General Discussion

bkeich 2017-06-24 18:07:14 UTC #922

julio:

I think what we have to avoid here is assuming that if a deal for Neshek doesn't happen this week, or next week, that's obviously because Klentak isn't interested/trying to move him at this point. That assumption rests on the premise that trading Neshek would be easy, that if Klentak wants to move him, he can - of course! - make that happen more or less instantly. IMHO, that would be magical thinking.

This is kind of like the assumption that Hellickson wasn't traded last July because Klentak didn't want to trade him, or nobody offered what he considered fair value, etc.... when we have credible reporting that Klentak did, in fact, have a deal in place for Hellickson - but that it fell apart at the last minute, as secondary fallout from one of AJ Preller's shady business practices or some such. Given that, complaining that Klentak didn't trade Hellickson last July... well, it's not a very compelling complaint, IMHO.

I agree with you Julio, but we can't have another season like last year where no assets were moved. We have assets, Klentak can have excuses for not making moves but that doesnt change the fact that nothing was done. He has to get things done this year, and having the excuse that it "fell through" doesnt change the fact that it is a loss. He has multiple moves to make, I am not going to assume he didnt try but he can't keep failing with whatever reason there is. Klentak cannot keep failing.

He has assets teams will want at this point, and yes ,the market is flooded so it will be difficult. That is why he needs to be making moves early.

allentown 2017-06-24 19:39:09 UTC #923

You keep shifting your argument. On the one hand, the most efficient way to add young talent by spending more $ is so sign vets on one-year contracts and flip them for prospects. On the other hand, it is hard to get anything better than a AAAA ceiling minor prospect and almost no chance for a decent, top 200 in baseball, prospect. Which is it? Most of the vets we've signed during the past several years have either quickly succumbed to injury with zero contribution to the current team or the rebuild or have grossly underperformed, as Saunders did. Now you say those very few vets who are healthy and performing well are extremely difficult to trade for any prospect with a halfway decent chance of making a difference at the MLB level. Even with over $65 million spent on old, one-year vets, our record is close to historically bad. We would have done about as well with a half dozen, close to MLB minimum, AAAA guys. We might have even found one worth keeping for the future.

Austinfan 2017-06-25 00:07:45 UTC #924

There's a difference between AAAA players and injury gambles.
AAAA players have marginal stuff, have had a couple shots and clearly aren't going to make it.
Injury and bounce back players have the right stuff when healthy, have performed and could bounce back.
I'm all for signing lots of cheap "bounce back" types for ST b/c they are good July fodder and cheap depth.

But trading for a marginal prospect, given the Philies organizational depth may have less value than just keeping the veteran, especially pitchers.
If I can get a live A ball arm for Garcia, great, but if all I'm offered is a AAAA pitcher, keep him because he might take it up a level and you have more options to protect young pitchers.

Slinging_Southpaw 2017-06-25 01:13:25 UTC #925

Just wondering, what AAAA players with marginal stuff, that have had a couple shots and clearly aren't going to make it, have we traded for recently?

Austinfan 2017-06-25 01:39:35 UTC #926

Mayberry for Gustavo Pierre
Rony Cedeno for Raywilly Gomez
Julio E. Rodriguez for Ron Welty
Michael Schwimer for Art Charles

Slinging_Southpaw 2017-06-25 02:11:10 UTC #927

None of those players ever made it to AAA, never mind AAAA status.
When we traded for them, they were all A-ball long shots where we were trading away nothing, hoping to get something for nothing.

andyb 2017-06-25 04:14:49 UTC #928

Do you seriously think we can't get better prospects for guys like Kendrick and Neshak and Hellickson. We'll get guys who fit in the 8-15 range on our very deep prospect rankings. More guys like Pivetta that are better than AAAA players. Did Papelbon have more value than any of those top 3 trade candidates we have?

When you are not competitive you need to trade your assets. Klentak failed at that last year. We'll see how he does this year.

Austinfan 2017-06-25 05:14:58 UTC #929

Again, you miss the point.
IF we're offered good prospects, then of course you trade.
But if you're offered marginal prospects, weigh the value of the veteran to the development of your prospects versus the meager return.

zambonir 2017-06-25 05:15:59 UTC #930

I think it is pure hindsight to say the Phillies blew a lot of chances to trade talent last year. We know what happened with Hellickson, and even though both the Marlins and the QO alternative fell through, it's not true that they got "nothing" for him because he still pitches here. Now, if they don't trade him this year, that will be true.

Gomez, nobody wanted him, everybody knew he had no stuff, didn't the Phillies get him on the waiver wire (or a minor league deal) originally? What happened to him (both last September and this year) is what everybody thought was going to happen to him, there was not another GM dumb enough to acquire him as a closer, and 6th inning relievers aren't acquired at the deadline. His value was the same as Casey Fien's.

Rupp, lots of reasonable people can disagree. I would have traded him. But he looked good enough, and Alfaro and Knapp did not look certain enough, that it was not obvious he should (let alone must) be traded. On top of that, if they'd moved him, they likely would have kept Chooch, and they got two players (not counting Ellis) for Chooch.

There was a decent argument to trade Herrera last year too but instead Altherr got hurt and Quinn continued to get hurt and here we are.

Neris is probably the one guy they could have moved but he's young and controllable and they'd just traded Giles and you can't say this year's bullpen is deep.

I think people are just impatient. When Klentak is ready he's going to make a lot of big moves, and in the meantime he's not gonna let these placeholder guys languish on the roster. As for Rupp, Galvis, and trading a 1B and a 2B, that will wait until the off-season.

LoneStarPhan 2017-06-25 05:45:01 UTC #931

I will say that although I had hoped for more trade action last season, I did understand why they probably did not do more. I was fine with getting the compensation draft pick for Hellickson and did not foresee that he would accept a QO. I really hoped they would trade Gomez because I was fearing his melt down each time he went into a game. Clearly, other teams could see that while he might be an okay reliever, he lacked the skills to be a true closer and they were not going to give up closer value for him. I hope this year will see the Phillies get some decent prospects for a few of the veterans that should be on the block. TZ says as much in this article:

andyb 2017-06-25 11:48:48 UTC #932

But that point is really meaningless. We know that guys like Neshek and Kendrick and Hellickson will get more than marginal prospects. Rupp would have a year ago. Just repeating this mantra is being argumentative. And then if the veteran is marginal (i.e. not worth more than a marginal prospect) they are probably not worth playing here (like Gomez and Saunders).

We don't have great tradeable assets but we do have some assets and bringing more prospects like Pivetta is a good thing. After watching the marginal slop that a guy like Hoby Milner throws wouldn't another LOOGY prospect be helpful to the team? At some point your strategy just seems to be unilaterally disarming and only waiting for prospects that may or may not ever develop. You seem to not place a priority on getting more and better prospects. It is just hard to discern why.

bkeich 2017-06-25 11:56:52 UTC #933

You could have made the exact same statement last year at this time. There were players that were not part of the future, but they finished out the season playing fairly frequently. Klentak needs to prove to me that he is willing / able to make these moves to turn our veteran players into an asset, at the moment he has not succeeded at doing that. He has made some good moves, but failing at last years trade deadline is not going to be acceptable again in my opinion, and until he proves he can we only have last year to base our conclusions on. If he gets a few solid prospects this year then last year will be forgotten.

Austinfan 2017-06-25 14:06:18 UTC #934

We don't know that Hellickson will garner anything this season, he has to put a string of good starts together after six putrid weeks.
Kendrick will garner assets, which is why they're being very careful to keep him healthy, but his fragility will limit his value.
Neshek isn't going to get you a Pivetta, not sure what he'll bring, but 7 inning pitchers have limited trade value.
Nava might get what???

It takes two to tango, GMs talk all the time, if someone offers a decent asset I'm sure Klentak will be happy to make a move.

andyb 2017-06-25 14:21:34 UTC #935

We know they will get something. It happens every year. Hellickson has value. How much will be determined by how he pitches (a little bit), but the guy's got a 7 year track record that teams know about and is better than many 4th or 5th starters out there.

Neshek WILL get you a Pivetta. He is pitching much better than Papelbon was when Pap was dealt. Pivetta was a guy who was about our 15th best prospect when he was dealt. But he had those TOOLS you absolutely overlook and hate. We had a plus fastball and the makings of a couple of other average pitches. Maybe we get a hitter with 4 or 5 tools that needs to refine them. This sense of not making a trade unless we get a top prospect is ridiculous. The main reason we spent $70 million on these guys was to flip them. If we have to throw mediocre pitchers like Leiter for a few months so be it.

We need to use our money as one way to improve the prospect base of the team. The mystery is why you don't seem to want to do this.

zambonir 2017-06-25 14:22:18 UTC #936

I don't really recall any other trade assets or veterans playing frequently, it was mostly AAAA filler and bench guys because they didn't have any alternatives. Hunter, Lough, Burris, Paredes. You had Bourjos who might have been traded before he got injured. And they were still evaluating Asche and Ruf (I don't know why, but they were). They had no one else to play the OF until Altherr returned. Rupp was in his first season as a starter. The rotation was all kids. Howard was a back-up by July. Goedell should have played more, but he was on the roster. And nobody in the bullpen had value. They got burned on Andrew Bailey but he wasn't tradeable at the time.

If you need Klentak to prove something, you need him to prove something, but I think he's on a different timetable. Not entirely by choice - obviously if Crawford was ready or the Phillies had developed, oh, a single prospect who could play the OF by now, or if the players Amaro acquired in his last round of trades had been ready more quicky they would have played, and we wouldn't have seen Galvis, Saunders or Rupp this year.

To me they had one tradeable player last year, there were three things they could have done with him, one of those options was not available to them (when the Marlins deal fell through) and they made a small mistake on the other.

And let's not forget - Hellickson wasn't that good! He was adequate. At this time last year his ERA was 4.41 (he got better later in the season). It would have been nice to get the Robert Hernandez return for him but that's still entirely possible, and given the state of the team and the rotation this year I don't think it is a bad thing that he came back. I would have been fine watching Adam Morgan instead but I don't think most people would have been.

The trade deadline is basically a TV show invented by ESPN, of course it's great to get assets when you can but it's hardly a true GM measuring stick in the big picture. So few of the moves made then turn out to be important in either direction. I'm much more interested to see if the new analytics approach is worth a damn and what he does this off-season (both in trades and FAs).

I will say, and AndyB has mentioned this often, it would be nice to see them do a trade deadline deal where they take on salary in exchange for a prospect (or an upgraded package as part of another deal). I don't know what kind of dead wood players are out there; turns out the Phillies had two themselves.

Slinging_Southpaw 2017-06-25 14:29:36 UTC #937

Neshek may get you a "Pivetta." Pivetta wasn't a Top 10 prospect of the Nationals when he was traded. He was somewhere between 11-15 if I remember correctly and struggling with his first taste at AA. I remember being disappointed we didn't get Austin Voth.

Austinfan 2017-06-25 14:36:52 UTC #938

Neshak is not going to get close to the return we got for Papelbon, while the salary issue isn't there, neither is the track record of high level performance.
Teams don't go ga ga over 7th inning pitchers.

Kendrick is the only really valuable trading piece, Hellickson if he strings together 4 or 5 additional good starts (but that means waiting 3-4 weeks).

Slinging_Southpaw 2017-06-25 14:39:58 UTC #939

Look at Neshek's whole career, he's been surprisingly good for a loooooong time.
Papelbon's return was also hindered by dropping velocity and just being Papelbon.
I also wouldn't be surprised if you get more in return for Neshek, than Kendrick.

Lawman 2017-06-25 16:27:45 UTC #940

Slinging_Southpaw 2017-06-25 16:38:22 UTC #941

Easy to tell from Cafardo's article, that the Red Sox are in desperate need for 3B help.