Printer-friendly

Contact Author

July 25, 2012

Pebble Hunting

Two Good Starts and a Trade

by Sam Miller

"I think the one thing you might be able to get someone to dream on—it's amazing to me, continually, how often trades are made based on the last two starts," one American League personnel director told Mackey. "So if he can put together a couple of starts in the next couple of weeks...” (Source)

Presume that this personnel director talking to Minnesota ESPN radio host/writer Phil Mackey about Francisco Liriano wasn’t misquoted. Presume that he wasn’t exaggerating wildly in order to entertain Mackey. Presume that he’s not insane. Presume that he’s telling the truth, and that, at least once, a team has made a trade based on the last two starts. The question, then, is this: Which trade?

The answer won’t necessarily be obvious, and it could be that the last two starts affected the cost of acquiring a pitcher (which we wouldn’t ever know) or dissolved trade talks around a pitcher (which we wouldn’t know). But from the start of July through the end of August, five to 10 established major-league starting pitchers are traded each year. Over the past three years, there have been, depending on your definition of the terms, about 20 such pitchers traded. And one of these pitchers, I will speculate, is the pitcher this personnel director is talking about.

Couldn’t be:
Roy Oswalt (2010). Average game score in his final two starts: 36. (To remind everybody, a game score of 36 is quite poor; a game score of 50 is average.) Three starts before he was traded, Oswalt threw a one-hit shutout. But in the final two starts before the Phillies acquired him, he pitched just nine total innings; he left one start after four innings when Pedro Alvarez lined a ball off his ankle, and he left the next after five innings when he gave up six runs and a couple homers. His