Discussion

Austinfan 2017-07-11 22:57:41 UTC #121

Neshek and Nava will go quickly, teams know what they're getting.
Kendrick will have to prove himself healthy, which will require a week of play before anyone is willing to pay.
Hellickson needs 3-4 starts to show he's back in last year's second half groove.
Garcia and Neris would need a few weeks with 3-4 appearances a week for teams to judge what they'd be getting.

andyb 2017-07-12 00:44:11 UTC #122

You really don't think the Phillies couldn't have traded for any players that would rank in our top 10 or 15 last year? Really? I agree that Klentak was probably conservative and tentative. But he made the decisions and they did not work out. It was his gamble to not trade Hellickson. Or Rupp. Or Neris. Or Gomez. These players did have value last year and with the exception of Neris are almost certain not to be part of our next contender.

Trading guys that would not rank in our top 50 like Tobias or McWilliams or Whitehead is also not a barrier. The Ruiz trade was also for non-prospects. Ellis was a placeholder. Curletta a non-prospect and Berjians barely a prospect. That does not count. We did nothing last year and it has to be seen as a failure by Klentak especially when his gamble with Hellickson and the comp pick failed. With what we had to trade we could easily have brought back several prospects that would rank in our current, relatively deep top 20.

Austinfan 2017-07-12 01:15:20 UTC #123

Rupp had limited value, and who would have caught this year?
Gomez had little value, teams knew what he was, a middle reliever getting phony saves. He was exposed in August.
Neris had some value, but he was inconsistent with the split finger. We weren't getting top value for him.
Hellickson had value, but the fact that no one even sniffed him in free agency suggests it wasn't as much as Klentak hoped. Nor are there any credible offers he turned down.

The funny thing is the same guy who suggests players aren't good enough to start for the worst team in baseball are going to garner top prospects in trades.
A player who'd make our top ten would easily be a top 200, maybe a top 150 prospect, while we may not be top heavy, we have a very deep system and many teams' #10 would be our #15-20.

zambonir 2017-07-12 01:27:48 UTC #124

I guess I just feel more confident in Klentak's judgment regarding prospects that only he knows the identity of than I do the notion that there simply had to be one or two Top 20 prospects out there on offer. It just seems more plausible to me that there were no offers, or no offers of that caliber, or that Klentak didn't like the players actually offered. Just stating that there had to be good prospects out there to be had for an improved but still inconsistent pitcher who was literally acquired for Sam McWilliams doesn't do it for me. In fact I feel like you are raising the bar here - if you want to argue that anything is better than nothing because of depth or lottery tickets, I get that, but I don't think what the Phillies had was going to bring back "several" legit prospects.

If nothing else, we know he publicly stated that if nobody offered him a Top 5 prospect for Hellickson, he wasn't gonna deal. Was that a misplayed hand? Without knowing what he actually was offered, I'm not prepared to say. Certainly it's also possible that as a rookie GM he was afraid of giving in, which may or may not have been a mistake. That's one thing we may learn this month.

But let's talk about this month then. Do you think Neshek or Hellickson or Kendrick is going to get anyone that cracks a Phillies Top 20 list? I think it's probably just gonna be some bodies. Better than the Utley deal, worse than the Rollins deal, maybe better on paper than the Roberto Hernandez deal. And whatever Hellickson fetches we'll both be able to argue it proves something about what he was worth last year.

andyb 2017-07-12 01:57:45 UTC #125

Question for you is whether you think last year's deadline was a success.

And to answer your question Neshek should yield a top 20 guy, maybe top 15 for us. Hellickson and Kendrick more likely top 30. Galvis might get someone around 10th for us. Remember an over the hill Papelbon got us Pivetta who was a top 20 guy when we got him. We pick up any contract money in deals.

allentown 2017-07-12 02:15:33 UTC #126

Who has ever suggested that there were top 20 prospects in baseball on offer for Hellickson. A top 5 prospect on another team was likely available, but that usually equates to a prospect at the bottom of baseball's top 100, possibly closer to 200, since some contending teams don't have strong farms. Teams rarely trade their #1 prospect, which is the sort of guys who make up the top 20 among all prospects. We didn't get a team's top prospect for either Hamels or Pence, nor did we give up our #1 for Pence or Lee or Halladay. Yes, we'll get a guy who cracks our top 20 list, or at least we should.

zambonir 2017-07-12 02:43:33 UTC #127

He (and I) meant someone good enough to slot into the Top 20 on the Phillies, once acquired. Presumably that would have been true of anyone acquired for Hellickson. If such an offer (besides the Marlins) existed.

zambonir 2017-07-12 02:50:21 UTC #128

Yeah, I do. I might not feel as strongly as AF but I was fine with the Hellickson gamble and almost as surprised as Klentak that he took the QO, not because of his talent or the market but because I thought he'd still want a multi-year deal. And because I assumed Klentak had some indication from Boras of their intentions. What was miscalculated was the extent to which other teams were going to be scared off by the comp pick. Boras's strategy was not so much to have Hellickson deliver an all-star season that would get him a big contract but to assume that he could get a better, if still modest one, w/o the comp attached.

As for the rest, I don't think Gomez had value, I was fine with keeping Neris (especially because it was obvious Gomez was collapsing) and they realistically weren't ready to trade Galvis. I would have traded Rupp but it wasn't mandatory, and there were better catchers out there. I think Klentak wanted to hang on to everyone because he still didn't know what they were, either as potential Phillies players or as trade assets. I think he could have traded Velasquez (at one point I believe the Rangers wanted him packaged with Rupp) and maybe he should have, but again, not hard to defend keeping him.

andyb 2017-07-12 03:53:28 UTC #129

Appreciate the answer, but here is the short counterpoint:

Even if you agree with the logic behind the gamble of Hellickson not taking the QO, you have to agree the RESULT was a failure. In hindsight they should have taken the best deal they could get even if it was $0.90 on the dollar. And there were offers out there beyond Naylor. We just don't know about them.
Gomez actually did not collapse until September. 2.77 ERA at the end of July. His August was slightly worse but the ERA was still 2.97 and he only gave up 3 runs in the month. He blew up in September (19.13 ERA) but was decent till then. Was he going to get a return like a good closer? No. But he did look like a good 7th inning arm that kept the ball in the park and could go multiple innings. He definitely had value. The worry at the time was more that he was too important to a fragile bullpen like the Phillies to deal.
Good GMs create their own deals. You come up with a dozen reasons why various deals like Velasquez failed. We (all of us) really do not know the story behind those deals. But it does not matter. A good GM figures out a way to help his team. We had assets that were not going to help us in the future. We had plenty of money to pick up contracts or pay salary. And we got nothing done. That is failure to me. A good GM would find the right match, maybe even a 3-way deal. Maybe picking up a bad contract. Maybe trading someone like Velasquez (or Herrera or Galvis) that we did not have to deal. Klentak got nothing done and that is a missed opportunity. Deadlines create a unique market where scarcity makes teams overpay and we failed to take advantage of that.

Last year we failed to trade several veterans and did not use our cash resources well. I consider those actions at the deadline to be a failure. Not catastrophic but a missed opportunity to help the team likely because the GM was tentative.

phillychuck 2017-07-12 04:25:23 UTC #130

One JP Crawford comment here, and I know it's a pretty small sample size, but since JPC came back from his injury...

.261/.378/.500 with a 15.88% walk rate.

Keep it up guy!

Slinging_Southpaw 2017-07-12 06:41:52 UTC #131

August 30, 1990: Larry Anderson traded by the Houston Astros to the Boston Red Sox for Jeff Bagwell.
At the time Bagwell was 22 years old, at AA and raking.

This isn't to say that's my expectation, but, I can guarantee that there isn't one team in the playoff hunt that doesn't want or need Neshek. That kind of interest has to drive up the price.

allentown 2017-07-12 12:22:40 UTC #132

I don't find it surprising that Hellickson took the QO, because he simply is not a $17 million pitcher. Also, if you can get a top 200 in baseball guy for him, that's better (because the guy has passed the initial minor league failure test and you know he's not a first round LGJ).

andyb 2017-07-12 12:24:28 UTC #133

In addition to the Nationals, the Red Sox seem very interested in Neshek:

Royals and Yankees also mentioned in a previous Cafardo piece.

allentown 2017-07-12 12:28:47 UTC #134

Most teams are smarter than that today. The Phillies got nothing for LA. Then as now they were reluctant to trade even their old relievers who wouldn't be with the team going forward. It was a PR/sales thing then, but it made future teams worse than they might have been. Didn't want to run up the white flag until they were mathematically eliminated, which was too late to move guys. It was an ownership-created issue back then. I'm not convinced it wasn't last year as well. Big ships turn very slowly and Middleton learned baseball management from Giles and Giles and his Phillies Way were in place a long, long time, especially counting Monty as Giles, Jr.

bigegypt0417 2017-07-12 13:05:45 UTC #135

Are we really still talking about Giles and Montgomery?

This is about as much fun as conversations about every good thing that happened being luck...lol

allentown 2017-07-12 13:33:22 UTC #136

In terms of organizational history and culture, Monty just left yesterday and Monty = Giles. Until it is crystal clear that the approach of ownership has changed, and I have yet to see that it really has, I am going to assume that Giles's Phillies Way is still a lightpost for the ownership group. Middleton came in talking a big game, has been less loquacious of late, and hasn't changed a heck of a lot. Last year's trade deadline is a perfect example of the more things change, the more they stay the same. Its like saying "now that we have President Trump elected as a populist, can't we stop talking about the Republican Party trying to funnel more $ to the rich." No, we can't, because Ryan and McConnell are still pushing the exact programs they were, before Trump was elected as a populist, and they are the ones guiding the legislation, while Trump just waits for a win. Now we have Klentak as GM, but it is hard to discern a philosophy, let alone a changed philosophy. This year's draft is less like Klentak's prior draft than like RAJ's last draft. I still see a lot less than a maximal rebuild effort from TPTB. This is "we're rebuilding, but we don't want to rock any boats in the ownership group or the commissioner's office, so we'll go light on bending rules and steer a middle of the road course, which suggests we're trying to field a respectable team while we rebuild, even though we can't do that.' It is like the 'plan' the Sixers followed before The Process began. With the new Phillies TPTB, I see tweaks and a bigger analytical staff. I don't see The Process.

bigegypt0417 2017-07-12 14:28:38 UTC #137

Nothing can ever just be what it is, can it?

Klentak didn't make deals and it has to be because it's still the Giles Phillie Way
It can't be that they spend in international area because of their own philosophy, its the Giles Phillie Way.
Spend more in the over 23 market but I can't really tell you what you should have spent money on.

It really is astounding that things have to have some historical basis and not just be a philosophy this group is working with.

Austinfan 2017-07-12 14:33:31 UTC #138

A top 20 guy for the Phillies has some, but limited value, given the depth of talent in the organization.
A good return for a limited one year guy like the ones we'll be trading because they have zero terminal value.
In fact, for most of them I'd be happy with any A ball player who can crack our top 50 (i.e. enough upside to be considered a prospect).

A top 10 guy would not be a good return for Galvis, who if he finishes strong (continues to do what he's done for 6 weeks) will be a starting caliber SS in his prime, you'd better get a lot more in that case, so you'd give up that possibility for a decent but not great prospect? If Galvis keeps hitting he'll be a 3-4 WAR guy which has real trade value, if he merely ends up at .710 OPS or so he's still a 2+ WAR and a top defensive SS, which will have as much value in December as it does now.

I'd much rather gamble on a strong finish and a package of prospects, one of whom would be in our top 5, than a top 10 guy in July.
The upside to waiting is much greater than the downside.

phillychuck 2017-07-12 14:41:00 UTC #139

The key to trading Galvis (if we decide to do that) is how much team control we are trading with him. I don't know when Freddie is a free agent--he's on a one-year contract this year--but I think it's after 2018. If that's true, trading Galvis now gives the acquiring team and extra 1/2 year of control which is worth a substantial amount.

julio 2017-07-12 14:55:28 UTC #140

This is correct; Galvis entered 2017 with service time of 4 years, 21 days. He'll be eligible for free agency in October 2018.

If the Phillies conclude (as some here evidently have) that J.P. Crawford isn't going to pan out, then they have a problem. Freddy Galvis will be a free agent in 15 months. If they're not going to go with Crawford... what ARE they going to do? Extend Freddy Galvis for several years, and gamble that he will continue to be acceptably productive through age 32 or so? If they don't, he's gone. Outta here.

If, on the other hand, the Phillies conclude that Crawford will eventually be better than Galvis - even if that's in 2019 - then does it not make sense to move Galvis when the potential return is relatively high? E.g., a club acquiring Galvis in July 2017 will offer more than club acquiring Galvis in December 2017; and the December 2017 club will give more than a club trading for him in July 2018. A club signing him as a free agent in December 2018 will give the Phillies nada.

My guess is that they don't think Crawford is quite ready - that they don't really want to promote him this month, but want him to continue to work on things in AAA (and they want to see if, post-injury, he's getting his game back together, or whether the last few weeks is a fluke). But this winter? It seems to me that they really need to decide by this winter - if Crawford is the future, then they need to move Galvis while they can get a return for him. If Crawford is NOT the future, then they need to extend Galvis (or trade for a shortstop). And no, Galvis isn't going to be the "super sub" in the Andres Blanco role any time soon. If the Phils aren't starting him (and don't extend him), he'll be a free agent, and he'll go where the opportunity is.