Yu Darvish is probably going to require Tommy John surgery. As Jeff noted yesterday, this is a blow to the Rangers already slim playoff odds, and now our projections have them as perhaps the worst team in the American League. After last year’s debacle, the team was hoping for a big bounce back, but that seems particularly unlikely now, and it’s a legitimate question whether this move should cause the front office to start really playing for the future.

So, yeah, this is bad news. The 2015 Rangers just became potentially unwatchable, especially if they perform poorly, eventually trading away Yovani Gallardo and maybe even Derek Holland; the remnants of the rotation would be the worst in baseball. But because of a series of triggers in Darvish’s contract, it’s actually possible to see this as not entirely awful news, with even some long-term upside for the Rangers

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When it comes to trading, almost every team plays favorites. Perhaps a former co-worker is now running another club, making conversations easy and player valuations similar. Or perhaps two GMs just happen to get along well, and when one needs to make a minor deal to round out his roster, he’s comfortable asking his friend for help before polling the rest of the league. There are plenty of reasons why some organizations just fit as better trade partners than others.

This goes the other direction as well. Many teams are hesitant to make trades with their division rivals, not wanting the player they gave up on to come back and haunt them for 19 games per season, or in the case of trading a young prospect, for years into the future. Shipping a player across the country, or even to the other league, minimizes the chances that your home town fans will be regularly reminded that not every trade works out in your favor.

Of course, for a few teams that share a large market, there is another franchise in the other league that happens to also be a challenging trade partner. If you want to avoid your fans seeing the traded player turn into a star, having him play for the in-town rival is probably the worst case scenario, which is why trades between market sharing teams are pretty rare. The Cubs and White Sox, for instance, haven’t made a trade since 2006 — the Neal Cotts for David Aardsma blockbuster — and hadn’t made a deal before that one since 1998. The A’s and Giants haven’t made a deal since 2004, when Oakland bought Adam Pettyjohn from the Giants for cash; they last made a deal with players going both directions back in 1990. The Mets and Yankees last swapped players in 2004, when they exchanged Mike Stanton for Felix Heredia.

But beyond those easily explainable barriers to making a deal, I was curious which other franchises have engaged in long cold wars. Whether for philosophical reasons or just because they haven’t ever matched up, which teams just don’t make trades? Thanks to the particularly nifty Trade Partner tool from Baseball-Reference, we can highlight the teams who seem least likely to make deals with each other, even without the in-division or in-market explanations.

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We’ve all seen it in various TV shows or movies; the main character is sitting on the floor of some room, surrounded by various pieces of hardware after being challenged to assemble some piece of furniture from vague and unhelpful instructions. And then, usually after a cutaway or some kind of time-lapse, we see the proud main character standing next to the completed product, showing off the fruit of his labor to some secondary character, who then rains on his parade by pointing out that while the product looks nice, there are a few leftover pieces that he somehow managed to exclude from the build.

That’s kind of what this Dodgers team feels like at the moment. On paper, this team could be very good, especially if Joc Pederson takes over as the regular center fielder and hits as well as the projections think he might. At that point, you have Carl Crawford and Yasiel Puig in the corners, with an infield of Yasmani Grandal, Adrian Gonzalez, Howie Kendrick, Jimmy Rollins, and Juan Uribe. That group gives them above average projections at every position, the kind of strong supporting cast that can help one of baseball’s best rotations go after the NL West title. So that group looks pretty good.

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Over the weekend, the ninth annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference took place in Boston, and I was lucky enough to be invited to be part of the baseball panel — along with Sandy Alderson, Ben Lindbergh, Dan Brooks, and Jonah Keri — on Saturday morning. I enjoyed our conversation, but I’ll mostly leave it up to others to recap that conversation, since I’m likely a bit biased by being part of the panel. There were some other parts of the conference that I thought were worth discussing, however.

For instance, on Friday afternoon, Commissioner Manfred took the stage for an hour long interview with Brian Kenny. While the commissioner has been making the media rounds since taking over, and has established some talking points that he repeated during this conversation, there were also some interesting points made during the conversation. Among the things that stood out to me from Manfred’s comments, which I’m going to paraphrase below:

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On Monday, the Red Sox won the bidding war for Cuban prospect Yoan Moncada, reportedly agreeing to pay $31.5 million as a signing bonus, plus another $31.5 million as a tax to the commissioner’s office for going over their allocation for international spending. That totals a $63 million acquisition cost for the organization, making Moncada one of the most expensive prospects in baseball history.

But if anything, the signing cost was perhaps a little bit on the low side of expectations, which had been rumored to be in the $30 to $40 million range for months. And while $63 million is a lot of money, the Red Sox actually guaranteed $72 million to fellow Cuban Rusney Castillo last year. Castillo broke the record for most money from a Cuban signee, set the prior year when the White Sox gave Jose Abreu $66 million. The Diamondbacks clearly used those two contracts as the inspiration for their $68 million deal with Yasmany Tomas, so Moncada became the fourth Cuban to sign for between $63 to $72 million in guaranteed money.

On the one hand, you could say that these four contracts represent a pretty clear price range that the market is willing to pay for talented Cuban hitters, but in reality, each contract has its own unique features that make the simple guaranteed dollar amounts a poor way of evaluating the true cost of the player to the team that signed them.

For instance, Moncada — unlike Abreu, Castillo, and Tomas — was prohibited from signing a major league contract, so the Red Sox do not get the benefit of spreading the cost out over the years during which he’s going to play in Boston, nor will any of the $63 million they’ve already committed to pay cover his future salaries when he does arrive in the big leagues. In other words, the $63 million payout for Moncada was simply to acquire his rights, making it more comparable to the posting fees paid to acquire players from Japan in the past.

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For the last few months, the baseball world has been speculating about Yoan Moncada. The question of who would sign him was less interesting, as the structure of the deal — a 100% tax on the signing bonus, due by the middle of the summer — meant that this was a bidding war that only teams with significant cash flows could justify winning. From the beginning, the Red Sox, Yankees, and Dodgers were identified as the heavy favorites, and in the end, Boston won the battle of the big spenders.

More interesting was the question of how much Moncada would sign for, because this was a bit of a unique situation in MLB. Because Moncada could only be lured with a signing bonus, and because of the tax on the signing, teams were being asked to spend significant present dollars for a chance to buy potential future wins. While this happens on a small scale in the draft and with other young international prospects, teams generally do not have to make these kinds of short-term investments without getting short-term rewards.

The last time I wrote about Moncada, I noted some similarities between signing Moncada and paying the posting fee for a player coming over from Japan, which pushed over $50 million for both Daisuke Matsuzaka and Yu Darvish. Those players also came with a steep up-front cost and hadn’t proven themselves as big league contributors, but neither one spent a day in the minor leagues before jumping into their team’s rotations; they were viewed more as major league free agents, just without the track record that other big league free agents bring.

Moncada has the short track record in common, but unlike Darvish, Matsuzaka, and Masahiro Tanaka, he’s not big league ready. The consensus is that he needs a year or two in the minors, and given that he’s just 19, that might even be aggressive. It wouldn’t be at all strange for him to not make a significant impact at the big league level until he’s 22 or 23, as even the prospects teams are most sold on don’t always develop as quickly as expected. So, the Red Sox $63 million investment — once you double the signing bonus to account for the tax — will likely return little or no value for several years, and because even very good prospects still have high failure rates, there’s a real possibility that this investment never returns anything at all.

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