In the lab: How do we evaluate trades?

On the heels of Monday’s piece it can be difficult to keep a level-headed outlook on these things. I try to stay above board, but I am also human and subject to the kind of emotional responses any fan would have during good times and bad. In this case, when we have decided that a manager or general manager should be on their way out, it becomes a lot easier to find evidence that supports that particular point of view. Often times, that evidence can be jaded or slanted to meet our particular viewpoint. Certainly evaluating the results of particular trades can fall into that category.

The early returns on Daulton Varsho fall under this paradigm. There are two primary problems with evaluating trades this way. The first problem is small sample size. Varsho has less than 50 at bats as an Astro and is just over 50 plate appearances total. That is equivalent to about two full weeks of baseball. Any player (including Yordan Alvarez) can look bad for two weeks at a time. So, evaluating a trade at the trade deadline is difficult at best under those circumstances.

The second problem is that all moves should be evaluated based on the available evidence at the time of the decision. So, to provide a perfect example of this, I am looking at three trade deadline acquisitions from recent Astros history and looking at what they did after they became Astros. Clearly, I think everyone will notice a trend, but to keep things interesting I will remove their names so that we can remove any emotional baggage that may come with those names.

None of these are good baseball players based on the numbers we are seeing. Clearly, Player C is a special kind of awful, but I think most people know that is Varsho and most people know that is only two weeks worth of baseball. I think everyone will look at the Arrighetti for Varsho deal as an abject failure if those are the numbers we are looking at some May 27th. Fortunately for Varsho, he has a little more than a month to fix what clearly looks broken.

Player A and B were acquired in 2015 and 2022 respectively. It is easy to look at those numbers and assume failure. Carlos Gomez (Player A) had an extra year of control beyond 2015, but was released prior to the end of the 2016 season. Trey Mancini (Player B) was a free agent following 2022 and the Astros had no interest in bringing him back following that performance.

We have to be fair to Jeff Luhnow, James Click, and Brown, so we have to look at these deals in the same lens. So, what we will do is look at what these guys were doing before the deals were consummated. We get the benefit of hindsight. General managers do not. So, I always try to look at things given the information they had at the time. Since we already know who the players are, we will dispense with the anonymous pleasantries.

It’s ironic that Gomez and Mancini had the exact same OPS coming into their time in Houston. The average OPS in the league usually hovers between .700 and .720 depending on the season. So, it was perfectly reasonable to expect both players to provide above average performance. There are usually three things that can happen when acquiring a player midseason and two of those things are bad. The Red Sox saw the other one when they acquired Curtis Mead and he was almost immediately hurt. A player can play significantly worse than what he has done. He can play as good or better. Two of those three outcomes are bad.

So, there are two separate questions we have to ask and answer. The first question is whether I would have made the trade at the time given the same set of information the general manager had. The Carlos Gomez trade was a hard one because it included Mike (“El Rato”) Fiers but saw Josh Hader going the other direction. Three other prospects went the other direction as well with Domingo Santana being the most significant of those prospects. Hader is likely to be a borderline Hall of Famer, but no one could have known that at the time.

The Mancini trade primarily involved Jose Siri. That one obviously doesn’t hurt as much in retrospect and the club did win the World Series, so the overall results are not as disappointing. Still, I think most people would add an above average center fielder and first baseman at the deadline for just prospects or fringe players. That brings us to the second question.

The second question is how should the players be used? This is more on the manager than on the general manager. Why in God’s name is Daulton Varsho batting cleanup? Even if he produced at his Toronto numbers that doesn’t set him up for success. Mancini was yanked around between left field and first base because Dusty Baker didn’t want to commit a spot to him. The Astros may have expected too much out of Gomez as well in retrospect.

Ultimately, this will be the test for both Brown and Espada. As hard as it is, we have to be fair. What is reasonable based on the information available at the time? Sometimes the most logical decisions don’t work out. Occasionally the least logical decisions will actually pan out. Managers and general managers should be evaluated mostly on the efficacy of their decision making and not necessarily on the short-term results.