Teoscar traded!!!!
Trading Teoscar Hernández to the Seattle Mariners looks like a salary dump, but at least nobody likes it.
The Blue Jays have dealt a tremendously likable Silver-Slugger-winning All-Star calibre player who represents some of this front office’s best ever work on the trade market to the Mariners for the kind of player they have demonstrated over and over that they don’t value especially highly. Teoscar Hernández will be playing in Seattle next year. Reliever Erik Swanson is coming to Toronto, along with prospect Adam Macko.
It’s a justifiable trade in terms of the value exchanged, the needs of the roster, and the resources the Jays have to work with this winter. It also sucks.
Hey, but least the return is better than a year of Chris Flexen!
Anyway, I guess we need to talk about it…
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Erik Swanson had an incredible season in 2022, striking out 70 batters in 52 2/3 innings, while issuing just nine unintentional walks and pitching to a 1.68 ERA. He is under relatively cheap club control for three more years. The Blue Jays needed bullpen help.
The Blue Jays also needed a path to allow George Springer more time in right field — not only because he is bog average centre fielder at this point, but because the demands of the position seem to have an increasingly adverse affect on his fragile health.
And in Teoscar Hernández, the Jays had a player who was just a year away from free agency, and projected to make $14.1 million in arbitration. He was a poor defender in a spot Springer ought to occupy anyway, a too-similar hitter to the Jays’ other right-handed sluggers, and getting his contract off the books provides the club with more money to work with as they reshape their roster this winter.
Money to play more seriously in the high-end of the free agent pool is good — and if the Jays use it on, say, Brandon Nimmo, the five-win lefty-hitting CF with a 134 career wRC+ formerly of the Mets, then this deal will feel at least a little bit different. Ditto trading a catcher for Bryan Reynolds and spending that cash elsewhere still. Ditto Justin Verlander. Creating more opportunities for Springer to not be in centre is also, obviously, good. Three years of a reliever with Statcast rankings that look like this is also good.
But is Swanson a great reliever, or just a reliever who had a great year? Did he even have a great year?
Swanson's swinging strikeout rate took a bit of a nosedive over the last couple months of the season. His 17.1% mark ranked ninth out of 240 relievers with at least 20 innings pitched in the first half of the year. In the second half his his 13.2% rate ranked 71st of 192.
He was also very much shielded from high leverage situations by the Mariners — in part a consequence of their having better options, though it's rather stark to note how just 16.5% of his batters faced were in high leverage spots, compared to, say, Jordan Romano, whose rate was 53.1%.
Oh yeah, and his average fastball velocity has dipped from 95.7 mph in 2020 to 93.7 mph this year, and was at 93.3 mph in both August and September. Also, his 85% strand rate was well above the 72% average for a reliever in 2023, and way above the 59.6% rate he produced in his first 101 big league innings. The uptick in strikeouts explains some of that, but it’s hard not to feel like some regression is coming.
That’s not to suggest I think he’s bad, but is he a game-changer? It certainly doesn’t look like it. Is him being a game-changer even the point of this deal? My early suspicions here are that it's not — and not just because, as I said above, the Jays have shown us repeatedly that they don’t think relievers are worth paying exorbitant prices for.
That’s where this one starts losing me.
GM Ross Atkins spoke to the media over Zoom on Wednesday afternoon, and while little he said was particularly interesting — they're comfortable with the outfielders they have, they didn't need to move Teoscar to save money, and several other things that had me incredulously cursing at my computer speakers when I heard them — one thing that did jump out was how he described the trade coming together.
There was a lot of interest (at the GM meetings last week), and then you work through exchanges to determine just how significant the interest is. It came down to three — maybe you could say four — teams that had that level of interest. And in the end it worked out that Seattle put the best offer in front of us. Or accepted the best offer that we made. But there was several teams that had interest in this market for right-handed bats like Teo. He was one of the better hitters in it, and we are fortunate to have some depth in that area.
That does not sound, to me, like a GM who reluctantly moved a player because he received an offer he couldn't refuse. It sounds like one who specifically went out shopping one of the best-liked and most talented guys on his roster.
It should surprise no one that the Jays moved Teoscar, or even that they explored moving him. But that they essentially put a "for sale" sign on him doesn't sit well with me, nor do I think it will sit well with a lot of Jays fans. Particularly because it looks like a way to make it easier for the club to do other business while staying under the competitive balance threshold.
That last bit is important. And while I'm hesitant to get mad about something before it actually becomes clear whether it's true or not, it’s not easy to see the trade as anything else. This isn’t a deal that makes sense without the financial component. Swapping a 2.4 WAR guy (who was worth 4.3 WAR a year ago) for a 1.7 WAR one doesn’t make the 2023 Jays better. And if they wanted to move out a right-handed-hitting corner outfielder for a non-high-leverage reliever, Lourdes Gurriel Jr. was right there.
Ahh, but Gurriel is only slated to make $5.8 million, not $14.2 million.
That's not to say I think Gurriel could have brought back the same kind of value as Teoscar did. With his recent wrist surgery and streaky performance history, I doubt there's a ton out there for Gurriel at that price. And while I have questions about Swanson — who I will absolutely mistakenly call Erik Hanson at some point — he's not bad. And the prospect coming back the other way, Adam Macko, is one that the Jays very much seem to like. Here's Atkins on him:
We loved him in the draft, and continued to value him. Our pro scouts have really good reports. The pitch grades are fantastic on him. So the overall evaluation of the objective measures of his arsenal are all above average — he has three above average secondary weapons, with an above average fastball. He has not logged an entire season of innings, (and that) would be probably the reason he was available. I think if we can put him into a position where he can sustain and haul a full season of innings he could become, easily, one of the better prospects in baseball. He's got the arsenal to do that.
It's just... I know Teoscar hasn't fared well in left, I understand diversifying the lineup is important, I know that losing him for nothing in a year’s time isn’t a great option, and I get that the financial relief will allow the Jays to do more to add to the team. But the CBT threshold is completely artificial — especially for the Jays this year, because $20 million of their luxury tax number comes from Hyun Jin Ryu’s salary, a significant portion of which is likely to be coming back to them through insurance eventually.
Yeah, I know every team has a payroll ceiling somewhere, and that the Jays have spent lavishly in recent years, to the point where the notion that Rogers is some kind of a pathetic, penny-pinching owner should be long dead. It’s not lost on me that it wasn’t very long ago that the thought of even having a conversation about the Jays going over the luxury tax would have been outlandish — and that’s when the threshold was much lower than it is today. I understand that I’ll probably never be satisfied with the Jays’ level of spending. But also… you know… fuck off? We know how incredibly wealthy Rogers is. We know that the TV rights are massively valuable. We know that owning a baseball club is a license to print money.
So, even if the Jays do a bunch of great business from here on out, taking money earmarked for Teoscar and coming out the other side with a better defensive outfield and a lineup that’s harder to deal with — and it’s entirely possible that they will, with more pitching coming on board as well — it’s going to be very difficult for me to be terribly impressed by it, because there’s no reason they shouldn’t have been able to do all that and still have Teoscar.
This front office talks all the time about culture, they acknowledge that theirs is an entertainment product, then they dispatch one of their culture leaders who also happens to be a wildly entertaining, always smiling, joyful, productive player in a deal that looks like a glorified salary dump? Oof.
Not a great way to start the winter, Jays.
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I'd like to hear Nick's take on this as he was always keen for extending Hernandez. This trade is worthy of a podcast! Do you know when the next one is and please let it be Australian time zone friendly!
I'm still more upset about Spin Rate, but this hurts too