David Forst was appointed to his current position in February of 2004 after serving as an assistant to the general manager and coordinator of professional scouting for the Oakland Athletics. His primary duties include assisting Billy Beane in all player acquisitions, contract negotiations and player evaluations. He agreed to sit down and talk at baseball’s Winter Meetings in San Diego, California.

Eno Sarris: A lot of people are asking: What are the Athletics doing? Here’s a different version: Was there a plan for the offseason, was there an overarching idea, or is it always just “Get better, piece by piece”?

David Forst: There’s definitely a plan. We certainly spend the first couple of weeks after the year, when the season ends, talking on a macro level about what direction we should go. The specifics of who to trade and who to target don’t necessarily come into focus until a little bit later in the offseason, but certainly the plan is talked about immediately. And frankly, it was probably something we talked about in September, before the season was over.

I think Billy [Beane, General Manager] has articulated in a couple of places that we knew that just bringing back the current team, assuming the losses of [Jon] Lester, and [Luke] Gregerson, and [Jed] Lowrie and some of those guys that we didn’t have an opportunity to sign — bringing back that team wasn’t going to work. The Angels were obviously 11 games better than us and the Mariners were right on our tail, and poised to get better. Just bringing back our group and just supplementing it with little pieces, wasn’t going to give us a chance to compete, and was also going to leave us further down the path of having an older, more injury-prone club, frankly.

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It’s a stunning reversal, is what it looks like. And it is a stunning reversal, if you just think about where the A’s were in the middle of last season. It was then that they dealt Addison Russell for shorter-term help. It was then that they dealt Yoenis Cespedes for shorter-term help. It was then that the A’s were very obviously going for it, and it was going well enough for them right up until the later innings in that game against the Royals. Now the A’s are shedding, only a handful of months later, and this isn’t what we’re accustomed to. Not from your average baseball team. The A’s are deliberately taking steps backward on the win curve.

They dealt Josh Donaldson. They dealt Brandon Moss. They dealt Jeff Samardzija. Of course, they don’t have Cespedes, and Jason Hammel is gone, and Luke Gregerson is a free agent, and Jed Lowrie is a free agent, and so on and so forth. You know what the A’s look like, because they’ve been one of the most popular conversation topics over the last few weeks. People everywhere are trying to figure out what Billy Beane is doing. The funny thing about it is Billy Beane is saying exactly what he’s doing, and why. The A’s are just doing what a team like the A’s pretty much has to do, if it wants to remain in any way competitive in the long-term.

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The White Sox deal for Jeff Samardzija still hasn’t been officially announced, but everyone is acting as if it’s a done deal. Kenny Williams is openly talking about trying to sign Samardzija to an extension, and at this point, it seems like an announcement could easily come before I finish writing this post. The deal is expected to be centered around infielder Marcus Semien, with a couple of prospects heading to Oakland as well.

Update: the official deal is Samardzija and Michael Ynoa for Semien, Chris Bassitt, Josh Phegley, Rangel Ravelo.

As has often been the case when a premium player gets traded lately, the perception of the deal seems to be slanted towards the buyer of the trade. Jeff Samardzija is really good, and while he’s only under control for one more year, it’s one cheap year with an exclusive chance to sign him long term. Or, failing that, the right to make him a qualifying offer at the end of the season and get a draft pick if he leaves via free agency.

And realistically, with starting pitchers, fewer years of team control can actually be described as fewer years of risk, and can actually be a feature rather than a bug. The White Sox might only be trading for Samardzija’s 2015 season, but the flip side of that coin is they’re not on the hook for his 2016-2021 seasons if he blows out his elbow. For franchises that have been burned by giving out big contracts to starting pitchers, Samardzija represented something like the best of both worlds.

And yet, at the same time that multiple teams were falling all over themselves to give Jon Lester $150 million, Samardzija was traded primarily for a lower ceiling middle infielder who was seen as a back-end Top 100 prospect at best, and has probably seen his stock fall a little bit with inconsistent MLB performance since. Marcus Semien and some stuff is not exactly an overwhelming return, and certainly seems to be less than what the Phillies are seeking in return for Cole Hamels, for instance. So, did we overrate Samardzija’s trade value, or did the A’s make a bad deal here?

The easy answer to that question is to just look at what Samardzija cost the A’s to acquire a few months ago and decide that the A’s didn’t get enough in return. After all, the same pitcher cost them Addison Russell in July, and Marcus Semien is no Addison Russell. But while Jeff Samardzija himself hasn’t changed in the last few months, his trade value has taken a nosedive, because instead of buying two playoff runs, the White Sox are only buying one. Additionally, they’re buying Samardzija in a market where teams have a plethora of alternatives, while the A’s bought Samardzija when there weren’t any quality free agents to sign.

Back in August, I looked at the cost of buying wins at the trade deadline, and my back-of-the-envelope calculations suggested that prices may be as high as double what they were the previous winter. Samardzija himself is both less valuable now than he was in July, and the market price for acquiring talent is less than it is at midseason, so we can’t simply say that the A’s should have gotten a similar return to what they gave up few months ago.

So let’s try to quantify what Samardzija’s trade value might actually have been. Given the prices being floated for Lester, it seems that the going rate for an elite starting pitcher is probably in the $8 million to $9 million per win range. Samardzija conservatively projects as a +3 WAR pitcher for 2015, though you could argue for something closer to +4 WAR if you buy into his 2014 performance as legitimate improvement rather than career year. What’s the market rate for one year of a pitcher at this level? Those price estimates would suggest something in the range of $25 to $35 million on a one year deal; the latter seems more realistic, given what Lester’s about to sign for.

And that doesn’t even include the value of the qualifying offer, which adds another $5 to $15 million in value, depending on how aggressively you value draft picks. That leaves us with a combined value of somewhere in the range of $30 to $50 million. Let’s split the difference and just call it $40 million. We don’t see those kinds of salaries because teams would rather borrow from the future than hit up their owners for that kind of cash on a one year outlay, but given the amount of money in the game and the lack of risk that a one year deal brings, it’s a justifiable salary.

Samardzija is actually due $9-$10 million for 2015, so he brought about $30 million in additional value to the table. That’s a lot, certainly, but we can be fairly certain that teams value their elite prospects at more than that amount. The rumored price tag for Yoan Moncada, for instance, is in the $60-$80 million range, and that’s with all the extra risk that comes with evaluating an international player who hasn’t played in the states yet. The best prospects currently in the minors probably have a market value north of $100 million at this point.

So Samardzija wasn’t bringing back Addison Russell, or anything close to it. Not in the winter, when free agent alternatives exist, and not with just one playoff run left. So is Marcus Semien worth anything close to $30 million by himself? Maybe.

If you think he’s a league average second baseman right now, as Steamer projects him to be, then it’s actually a pretty easy argument to make. After all, Yasmany Tomas — who seems to project as roughly a league average outfielder — just got $68 million in guaranteed money from the Diamondbacks, and that contract included a fourth-year opt-out, so if he hits his upside, it really turns into $36 million for four years and then the D’Backs lose him to free agency. Semien’s skillset won’t be valued the same as Tomas’ right-handed power, but we have a very recent example of a team betting big on a 24 year old with no big league track record who doesn’t project as a superstar.

And while Semien’s skills may be valued less than Tomas’ skills, the contract terms are certainly far more favorable. Essentially, Semien is signed to a one year, $500,000 contract with five team options beyond that. If he plays well and they keep him through all five arbitration years, he’s probably going to make somewhere in the range of $20 to $30 million through his team controlled years, so to be worth $30 million in value above his paychecks, he’d have to be worth $50 to $60 million over those six years.

$10 million per year currently buys you Jason Hammel, Billy Butler, Nick Markakis, or Andrew Miller. Each of those four project for something like +1 to +2 WAR players in 2015, and each project to get worse as their contracts go forward. Is it unreasonable to expect Semien to be better than any of those four in 2015, or to improve as he reaches his prime? Steamer thinks he’s likely a +2 WAR player for 2015, on par or better than Asdrubal Cabrera, who the crowd projected for $33 million over three years. If an aging Cabrera is worth 3/$33M, is it really absurd to suggest that Semien would have a market value of 6/$50M?

As I noted in the piece about star player trade value last week, it seems like there’s currently a disconnect between the public and the teams themselves about the value of mid-level talents. If you think it’s an easy task to find capable +1 to +2 WAR players who can fill holes and perform reasonably well, then this trade makes no sense, because Marcus Semien would have little value. But Major League teams clearly do not think that it’s easy to find above-replacement-level pieces, because they’re paying a mint to get low-upside role players this winter.

Marcus Semien and some stuff feels like a light return for Jeff Samardzija, just like Drew Smyly and Nick Franklin felt like a light return for David Price, and Martin Prado and stuff felt like a light return for Justin Upton. At some point, we need to stop expecting the market value of very good players on short-term deals to be elite talents who could turn into superstars. Instead, it appears that the market value of these kinds of players is lower-ceiling, big league ready players who look like they could perform at roughly a league average level for multiple low cost years.

That kind of production might not be as sexy, but getting the equivalent performance of a $10 million player for the league minimum has legitimate value. Marcus Semien might not ever turn into anything more than just a nice little second baseman, but nice little second baseman aren’t so easy or cheap to acquire as we might think. As another trade piles up suggesting that this is what teams can expect in return for short-term frontline starters, we probably need to calibrate our expectations accordingly.

Jeff Samardzija is very good and very valuable. Marcus Semien is less good, but maybe not that much less valuable.

Someday, an up-and-coming SABR scientist should try to measure the psychic effect that losing has on ballplayers. As everyone knows from watching “The Natural,” losing is a disease — as contagious as polio, syphilis and bubonic plague. Attacking one but infecting all, though some more than others. And no other major leaguer over the past decade, among hitters, lost as frequently as Josh Willingham did.

Willingham, 35, recently announced his retirement after playing nine full seasons and parts of two more. What a relief it must have been for him to finish as a part-timer with the Kansas City Royals, who made it to the seventh game of the World Series. Only once before had Willingham played significant time for winning team (with the Florida Marlins in 2008), and never had he played in the postseason. Cross it off the list, call it a career. And it was a good one, aside from all of the losing.

Overall, his teams went 503-644 in Willingham’s appearances, producing a .439 winning percentage, the worst among anyone who recorded at least 4,000 plate appearances since he broke into the majors in 2004. It usually wasn’t Willingham’s fault that his team lost; he was the best hitter on the Marlins as a rookie, after Miguel Cabrera, and he was better than Hanley Ramirez. He was the fourth-best hitter in ’07, the third-best in ’08 — and in ’09 and ’10 after being traded to the Washington Nationals. He was the best hitter on the Oakland Athletics in 2011, and the Minnesota Twins in 2012.  It’s just that Willingham’s teams lost anyway.

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The list of non-tenders is out. Time to dream!

It’s actually a very tough place to shop, even if there are a few names that seem attractive this year. Only about one in twelve non-tenders manages to put up a win of value the year after they were let loose. Generally, teams know best which players to keep, and which to jettison.

You’re not going to get 12 non-tenders in your camp in any given year, but there is a way to improve your odds. It’s simple, really: pick up a player that was actually above replacement the year before. If you do that, you double your chance of picking up a productive major leaguer. So let’s look at this year’s market through that lens first.

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Nothing’s ever really settled in Oakland. They can’t afford to settle, not if they want to be able to keep up despite their budget constraints. The A’s always have to be trying to think one step ahead, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but Billy Beane, if nothing else, is doubtlessly bold. And he made a bold move the other day, exchanging a very excellent Josh Donaldson for a package of less excellent players. It remains to be seen how Oakland will build out the rest of its roster, but it’s obviously a team in transition. Beane stated as much in saying he wanted to stay away from having a roster in decline.

In terms of just looking at the depth chart, the A’s are shifting gears by bringing in new personnel. But there might also be something else going on, underneath. It’s nothing we can know, and it’s probably nothing we can ask Beane about while he’s still trying to work, but the recent A’s had a particularly distinctive characteristic, and one wonders whether Beane might be moving away from the philosophy. We can observe what might be interpreted as points within a pattern.

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As you by now are well aware, Josh Donaldson was traded to the Toronto Blue Jays over the weekend in a blockbuster deal that sent Brett Lawrie back to Oakland. The Blue Jays gave up Lawrie and a few prospects to immediately get better, because Josh Donaldson is a guy that immediately makes any team better. Over the last two years, only Mike Trout and Andrew McCutchen have a higher WAR than Donaldson, and Donaldson’s been three wins better than the next-best third baseman. Donaldson can hit, he runs pretty well for a third baseman, and he’s good with the glove. Add those up and you’ve got a hell of a player.

But there’s something to that last point — that he’s good with the glove — that’s been on my mind for awhile. It’s something I was going to write about when the Gold Glove winners were announced, but then Donaldson didn’t win, so I saved it for another day. Now that Donaldson is back in the news, today is that day.
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I’ll try to complete the FanGraphs analysis of the Josh Donaldson deal, with Dave covering the A’s perspective of the deal and Drew Fairservice covering it from the Jays perspective while I’ll jump in with the prospect end of things. Those two prior pieces do a good job analyzing the various angles of this deal, with the main question being what the next few moves are for Oakland, since they seem far from done shuffling their roster.

Dave’s piece made the points that the gap between Donaldson and Brett Lawrie may be smaller than 2013-2014 would lead you to believe, so if one of the prospects end up as a star or a piece that can be used in another deal, it could swing the balance of the deal toward Oakland.  There’s an expectation that Lawrie won’t match Donaldson’s production, hence the three minor leaguers included. While Lawrie will be the player watched most closely in 2015 from this deal, one exec I talked to last night said Franklin Barreto is the key to the deal, so let’s start with him.

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Four months ago, the A’s made the biggest splash of the summer, trading elite prospect Addison Russell in a package that landed them both Jeff Samardzija and Jason Hammel. It was a clear go-for-it trade, giving up a player rated as one of the 5-10 best prospects in baseball in exchange for a short-term upgrade, as they were renting just a few months of Hammel’s services, and only getting another year and change from Samardzija. It was the kind of deal that the team would likely regret if they didn’t have a deep playoff run in either 2014 or 2015. They followed up on that aggressive stance by trading Yoenis Cespedes for Jon Lester, moving even more of their assets into the present at the expense of the future.

We know what happened to finish out 2014; the A’s played very poorly down the stretch, lost out in the division race to the Angels, and then saw the Royals literally outrun them in Game 163. The window that the team worked so hard to open slammed shut in their face. Lester and Hammel are both going to pitch elsewhere next year, and Jed Lowrie and Luke Gregerson are almost certainly going to find new homes this winter as well. Next year’s A’s were simply never going to look like last year’s version, and the A’s just made extra sure of that by trading away their best player, third baseman Josh Donaldson.

On the surface, it’s easy to look at this move and think that it suggests the A’s are switching back into a build-for-the-future mode. Beane’s post-trade comments even suggest that this is perhaps the right interpretation of this trade. From MLB.com’s Jane Lee:

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After the 2011 season, it seemed improbable that the Blue Jays would ever trade Brett Lawrie. He was the native son who exploded onto the scene, bounding his way into the hearts of baseball fans from Victoria to Corner Brook. Always a great hitter in the minor leagues, Lawrie hit .293/.373/.580 with 9 home runs in a 40-game big league tease that set completely unrealistic expectations .

Three injury-ravaged and underwhelming seasons later, Lawrie and three prospects are gone and Josh Donaldson is the new starting third baseman in Toronto as the Blue Jays try to accomplish one goal: reach the playoffs for the first time in a generation. No passport or sentiment will stand in their way as they try to end a long streak without playoff baseball.

Adding Donaldson is a significant upgrade for the Jays, as any team would expect when they pick up one of the premier players in baseball. Conservatively, switching out Donaldson for Lawrie is about a two win upgrade on talent alone. Lawrie’s spotty injury history and inability to translate his minor league offense at the big league level suggest it might be an even bigger gulf.

With two top-ten MVP finishes and 53 total home runs in the last two years, the Jays get a star – a star moving from an offensive sinkhole to a very friendly space for right-handed power hitters. Donaldson is an older player, heading into arbitration for the first time (he’s a Super Two) as well as his age-29 season. Unlike the A’s side of the deal, the four years of control that come with Toronto’s new third baseman is purely secondary to his ability to help them win in 2015.

The Jays wanted an upgrade and, according to Alex Anthopoulos, it was the inclusion of Lawrie in the talks that brought this deal to life. They sell low on Lawrie, who always hit before struggling (mightily at times) at the big league level. He’s as talented a player as there is, one Oakland hopes they can reshape into a more well-rounded big leaguer.

His talent is undeniable, Lawrie is perhaps the defensive equal of Donaldson at third base, and like Oakland’s Fielding Bible Award winner, Lawrie is a former catcher. Perhaps Oakland can get the countless moving parts of his swing in order and awaken the one tool that brought him to the big leagues at 21.

Toronto also gives up a very promising international free agent in Franklin Barreto, a shortstop at 18 with his stock on the rise, fast-rising pitcher in Kendall Graveman, and slightly stalled prospect in Sean Nolin. In terms of bulk control years, the Jays give up a lot. But that future surplus value finishes a distant second to the chance the Jays are building the best team in their division.

Some might look at the Jays rotation and wonder if they have the talent to win a championship. To that I say: look around. The state of the game swung so heavily in favor of pitchers, adding Donaldson’s bat to the likes of Edwin Encarnacion and Jose Bautista — to say nothing of Russell Martin — suggests the Jays believe the road to the postseason is paved with extra base hits.

Like the Red Sox, the Jays seem focused on piling more offense on top of their already-deep pool of sluggers. In Donaldson the Blue Jays add another home run threat who actually strikes out at a below-league average rate. As the league heads in one direction, it appears Toronto is headed in another.

It is easy to search for additional meaning in this trade and the Blue Jays interest in Josh Donaldson. Simply put, they targeted a great player they thought could help their team win a division title and more. They added a player who saved more than 30 runs with his glove since 2012 while putting up a 125 wRC+. His 14 WAR over the last two years trails only Mike Trout and Andrew McCutchen. Rather than hope their third baseman realized his potential, Toronto acquired one of the best in the game.

It also signals Toronto is serious about overhauling their clubhouse culture, though there is no better cure for a divided clubhouse than a whole pile of wins. Any team that boasts Reyes-Martin-Bautista-Encarnacion-Donaldson at the top of their batting order figures to give pitchers fits, though another left-handed bat in that mix (Reyes switch hits, the rest are all righties) must be a priority.

There is still work to do in Toronto, as huge questions loom in left field as well as second base. Their presumed starting center fielder is 43 big league plate appearances into his career (barely 200 PA above A-ball for Dalton Pompey, another Canadian.) They might not be done yet, but adding an elite ballplayer for the second time in two weeks is a nice way to head into the Winter Meetings.

Deals like this are how teams climb from the 80-85 win treadmill to the 90-win tier of World Series favorites. As they did with Russell Martin, the Blue Jays looked at a decent (and affordable) spot on their roster and thought they could improve it. They gave up a chunk of their identity and whole lot of prospect capital to do it, but it looks like these aren’t your older brother’s Toronto Blue Jays – though I’ve said that before.