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July 31, 2007

Prospectus Hit and Run

Trade Deadline Edition

by Jay Jaffe

The trading deadline is upon us, and if you've stumbled in here only because you've grown weary of reloading various web sites 20 consecutive times in a row in the hopes that your team snagged Eric Gagne for a Low-A catcher with the offensive upside of a dying elm tree, no worries. We've got a little deadline flavor to offer you here, too.

Pickle Me This

Yesterday's almost-consummated big trade between the Rangers and Braves—principally Mark Teixeira for Jarrod Saltalamacchia and Elvis Andrus—prompted BP intern Pete Quadrino to exhume the study I did a couple of years back regarding prospects traded by Atlanta GM John Schuerholz. While Jason Schmidt and Jermaine Dye remain the cautionary tales, they're the exceptions rather than the rule when it comes to Schuerholz's track record. In my study, I found that only six out of the 80 traded prospects (arbitrarily defined as having not accumulated 502 plate appearances or 162 innings in the bigs) had thus far managed 10.0 WARP post-trade, a "career of consequence."

Revisiting those numbers two years later, Dye and Schmidt have distanced themselves from the pack, even though they've fallen on hard times in 2007. Meanwhile, Wes Helms and Jamie Walker have crossed the 10.0 WARP threshold, the latter as a rather wealthy man but nonetheless a situational reliever, bringing our running total to eight careers of consequence.

Of the players who had yet to appear in the majors at that time of the article, only Adam Wainwright and Jose Capellan have had any impact, with the latter already skirting oblivion before reaching 3.0 WARP. Even that's light years ahead of Dan Meyer, the highly-regarded pitching prospect the Braves sent to Oakland in the Tim Hudson deal around the same time that they shipped Capellan to Milwaukee. Now in his third year at pitcher-friendly Sacramento, the winner of the organization's "Two Steps Back" designation is a 26-year-old who's struggling to keep his walk rate below five per nine as he tries to regain his velocity following shoulder surgery. His PECOTA Stars and Scrubs chart is somewhere between two stock types that can be described as "Blood Red Sunset Over Lowlands" and "Mars is Landing on Your House."