I get mixed feelings about doing This Trade Makes No Sense posts. On one hand, I like doin' em cause they're fun to write, and I get to play John Oliver a bit. On the other hand, the demand for posts like these proves that GMs are still quite stupid.
I was gonna do one yesterday about the Mets trading for Jake Marisnick just to have him hit .220 off the bench all year, but that'd be too one note. 'He sucks', or 'Mets suck', or whatever. I needed something with more pull, more nuance.
So thank god the Rays did something stupid, or else I'd be really screwed here.
Here's the deal in print: The Tampa Bay Rays took one of their best players, contact-hitting outfielder Tommy Pham, and a two-way prospect named Jake Cronenworth, and traded them both to San Diego in exchange for outfielder Hunter Renfroe and shortstop prospect Xavier Edwards.
Let's go over some issues with this trade.
1. Pham vs. Renfroe is what this trade really boils down to, and let's examine and compare the both of them. Pham is a versatile, contact-hitting outfielder whose highest batting average has been .306, and has hit up to 155 hits in a single season. Pham also ended a season with a 6.2 WAR, which is nice for a guy who had his breakout season at 29. Meanwhile, Renfroe is a power-hitting, high-strikeout guy who had a great defensive year this year, has had a high average of .248, a high hits-value of 103, and had his highest WAR this season with 2.6
ADV- PADRES.
2. The Rays will be going into 2020 with a few high-strikeout guys on their roster already- Willy Adames had 153, Austin Meadows had 131. The difference is that Adames and Meadows had solid, productive seasons in between strikeouts. Adames still finished the year with a 4.2 WAR, the highest for a position player in Tampa, and Meadows finished with a 3.8, both higher than Renfroe's with 154 strikeouts.
3. Alright, let's move off the Renfroe bashing, and instead bash the other people. The Rays are getting a shortstop prospect named Xavier Edwards. The Padres figured they could get rid of Edwards because he's blocked at SS by Fernando Tatis, and will be for a while. So they sent Edwards to....Tampa Bay. Where he will be blocked by WILLY ADAMES for the foreseeable future. Adames is 23, is coming off a 4.2 WAR season, and won't be eligible for arbitration til 2022. Granted, Edwards is 20 and will likely be in AA next year, but...are the Rays just assuming they'll have moved Adames by the time Edwards comes up?
How is Edwards supposed to feel about this? How is ADAMES supposed to feel about this? It's the equivalent of the SNL 'Meet Your Second Wife' sketch, where they casually reveal that Beck Bennett will get a new wife because Aidy Bryant will die in a kayaking accident. How are you supposed to go about your life knowing that?
4. Jake Cronenworth will eventually get to prove if two-way players work in San Diego. Keep in mind- thanks to Brendan McKay, we know that they barely even work in Tampa.
5. This is a deal that sets San Diego up with more well-rounded star power and more pitching...and leaves Tampa with a strikeout-friendly outfielder and a prospect that will render their young star obsolete in a year...and TAMPA SAID YES TO THIS?
A lot of this probably makes more sense if you're an executive, or if you wake up every morning in a pile of cocaine, but I just don't see the benefit for this if you're the Rays. You just had a wonderful season, and you make a move that rids you of one of your stars and jeopardizes another one of them?
I mean, the funniest part of this is that Hunter Renfroe got to premiere the new uniforms a few weeks ago, and he's not gonna get to wear any of 'em. But that's all the entertainment value I'm getting from this.
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