Last summer, I wrote that I thought the Phillies should do everything in their power to trade for Roy Halladay, desperate as they were for a top of the rotation starter given the down year for Cole Hamels and the injuries to Brett Myers. I even advocated that they trade top pitching prospect Kyle Drabek to achieve the deal. Phillies GM Ruben Amaro disagreed, and instead pulled off the swindle of grabbing Cleveland's Cliff Lee for lesser prospects, a move that helped us cruise to the World Series for the second straight year, only to lose to a team even more determined (and more financially able) to buy themselves another World Series. But the loss certainly wasn't Lee's fault, as he pitched spectacularly in the playoffs, and I was looking for him to start at the top of the Phillies rotation in 2010. But Amaro had other ideas. He was still fixated on Halladay, who hadn't been traded at the deadline but remained imminently available, going into this, his last season under contract with the Blue Jays.
Reports were that Halladay had named the Phillies among his very short list of potential destinations (he had a full no-trade clause) and that he actually wanted to go there. Amaro and the new Blue Jays GM were talking, and talks were heated, and visions of Phillies' fans were dancing with a potential rotation of Halladay, Lee, and Hamels, together!!! for 2010. But there were two issues preventing that wondrous outcome: (1) the Jays still wanted Kyle Drabek, and (2) the Phillies couldn't afford Halladay at the place where their payroll had been set ($140M). As it turns out, the first issue wasn't a dealbreaker this time, unlike in the summer. I'm not sure why, exactly, although Drabek struggled in the final two months of the season, after the trade fell through. But Amaro pulled the trigger on the Halladay deal this time, after a successful trip to the playoffs without him, giving up Drabek and two other highly touted prospects from the Phillies system, Michael Taylor and Travis D'Arnaud. I'll deal with the second issue later, but Drabek is gone now and Halladay is here. And despite the loss of the prospects, the Phillies just traded for one of the best pitchers in the game and he signed a below market extension to play for us for the next 4 seasons. That's a pretty great thing, even if we someday regret the loss of Drabek and Taylor, or even D'Arnaud, an A ball catcher. They could all turn into stars, but we just got ourselves a star, one who wanted to pitch here, and he will be sitting at the top of rotation for years, barring in jury. All of that is a good thing. Too bad the second issue, and Ruben Amaro's gross inability to perform his job, ruined all that was good about the trade at the same exact time.
In a completely separate, but jointly announced trade, the Phillies decided to dump Cliff Lee and his $9.5M salary on the Mariners, receiving three lesser prospects in return, lesser than the Phillies traded to Toronto at least, but not necessarily lesser than the ones they gave up for Lee in the first place. That being said, that deal was done, and had nothing to do with the piddling return that Amaro was able to receive on Lee this winter. Especially since, unlike Cleveland last summer, WE DIDN'T HAVE TO TRADE HIM! Lee, as it turns out, was completely floored by the trade -- had no idea it was coming, and was actually in negotiations with the Phillies on an extension (he's in the final year of his contract) when the trade was suddenly leaked. And now he's gone. For nothing. Well, not nothing, but almost nothing.
As most of you know, I've also been a long-time Mariners fan and thanks to the historically awful reign of former general manager Bill Bavasi, the M's don't exactly have the best farm system in baseball and the prospects they included in the trade for Lee weren't even among their best. It's really a sick trade for the M's -- they get Cliff Lee, like Halladay one of the best pitchers in the majors -- for 3 prospects who didn't figure in their plans for 2009 and are all longshots to have significant impact in the majors in the future. Sure, there is a former #1 pick, Phillipe Aumont, but for reasons that remain confusing to me but are probably health-related, he was moved to the bullpen before last season and only pitched 50 innings, which severely limits his upside. I do love the trade from the Mariners perspective, and I like the Chone Figgins signing (offsetting and maybe improving a little on the loss of Adrian Beltre) and some other moves they've made like getting rid of the tub of lard Carlos Silva and his Bavasi-born contract for Milton Bradley, who is good when healthy and not stirring trouble, admittedly rare but more likely than Silva ever pitching effectively in the majors again. In addition, the Angels have lost Figgins and John Lackey, so that division is for the taking and with Cliff Lee and Felix Hernandez at the top of the rotation, this has turned the Mariners into a playoff contender. I do have Ruben Amaro to thank for that. But the Phillies, at best after these transactions, are a little bit better in 2010 (assuming that Halladay is a little bit better than Lee). And at the expense of that modest improvement, they lost a huge chunk of their upper farm system (Drabek and Taylor) and also lost out on the opportunity to run out a rotation of Halladay, Lee, and Hamels, even if only for one year, when it would have only cost them $9.5 million. It really makes no sense.
One can quibble with the hard cap that Phillies ownership instituted ($140M is a huge increase from last year), and if the trade was forced by ownership because they refused to go over that cap, even to get Halladay, then there is some blame there. Maybe winning a World Series couldn't have justified a $150M payroll (we're not the Yankees, our revenue is still limited by our market), but I find it hard to believe that if they went to 140 they couldn't stretch to 150. But maybe they were stretching just for 140, so again, I'm not going to blame ownership completely. Especially when the Halladay-Lee-Hamels rotation could have been achieved -- easily -- if Ruben Amaro had used his fucking brain and got even a little creative to keep the payroll under 140 without trading Lee. And it really didn't have to be all that creative. It's as easy as getting rid of Joe Blanton, which Amaro said he tried, and I'm sure he did, but for fuck's sake, just release him outright instead of tendering him THE WEEKEND BEFORE YOU TRADED LEE! Of course, I'm sure he could have gotten something for Blanton, something similar to one of the crappy A ballers he got from the Mariners. And since his salary is basically Lee's for this season, then Amaro would be fucking set, and we'd have Lee instead of Kentucky Joe. But no, Amaro's a fucking idiot. Here's some other takes on the trade if you think I'm alone:
Matt Swartz, Baseball Prospectus: "The only team that does not necessarily come out ahead in this is the Phillies. The team really made two separate trades—three prospects for Roy Halladay conditional on an awesome extension, and Cliff Lee for three inferior prospects. The former will turn out to be a success and the latter will not. . . . The issue I take is that they could have non-tendered Joe Blanton (or, better yet, traded him for some inferior prospects) and Chad Durbin and won two or three more games in 2010 at the same $9 million salary. I say that even as someone who believes Blanton is vastly underrated, but they could have gotten better value by doing that. If Blanton was worth nothing on the trade market (which I am skeptical about), then the Phillies were foolish to offer him arbitration—clearly no one else would have even offered him his arbitration estimate on the free-agent market, so why pay him that much? Figure out what other teams would pay him and offer him that and a cookie."
Christina Kahrl, Baseball Prospectus: "Less certain is the necessity of coupling this trade with the deal that put Lee in Seattle. Even if you accept for the sake of argument the suggestion that Amaro had to work within a budget, and that he had to have one or the other, this seems to suggest that the Phillies just blew it by being active early and, true to form, acted fast. If payroll's a problem, then the money spent on Placido Polanco or Ross Gload or Juan Castro or Brian Schneider—in short, the entire pack of elective add-ons, these veteran talents barely above the free-talent alternatives or players making close to the minimum—deserves to be seen collectively as needlessly spent money on players who don't significantly alter the Phillies' chances at a third pennant, not nearly so much as having a rotation with Doc and Cliff Lee and Cole Hamels gives you a rotation that might have been able to handily beat the best the AL might throw at you, and start a case for elevating the Phillies to dynastydom."
Dave Cameron, FanGraphs: "The Cliff Lee to Seattle portion of this trade just seems very light in return for the Phillies. They’re getting two power arms with a lot of questions marks and a speedy center fielder without a lot of power. None of these guys are top tier prospects. This is the best Philadelphia could have gotten for Lee? Really? A pu-pu platter of interesting, high-risk guys not really close to the majors for a Cy Young-quality pitcher who is already well on his way to Type A free agency? And, even if that’s true, why clear $8 million from the books by trading Lee? Surely, you could have moved Joe Blanton without eating any of his salary, even if you didn’t love the deals being offered. Or, how about this – don’t sign J.C. Romero, Brian Schneider, and Ross Gload, whose 2010 salaries are about equal to Lee’s. Replace those three reserves with league minimum guys and you’ve saved enough money to keep Lee around."
Reading these comments and many more like them has made me sick the past week as I tried to digest the trade, especially since I/we/all of Phillies Nation should have been celebrating the fact that we just got Roy Halladay! But it makes no sense. And I'd really like to hear Amaro's reasoning for these deals, although I can't imagine any explanation sufficing. I guess in the grand scheme of things, it probably helps the Phillies this year (a little, and only assuming Drabek wasn't going to be used during the season -- we probably didn't have a spot for Taylor, barring injury). And we have Halladay signed for 2011-13, where we wouldn't have necessarily had Lee signed. So if you take them together, I can see some sort of warped logic in the logistics. But the flat-out bottom line of the deal is that we could have had a rotation of Halladay/Lee/Hamels/Happ and instead we have a rotation of Halladay/Hamels/Happ/Blanton and that's inferior no matter which way you look at it. And it didn't have to be. Good deal for the Mariners, though. That's something.
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