With Jose Bautista’s weekend tear putting him in Bondsian territory (2011 stats through 32 games: 16 homers, .368/.520/.868), Dejan Kovacevic decided yesterday that it would be a good time to decide if the Pirates front office was dumb for letting Bautista go for next to nothing in a trade that was made nearly three years ago.
Charlie already has a good post up about this that echoes what I was saying on Twitter last night (that Bautista was for all intents and purposes a 27-year old replacement level player at the time of the trade facing a non-tender and his value really was only about equivalent to a potential back-up catcher at that point in time) and so I don’t want to make too big a deal out of something that I don’t think is worth talking about in 2011, but I do want to add a couple things in to Charlie’s post.
The main thing to keep in mind here is that since Bautista was traded after July 31, he had to pass through waivers before being traded. The entire National League, plus every American League team that had a worse record than the 2008 Blue Jays at that point (for completion’s sake, on August 21, 2008 the Mariners, Royals, A’s, Indians, Orioles, Tigers, and Rangers were all worse than the Blue Jays) had to pass on Bautista for the Blue Jays to have a chance to claim him. And they all did because Bautista was more or less a lock to be a non-tender at that point. That’s because pretty much everyone everywhere in the universe at that point in time realized that the Pirates had Andy LaRoche and that playing LaRoche over Bautista was the right thing to do.
In January of 2009, this is how Ghostrunner on First (an excellent saber-minded Blue Jays blog that has since been recruited the ESPN’s Sweet Spot Network) reacted to the Blue Jays decision to tender Bautista a contract for the 2009 season:
While my fandom remains liberated, my ire has been raised by the Jays agreeing to a one year contract with Jose Bautista worth $2.4 million American dollars! Legal tender! It won’t have JP’s face on it or anything. Honestly, what the [effing eff] is this?
Let’s go on to the next offseason. MLB Trade Rumors identified Bautista as a non-tender candidate despite coming off of what was statistically the best season of his career. GROF grudgingly admitted that maybe he would be worth a contract if he could keep up his hot September and reach the stratosphere of Bill James’ 13-homer projection for him in 2010.
I understand that using blogs as a measure of a guy’s worth isn’t the best way to do it, but the point is that when the Pirates traded Bautista in 2008 he was a player without a spot on the Pirates that was about to become expensive and was relatively worthless in terms of trade value. As 2009 wore on, he didn’t do much of anything besides a September tear to change people’s minds. Then, suddenly, he was the best power hitter in the game. Essentially, the Blue Jays hit the lottery on the most random and unexpected power surge in the history of baseball. Does it suck for the Pirates that this happened this way? It sure does. When I throw up my hands and curse the heavens about the terrible luck and fortune brought the way of Pirate fans, Bautista is prominently involved. But it’s hard to see criticizing the Bautista trade at this point as anything but an attempt to re-frame history using pure hindsight.
The Pirates jettisoned two guys this winter (Andy LaRoche and Lastings Milledge) that were younger than Bautista was in 2008 with much better minor league pedigrees (LaRoche’s big league value in 2+ years with the Pirates was similar to that of Bautista over his Pirate career — replacement level — and Milledge’s was worse, though he’s younger) and nobody said boo. Nobody should have, because the Pirates have better options at the positions those guys played and had seen plenty to know neither was going anywhere. Nobody will, either, unless one of them goes on to hit 50 home runs in a season. And at that point, dropping both of those guys with no return will go from being an afterthought to a giant mistake that the Pirates should have somehow avoided.
