Most of our writing ideas come from reading things around the interwebs. Thinking of it as “theft of intellectual property” feels a bit harsh to me. Instead, I prefer to think of it as “inspired inspiration”, a more clean look to the idea.
Just the other day, over at Baseball Prospectus, there was an article about how the Rockies have a player that needs saving. It’s a good article, one worthy of your time (as everything there is), but there was something that struck me while reading it. It was in the first paragraph of the article, which is paywalled, but I’ll put here:
There will be few clear sellers, and a couple of them (you know the ones) really won’t have anything to sell, and the buyers will be queuing up for the scarce available talent—especially because several of the contenders have overlapping or competing needs. Most obviously, because it’s always true, the good teams will need starting pitching, but that feels even truer than usual as summer kicks off this time—and the supply isn’t going to match nicely with the demand.
Most, if not all, trade deadline seasons are marked by the buyers and sellers of the year. There are teams that we can identify early enough as sellers and those that are easily seen as buyers that, in our heads, we can start to make matches. Follow a team closely enough and you can put together a map of players that should be available for the pickin’. Barnacles on the hub of the MLB ship like the White Sox, Marlins, Rockies and Pirates, they’re already clearly going into sell mode. They’re bad and rebuilding (or in the Rockies case, just bad) and will look to move players that are not going to be needed for when (if?) the team is good again. It’s what smart teams do. There are others that might be sellers, teams that have yet to point their compass in the direction the organization feels is best.
But if we focus in on the bad teams, the ones that are clearly going to be selling players that might be of interest to the Phillies, is it that easy to find a match?
Consider the needs of the Phillies. We can debate the order in which their importance should rest, but reliever (or two) to be used in leveraged situations would probably rank at the top of everyone’s wishist for the team. Perhaps finding a more permanent solution to either one of the team’s outfield platoons is there as well. If you’re really scrounging for help, maybe you’re dissatisfied with the backup catching options the team currently has and want something a bit better. Whatever it is that you think the team needs help with – are they going to be able to currently find it amongst the collections of players the bottom feeders currently employ?
Bad teams are bad for multiple reasons. Drafting and developing, coaching at the big league level, unable to procure useful talent from the freely available player pool, all of these things can create a team that is bad and gives the whiff of seller before a season even begins. The four teams mentioned above are so bad, one has to wonder if there is anything left to salvage. Take relievers for example. The Phillies use their bullpen during postseason in such a way that there needs to be, at least, four arms the team can trust during high leverage situations in those games. Right now, you can say that there are arguably three – Orion Kerkering, Matt Strahm and Jordan Romano. Jose Alvarado was the most obvious choice, but he of course will be watching the postseason just like the rest of us, from the couch. Tanner Banks has been quite good of late, but putting him into a leveraged situation during a playoff game does not feel like the correct decision. If we look from outside the organization at those four teams, who is there for the Phillies to grab at the deadline?
Pick any kind of bullpen measurement and chances are, the four teams are in the bottom third of it as a team. Go further into their rosters and you’ll undoubtedly find some players of interest – Anthony Bender, for instance. Picking that random name, he’s got an ERA under two for the Marlins with some things that are at least interesting under the hood. He doesn’t have swing and miss stuff (single digit percentiles on chase and whiff rates is…yikes), but maybe the stuff he does have is something the team can work with. Is that someone you’d trust in a key playoff spot?
Maybe there is a project that catches your eye, someone like Seth Halvorsen? He’s got that swing and miss stuff that someone might fancy for their bullpen, but with the Rockies, you never know if they’ll actually smarten up and trade a player like that, one with many, many seasons of team control who can help a team for multiple seasons, or if they’ll hang on to him like grim death? They’d likely ask for the moon for him, but what does he look like outside of Coors? What would he look like with a better pitching lab to help formulate better pitch decisions?
We could go for name after name after name, but the point does remain that maybe the team that are sellers just don’t have anything good to pick from. Looking at them, the answer to the question that titles this article is a collective ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Of course there will be players available at the right price once the trade season begins in earnest. Making a move right now would have the Phillies paying a premium on talent, something they might be loathe to do, but there will be players available now and then. Maybe that player they look to move hasn’t even been mentioned yet. Maybe that player is on one of those bad teams and the Phillies are being covert in their scouting. That’s what they pay the scouts for anyway.