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Over the weekend, the Diamondbacks made a pretty controversial trade, selling Touki Toussaint to the Braves in exchange for $10 million in salary relief. I wrote up my thoughts on the deal on Monday, noting that while it’s certainly possible that the Diamondbacks have more information about Toussaint than other teams, it still seems like they simply misread the market value of a prospect in making this deal.

If you didn’t think that’s what happened a few days ago, you can be sure of it now, because in Ken Rosenthal’s latest column, Stewart says some things that, for a baseball executive to say publicly in 2015, are absolutely remarkable. And should scare the crap out of Diamondback fans.

Per Rosenthal’s column, here’s the entire text of what Stewart said in regards to trading Toussaint.

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A little over a month ago, I wandered into the depths of the Baseball Prospectus PITCHf/x leaderboards, looking to see who had the most increased movement on their breaking pitches through the first month of the season compared to last year. As you might imagine, increased movement doesn’t always mean increased success, and so many of the names that turned up were interesting but inconclusive: seeing names like Rick Porcello and Ross Detwiler leading best-of lists tells us that the article was a fun exercise, if not a totally meaningful one.

However, there were a couple of interesting names when it came to right-handed pitchers with increased horizontal movement on their sliders. First, there was Sonny Gray, who is now the proud owner of a top-three slider by run value this year. Then, coming in a close third after Seth Maness, was Drew Storen. Unlike Gray and Maness, Storen has been around for a while, so the prospect of him tinkering with pitches (especially after four mostly successful years), drew some attention.

That attention was, and is, warranted: Storen’s slider (PITCHf/x calls it a slider; some say it’s a cutter. For ease, we’ll go with slider) now has over two inches of greater horizontal movement than last season, and at least one inch more than his previous career-high. Take a look at the horizontal movement change of his slider over his career, courtesy of Brooks Baseball:

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ATT Park, from behind home plate, at game time for a night game.

Justin Upton has hit the ground running in San Diego. His power stats have not suffered as much as you might expect, at least, as his isolated slugging (.194) and home runs per fly ball (16.7%) are right in line with career norms (.201 and 15.1%, respectively). When I asked him about hitting in San Diego, he shrugged it off. He also said something interesting about San Francisco’s park.

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For the last few years, Rick Hahn and Kenny Williams have been steadily rebuilding the White Sox base of talent, and along the way, they’ve acquired a few cornerstone players that are the envy of every other franchise in baseball. Chris Sale continues to get better by the year, and is probably the best pitcher in the American League at this point. Jose Abreu was a monster from the minute he arrived in the big leagues. Jose Quintana went from minor league free agent to rotation stalwart. The team’s struggles allowed them to be in a position to draft Carlos Rodon, who got to the big leagues less than a year after being drafted, and they just selected Carson Fulmer, another polished college pitcher who Kiley McDaniel believes could get to the big leagues very quickly as well. There are the makings of a very good team here.

Unfortunately for the White Sox, having a few star players just isn’t enough, and even with Sale dominating every fifth day, the 2015 season has been a disaster on the south side of Chicago. After pulling within two games of .500 after an early-June sweep of the Astros, the team has now lost nine of their last 11 games, including a 13-2 drubbing at the hand of the Twins yesterday. As they enter play today, they stand at 30-39, the second worst record in the American League, and even that overstates their performance to date; by BaseRuns, their expected record is 24-45.

Six weeks ago, I noted that the White Sox faced a “looming decision”, as the team’s poor start would test their conviction that this really was a roster built to contend in the short-term; since then, the White Sox have played roughly .500 ball by getting some clutch hits and stranding runners, but they haven’t really done anything to show that this is a team capable of running down the legitimate contenders in the American League this year. At this point, it’s pretty clear that the White Sox should probably be sellers in July.

But the more I look at the White Sox roster, the more I think that they probably shouldn’t just stop at moving Jeff Samardzija before he hits free agency. It might really be time for the White Sox to blow up their roster.

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It seems like a simple question to ask. Which recent home run was the least likely?

You could flippantly answer — the one Erick Aybar hit this year, or the one Melky Cabrera hit this year — and because they’ve got the lowest isolated slugging percentages with at least one homer hit, you would be right. But that doesn’t control for the quality of the pitcher. Aybar hit his off of Rick Porcello, who is having some issues with the home run right now.

A slightly more sophisticated approach might have you scan down the list of the worst isolated powers in the game right now, and then cross-reference those names with the pitchers that allowed those home runs. If you do that, you’ll eventually settle on Alexei Ramirez, who hit his first homer of the year off of Johnny Cueto earlier this year.

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On late Saturday night, the Diamondbacks and Braves made a trade, but while players were sent in both directions, this was really more of just a sale. Sure, the Braves did give up a player — replacement-level utility guy Phil Gosselin, currently on the DL — in the swap, but they traded Gosselin for a legitimate prospect and a Major League pitcher, which only makes sense when you add in the financial aspects of the deal. In taking on the remainder of Bronson Arroyo’s salary — roughly $10 million, including the buy-out of his 2016 option — the Braves essentially bought pitching prospect Touki Toussaint from the Diamondbacks for that $10 million figure.

While this isn’t an entirely new type of trade — the Dodgers essentially did this same thing a few months ago when they bought a draft pick from the Orioles by taking Ryan Webb off their hands — it’s still a little unusual to see a team make a trade that can so clearly be broken down as a legitimate asset for just straight cash. And in this case, it’s made even more unusual because the team selling the prospect is in rebuilding mode, so we have an organization focused on the future selling an asset with future value in exchange for short-term financial relief.

But it shouldn’t be a big surprise that the team doing the unexpected is the Diamondbacks, who have been marching to the beat of their own drum ever since Tony La Russa and Dave Stewart took over. The D’Backs don’t operate like the other 29 franchises do, and they don’t see things like everyone else, so they make moves that cause a lot of heads to be scratched. This move is no different, with the trade drawing near total criticism from Arizona’s perspective. At its heart, though, this is simply a question of how to value an A-ball pitching prospect, so let’s break this down and see if the D’Backs really did get fleeced on this deal.

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Jonah Pemstein and Sean Dolinar co-authored this article.

Due to the math-intensive nature of this research, we have included a supplemental post focused entirely on the math. It will be referenced throughout this post; detailed information and discussion about the research can be found there.

INTRODUCTION

“Small sample size” is a phrase often used throughout the baseball season when analysts and fans alike discuss player’s statistics. Every fan, to some extent, has an idea of what a small sample size is, even if they don’t know it by name: a player who goes 2-for-4 in a game is not a .500 hitter; a reliever who hasn’t allowed a run by April 10 is not a zero-ERA pitcher. Knowing what small sample size means is easy. The question is, though, when do samples stop becoming small and start becoming useful and meaningful?

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Blind comparisons are always fun. They’re fun because we have set notions about who players are, and when we strip away names, similarities that we didn’t think possible come to the surface. With that said, here are two players:

Player A, as you might have guessed by the title of the article, is Todd Frazier. Player B — he of the lower ISO and almost exact same strikeout and walk rates — is Josh Donaldson. An oft-used term is “the poor man’s version of so and so,” but currently, Frazier isn’t the poor man’s version of anyone — in fact, he’s been one of the best players in baseball through the first two months of the season. Donaldson is too, and he probably plays a little better defense than Frazier does.

However, the Reds third baseman is up there: he has almost the same WAR (3.8) as Mike Trout (3.9), and his current ISO is third only to Bryce Harper and Giancarlo Stanton’s. That doesn’t mean Frazier will finish this season with the same WAR as Trout, or the same ISO as Harper or Stanton, but it’s interesting and requires our attention.

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In the first chapter of his (excellent!) Big Data Baseball, Travis Sawchick describes how now-Pittsburgh Pirates General Manager Neal Huntington used an interesting bit of historical analysis to help inform a controversial roster move. Writes Sawchick:

Using the software [DiamondView], the Indians made key decisions, such as when they elected not to sign aging star Jim Thome to an extension after the 2002 season, in part because of the database, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported. […] Huntington noted that the Indians found in a payroll analysis that no major league club, dating back to 1985, had won a World Series when committing 15 percent or more of its payroll to one player.

Let’s call that 15% rule The Thome Corollary.

Has The Thome Corollary held up in the years since 2002, when price tags for choice free agents and franchise cornerstones has escalated at a rate far greater than your journeyman’s/rookie’s salary? The answer is: “No, The Thome Corollary has not held up,” or, “Yes, it sure has, with some small tweaks.”

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When you promote someone as young as Carlos Correa, the most you can realistically hope for is that the player’s able to hold his own. Sure, it would be possible for a 20-year-old to become a standout immediately, but just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it’s reasonable to expect. The majors are hard, and rookies aren’t finished products, because the rookies haven’t been in the majors, and the majors are hard. Generally, you look for learning, and you look for glimpses. You look for signs you’ve promoted the player to the appropriate level.

We don’t know what rookie Carlos Correa is going to be. Lots of baseball left to go; lots of adjustments left to be made. This much could be said, though: if a 20-year-old rookie were to become a standout immediately, he might do things like Correa has done. It would be difficult to imagine a more promising start, and underscoring everything, the Astros got a hell of a glimpse of Correa’s talent on Wednesday in Colorado. On Wednesday, Carlos Correa did something amazing. Let’s watch it.

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