of the Royals and Indians, record-wise. What about the sellers’ wares? Here’s another look at the players involved in deadline deals this season, this time from the perspective of their own attributes, not their teams’. Salary information, as usual, comes from the indispensable Cot’s Contracts. The figures quoted are base salaries for 2010; in cases where a player is under team control for another year after this one, he’s usually due for a raise in 2011. The “Over/Under” column indicates whether the player was exceeding or falling short of his PECOTA weighted-mean forecast after his last game with his original 2010 team (though not by how much he exceeded or fell short of it; in some cases, the difference is negligible). I used projected TAv or ERA as the basis for comparison; that choice shortchanges pitchers with skill-interactive ERAs far below their actual ERAs, but might provide a clearer picture how the players in question are regarded around the league.

Name

Over/Under

Age

Salary ($ million)

Remaining Years of Team Control

Ryan Ludwick

Under

32

5.45

1

Jake Westbrook

Under

32

11.00

0

Ted Lilly

Under

34

12.00

0

Ryan Theriot

Under

30

2.60

2

Lance Berkman

Under

34

14.50

Club Option

Kerry Wood

Under

33

10.50

Club Option

Rick Ankiel

Over

31

3.25

Mutual Option

Kyle Farnsworth

Over

34

4.50

Club Option

Cristian Guzman

Under

32

8.00

0

Chris Snyder

Over

29

4.75

1, Plus Club Option

Octavio Dotel

Under

36

3.25

Club Option

Chad Qualls

Under

31

4.19

0

Javier Lopez

Over

33

0.78

1

Will Ohman

Over

32

1.35

0

Ramon Ramirez

Under

28

1.16

2

Edwin Jackson

Under

26

4.20

1

Austin Kearns

Over

30

0.750

0

Roy Oswalt

Over

32

15.00

1, Plus Club Option

Matt Capps

Over

26

3.50

1

Jorge Cantu

Under

28

6.00

0

Miguel Tejada

Under

36

6.00

0

Scott Podsednik

Over

34

1.75

Club Option

Jhonny Peralta

Under

28

4.60

Club Option

Dan Haren

Under

29

8.25

2, Plus Club Option

Yunel Escobar

Under

27

0.435

3

Alex Gonzalez

Over

33

6.00

Club Option

Cliff Lee

Over

31

8.00

0

Bengie Molina

Under

36

4.50

0

Average

 

31.3

5.6

 

We’re looking at only one season of data, so what happened in 2010 isn’t necessarily reflective of typical trade deadline behavior. That said, the results jibe with our expectations. Most players who changed uniforms were on the wrong side of 30, carrying substantial salaries, and close to the end of their periods of team control. Interestingly, this list isn’t littered with “sell-high” guys, which indicates that teams were either unwilling to part with unexpectedly productive assets, or unable to convince opposing teams that their performances were for real. The latter explanation wouldn’t mean that major-league front offices are entirely devoid of suckers, but it might be worth remembering the next time we’re inclined to assume that it would be easy to unload the likes of Jose Guillen after a deceptive .609 slugging percentage in April.

So whose Baseball-Reference page is taking shape in our sketch? A number of suspects could fit the description (our artist wasn’t very precise), but our likely candidate is starting to look a lot like Ty Wigginton, who’s 32, employed by a losing team, making $3 million in a contract year, and nearly hitting his weighted-mean PECOTA projection on the nose. Unfortunately, Wigginton has an air-tight alibi; witnesses place him in Oriole orange at first base in the O’s-Royals game that commenced just a few hours after the trading deadline passed. Although other Orioles took wing before 4 p.m. on July 31, what kept Wigginton where he was, ironically, may have been the fact that the Orioles were simply too bad to trade him. The typical veteran involved in a deadline trade may resemble Alex Gonzalez much more closely than Yunel Escobar, but that doesn’t mean that players of both types can’t be dealt (even for each other). Still, when you’re deciding which rumors to place your faith in the next time a non-waiver deadline rolls around, remember that certain subjects fit the profile better than others.

Thank you for reading

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Oleoay
8/05
I like this kind of chart, but I think you stopped a bit too soon. I'm not sure whether a player under or overperforms PECOTA matters when teams are evaluating what players to acquire or trade. I think they look at their current production relative to their current salary. Maybe MORP would've been appropriate. I'm not sure you can say players on the wrong side of 30 on losing teams and making around 5 million are often trade bait, because a player could underperform their PECOTA and still be valuable, or outperform their PECOTA and still be too expensive salary-wise.
crperry13
8/05
Why does the photo of this article show a pic of Wigginton in an Astros uniform? Just wondering. Has nobody taken his picture since 2008? Is he camera-shy?
BrewersTT
8/05
It's possible that no trading partner was highly interested in a player (Wiggy) who is out of position at 2B, and would be ordinary offensively wherever he would be adequate defensively, especially if one accounts for the fact that he had a ridiculous run of homers early in the season that he was not able to maintain. Still, you'd think he'd be as useful as some of the guys who were moved elsewhere.