The MLB Trade Deadline is weird. To the extent player talent gives you any kind of definitive advantage, it needs to be present over a large-enough sample to drown out the effects of everything else. However, by the time the Trade Deadline rolls around, you end up right around that point where even if you include the playoffs, the number of games remaining is right in that “talent versus everything else are about equal in contribution” area. There’s also a discrete units thing: by the time of the Trade Deadline, a 3 WAR upgrade over a season (i.e., replacing a replacement level scrub with an above-average player) translates to one regular-season win. And, 3 WAR players are relatively rare and expensive to acquire!
This Trade Deadline was also kind of strange, though maybe they’re all strange and this one just stands out in my mind in proximity. The general idea of the trades is that the surplus value paradigm works. We have an update to that potential paradigm thanks to the update from Ben Clemens/FanGraphs, and while I don’t think that update is dramatic enough to clash with what actually happened at this Trade Deadline vis-a-vis the old (pre-update) framework, it does feel like this past weekend’s action featured a lot of deals that were off, in both directions.
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The overpays are the overpays. I don’t expect anyone to come in and say, “Yeah, I’d have done that overpay.” Even when the result is the combination of a bunch of small marginal values, such that the paying team is unlikely to actually miss any of those values in a vacuum, it still feels kind of weird given that other guys were acquired for free. (For example, compare the deals for Freddy Peralta versus Tyler Mahle.)
But, when there’s a perceived underpay, that’s more interesting to me. And, those are the ones where I wonder both: A) why didn’t anyone bid this up, but also B) why didn’t the Braves do this deal?
The one that I’m stuck on right now is Jose Soriano. Yeah, he’s had two Tommy John Surgeries already and would probably have disintegrated as soon as the Braves sent paperwork acquiring him to the league office. He’s also not really a Braves-y pitching target for a bunch of reasons (multiple fastballs, sinker primary, his main breaking pitch has already been extremely sped up, and most critically, ERA lower than peripherals). But, he’s an above-average arm with two (assuming no lockout impacts on the 2027 season) additional years of arbitration-eligible control who’s been reasonably durable for a while now. On top of that, the bidding was won by a team that likely won’t even benefit from the boost he provides this season. Both Arjun Nimmala and Tate Southisene are 50 FV up the middle types. The surplus value math, under the new paradigm, works out — even as that paradigm has made prospects more valuable. You’d have to assume Soriano gets a lot worse, or definitely gets hurt, to make it tilt away from trading a 50 FV bat.
Anyway, I haven’t done a full comparison of every deal (there were a lot of deals with over 110 players moving!) but that’s the one that jumps out at me from a “why not?” perspective. What about you?
