My Problem With the Marcell Ozuna Return
The Marlins are having another firesale. Their most recent now-for-future trade sent Marcell Ozuna to St. Louis in return for four players, with hard-thrower Sandy Alcantara and fast-runner Magneuris Sierra as the primary pieces coming back. Eric likes both enough to give them 50 FV grades, as their carrying tools make it likely they’ll be MLB players in some form, and if they make any kind of strides, they could become impact players in Miami.
Up front, I will say that I’m not a huge fan of these kinds of bets. Alcantara is arm strength without performance, which is the basic profile of every guy who got taken in the Rule 5 draft this morning. Sierra is extremely fast but isn’t yet clearly an elite defender, so the questions about his bat are problematic. And while I understand that he was 21 last year, began the year in A-ball, and probably shouldn’t have faced MLB competition at that point in his development, I would like to present some very-small-sample Statcast numbers that are kind of scary.
| Rank | Player | Average FB/LD Exit Velocity |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | R.A. Dickey | 76.1 |
| 2 | Gio Gonzalez | 76.6 |
| 3 | Magneuris Sierra | 81.4 |
500 players put at least 40 tracked balls in play last year. 497 of them hit their fly balls and line drives harder than Magneuris Sierra. The two that didn’t were pitchers, and not just any pitchers; two of the worst-hitting pitchers alive. Dickey has a career wRC+ of -4. Gonzalez has a career wRC+ of -36. These are the guys who hit the ball in the air like Magneuris Sierra just hit the ball in the air.
| Rank | Player | Max Distance |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | R.A. Dickey | 276 |
| 2 | Clayton Kershaw | 294 |
| 3 | Julio Teheran | 296 |
| 4 | Tanner Roark | 315 |
| 5 | Zach Davies | 318 |
| 6 | Jhonny Peralta | 321 |
| 7 | Carlos Martinez | 326 |
| 8 | Magneuris Sierra | 331 |
Jeff often talks about how looking at what a player does even once can show that the ability is there, if not the consistency. By looking at max distance, perhaps we can see something about what a hitter is currently capable of offensively, even in limited samples. Magneuris Sierra hit a ball no further than 331 feet. Six of the seven guys below that total were pitchers; the other one is basically out of baseball.
And if you’re wondering if this arbitrary cutoff just excludes a bunch of other big league hitters in the mid-330s, well, nope. After Sierra is Gio Gonzalez again (333 feet), then Marco Hernandez (341), then Kenta Maeda (348), then Travis Jankowski (351). Sierra was 20 feet short of the mark put up by an elite speed/defense guy who couldn’t hit well enough to stay in the big leagues.
| Rank | Player | Max EV |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | R.A. Dickey | 90.6 |
| 2 | Gio Gonzalez | 95.3 |
| 3 | Clayton Kershaw | 97.5 |
| 4 | Zach Davies | 99.2 |
| 5 | Ronald Torreyes | 100.0 |
| 6 | Julio Teheran | 100.0 |
| 7 | Magneuris Sierra | 100.5 |
Same idea as the max distance, but EV would give him credit for hitting it hard even if he hit it on the ground. Some guys just need launch angle changes, after all, so if he was hitting hard ground balls, that’s worth knowing. But, again, nope.
It’s five pitchers and Ronald Torreyes in Sierra’s territory. Torreyes is a utility infielder who is hanging around because he makes a lot of contact. Sierra doesn’t even really do that.
So, yeah. Magneuris Sierra is 21. These samples are tiny. Guys develop. He’s fast and might turn into an elite defender. There are lots of caveats here.
But if it’s me, and I’m trading a guy like Marcell Ozuna, I want some real stuff in return. Given what he just did in the Majors, I think it’s fair to wonder if he just falls outside the barrier of Major League offensive quality. Running is great, but Terrance Gore isn’t really a big leaguer. And if I’m the Marlins, I’d be pretty worried that I just traded for the next Terrance Gore.
Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.
Jankowski is actually a pretty good comp (he actually had a 2 WAR year). Sierra is only 21, like you say, which gives him
2-3 full years before he’s really even expected contribute. Give credit where it’s due, he played WAY above his level when he got called up and held his own. One tool guys at premium positions are high floor low ceiling. He’ll be a decent major leaguer, but whether he’s your everyday CF depends on bat progression. If they think he can manage .330 OBP in the future, it’s a great piece.
Return for someone of Ozuna’s caliber should be 2 guys in the top 20-40 and another who’s either sniffing the top 100 or has the upside of former two.
This was two in the 80-100 range, depending on who you talk to, and another two who are gonna be refilling the Gatorade tank.
Total heist by the Cardinals
Ozuna is definitely not worth two top 40 prospects and another guy around the top 100.
The issue here is not so much that they only got a 50 FV hitter and a 50 FV pitcher for Ozuna, it’s that Dave doesn’t buy Sierra as a 50 FV hitter. And maybe not Alcantara as a 50 FV pitcher either, though he doesn’t spend as much time talking about that.
K. Lemme know when you find another low-cost, mid-20s CF/elite LF coming off a 145 wRC+/5 WAR season available.
Adam Eaton last year. The only difference, of course, being that Eaton had 5 years of control, and Ozuna has 1. Eaton was worth two top 40s and another top 100. Ozuna is not.
Can we find a compromise by agreeing that Ozuna definitely was not worth “2 guys in the top 20-40 and another who’s either sniffing the top 100 or has the upside of former two,” but that he was very likely worth more than what the Cardinals gave up?
Please. 60+% of Eaton’s value is tied up in his glove, which we all know ages far more rapidly than a power bat. I think most teams would much prefer Marcell Ozuna.
(Plus, the return for Eaton was one top 5, another top 35, and another just like the one I described. That’s MUCH steeper than two top 40 + another.)
Also, Ozuna has two years of control, not one. Huge difference in terms of trade value
Actually, only -12.6%(?) of Eaton’s value is tied up in his glove, as opposed to 18.8% for Ozuna. If you had been paying attention, you would realize that one of the issues discussed at the time of the Eaton trade was whether he was an above average CF at all.
Also, even with Ozuna’s breakout year, Adam Eaton still has a higher career wRC+ and wOBA than Ozuna. Ozuna’s previous best wRC+ was 116; Adam Eaton beat that in all three of his qualifying seasons.
12.6? A guy who puts up a 118 wRC+ with average D in a corner is worth like 2.5-2.7 WAR depending on PAs accrued and such. Eaton’s DRS/UZR in 2016 supposedly made him worth more than twice that (probably bullshit, i agree, but these are the metrics we’ve all adopted as gospel, so)
Actually, I ignore Eaton’s 2016 entirely as a fluke and look at him as a bat-first, fringe CF, since that’s where he’s playing with the Nats.
2014: 118 wRC+, -3.3 UZR, 3.1 WAR
2015: 121 wRC+, -10.2 UZR, 3.8 WAR
Before 2017, Marcell Ozuna wished he could put up those numbers.
By the way, that’s a minus sign in front of the 12.6. Adam Eaton has negative defensive value for his career as a center fielder.
He will not be playing CF anymore.
It’s two years of control for Ozuna, not one. He’ll be a free agent after 2019.
It does seem kind of light. Let’s imagine the Cards were getting back Jack Flaherty and Tyler O’Neill instead. I would think that was a better trade, but I’d probably not like the deal for the Marlins unless Carson Kelly was one of the FV50 guys brought back, and he’s probably an FV55 to some.
Of course, if the point is that I think Ozuna should have been worth an FV50 and FV55 instead of two FV50s, that still more or less proves your point.
^^^^^ Maguro’s point is exactly it. Go through the Fangraphs prospect value math ( https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/valuing-the-2017-top-100-prospects/ ).
Consider that the linked backup from that article says that these values appear to be based on $8 million per WAR, and therefore should go higher if we’re valuing Ozuna’s surplus value at more than $8 million per WAR.
Also consider how fast these values drop for position players: a 50 FV position player is $22 million on the FG chart, a 45 FV is $11 million, and a 40 FV must logically be somewhere south of that.
Dave Cameron’s doubts about Sierra sound much more like a 40 FV player to me than a 50 FV player, because Dave doubts that Sierra hits enough that even an optimistic projection puts Sierra as a 2-ish WAR position player.
Agreed. Sierra got overvalued after his cup of coffee, but he didn’t hit all that great when he was sent down to AA. He has speed, but that didn’t necessarily translate into elite defense as he only played CF ~30% of his games in AA. The bulk of the games in CF were played by Oscar Mercado, who Baseball America lists as the Cardinals best minor league defensive OF also happened to have a better year at the plate.
So…your argument against his being good defensively is that he played left because the Cardinals had a better defensive CF in AA?
Would Lorenzo Cain suddenly be worse defensively if he played next to Kiermaier?
I don’t know if the playing time alone tells us a lot, because minor league development can involve all sorts of oddities of trying to get players time at different positions to develop versatility.
Subject to that caveat, though, I see a fair point to wonder why rankers are so high on Sierra. That same BA list has Sierra #7 on the Cardinals’ top 10 and Mercado outside of it. It also has Sierra as “best athlete” and “fastest baserunner” in the Cardinals’ system.
Sierra’s only 21, but he’s been in the Cardinals’ organization since 2013 and there seem to be a whole lot of “if’s” in Eric’s write-up of him. He has plus-plus speed and decent contact skills, but there’s doubt “if” he combines that with good routes and reads, or “if” he combines that with good jumps on stolen bases, or “if” he ever hits the ball hard enough to be even a slap-hitting major league player.
I know that a lot of prospect ranking is projecting – in the sense of what a player could become – and I can see the idea of a ceiling as Dee Gordon on offense with Kevin Pillar’s defense in CF, which is a 4+ WAR player going by Pillar’s 2015. Maybe I’m just underestimating how much downside floor a typical 50 FV prospect has, but I’ve come around to the side that Sierra is a marginal one, or at least one with a really low floor.
Project Ozuna for 3.7 WAR = 7.4 total over two years.
9M per win = 66.6M total value.
67M – 11M – 16M = 40M surplus.
ONE guy in the top 20-40 is likely going to be worth 40M and possibly more.
Fringe/bottom-100 hitters are supposedly worth ~20M and pitchers ~14M. By this evaluation Alcantara and Sierra together may be worth something like 34M. Factor in the remaining two guys and this deal looks perfectly fair, based on estimated market values.
Most sources estimate a higher cost per win than that, Alcantara and Sierra both have red flags that make their profiles more risky than most, and you’re not factoring in that future surplus is worth less than present surplus. This may end up being a great deal for the Marlins, who knows, but based on the available information this definitely appears to be a light return.
I think if you decide to assign a higher dollar value to present day wins, the value of the prospects would have to increase as well, probably by about the same amount.
Huh? Future money is always perceived to be worth less than present money, which is why deferred salaries are a thing.
Yeah, but the prospect valuation model already takes the time value of money into account. So changing the present day value of a win would affect the estimated value of future wins as well, one would think.
This is important. I went back and checked and it does appear that the numbers I gave (14M, 20M) are a bit out of date. They should be higher but I’m not sure by how much. The dollars/WAR should probably be a bit higher as well.
Those prospect valuations are all based on trades I believe. I don’t know the exact methodology but I’m pretty sure they fully account for the fact that future production is worth less than present production.
I acknowledge that these particular prospects might be overrated, but my point is that they seem to line up fairly well with market values (~100 ranking) in a package for Ozuna.
As for the cost per win, I really don’t have much to say about that. 9 million is what I’ve most commonly heard, and what I’ve seen used on this site, but whatever estimate we use is going to be imprecise regardless. I’ll be interested to see how it shakes out as more trades are made and more free agents are signed.
Present v Future Surplus value in a vacuum isn’t the only factor here. How much surplus value did Chapman and Verlander have, respectively, when they were acquired to bolster a playoff run in the last two yeasr? Zero? Negative?
And I’d argue the returns for each were considerably higher than what we saw here last night. The urgency to win, scarcity of comparable talents on the market, and, ultimately, the extreme volatility of even highly-touted prospects seem like way bigger factors to me.
Yeah, I like the back-of-the-envelope trade-value estimations as much as anyone, but I’m getting a sense people are beginning to do it by rote around here. You have to realize that trades are often based on teams’ putting *different* valuations on the assets involved.
Sometimes I think the “cost of win” stuff makes comparing values even more complicated than before.
I like the theory of it more than the practice. We don’t do a good enough job of distinguishing between how much the average player of type X (FV50 hitting prospect, or say a 3-WAR OF with three years of team control) has made in the past and how much those teams actually expected to get out of them.
I just want all the terms more clearly defined and everyone on the same page.
Depends on interpretation. The objective is supposed to be a rough estimate (as with most models). I think it achieves that.
For example it shows that the Ozuna deal could absolutely be fair depending on valuation differences specific to the players involved. The analysis indicates that the trade is not especially uneven, which we might not have otherwise known. Without some sort of model, it really is extremely difficult to evaluate any trade or free agent signing just by looking at names (e.g. Ozuna is not worth two top prospects).
Re Verlander and Chapman, it’s been well-acknowledged that the in-season cost per WAR for high-end pitching for contenders shows a premium both to off-season trade values and pretty much always to the in-season premium applied to position player WAR. It’s a mix of scarcity, that these players can pitch a higher percent of total innings in the playoffs, and supply/demand dynamics. On the latter point, virtually any contender can improve with one more TOR starter or high-end reliever, but not every good position player is a fit to upgrade a contender by a lot.
Giving up Torres for a half-season of Chapman was also at the time regarded as big overpay for a half-season of Chapman (plus paying whatever percent of his $11.3 million salary that is). That wasn’t just relative to normal trade value math, but also in comparison to the Indians’ package for 2.5 years of Andrew Miller at $9 million AAV.
Verlander, in addition to whatever premium the Astros paid to have him for the 2017 playoffs, shows expected surplus value over the last two years of his contract. The Tigers sent cash to pay the cost to the Astros down to $20 million per year, and his current Steamer projection for 2018 is 3.7 fWAR.
I admittedly don’t know how much/if Verlander’s projection has changed since he was traded, but he was on pace for 3.6 fWAR in 2017 when the Tigers traded him and he overachieved that pace to put up 4.1. His 2016 season total was 5.3 fWAR, so I think that he was going to have pretty close to that Steamer projection for 2018 even with a somewhat lower 2017.
“Those prospect valuations are all based on trades I believe.”
That’s not the case. They’re based on how prospects with those rankings have performed historically during their 6 years of team control.
But everything else that Wilmerr is saying is correct. Dave’s article on the FG prospect value has a link to research by Kevin Creagh and Steve DiMiceli (links below). It takes a bit of reading of the two sources combined to get all of the assumptions, because they initially worked with the top 100 rankings but then translated it to scouting grades.
It does look like they assume free agency pricing of $8 million / win for surplus value, so the prospect value should also increase if we use more than that value for a player such as Ozuna.
They do use an 8% annual discount rate to get a net present value for prospects, so that idea is taken into account.
They also take into account estimated arb salaries with an arbitration salary model, so that’s factored into surplus value.
https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/valuing-the-2017-top-100-prospects/ and http://www.thepointofpittsburgh.com/mlb-prospect-surplus-values-2016-updated-edition/
Sierra seems like, best case, a Mallex Smith clone, and Smith was acquired as part of a hodge-podge of players exchanged for an oft-injured Drew Smyly, who was coming off a down year.
I will keep coming back to Tyler O’Neill as a missed opportunity here. Cardinals were in a hard spot with way too many outfielders, even subtracting Piscotty, they should have asked for a guy with at least a modicum of high ceiling.
Sierra became something of a mythic figure in St. Louis when the Cardinals called him up midseason and he hit ~.400 and seemed to be involved in every game-winning play for his first 10 games or so. A glance at his advanced stats showed that he was getting lucky as hell even then, and his performance went way down during his September call up. He was a 21 year old in the majors though, so his struggles weren’t unexpected. I was more concerned by his mediocre stint in AA.
Never mind Terrance Gore, the Marlins better hope they didn’t just trade for the next Leslie Gore.
Or Tipper.
I’ve never really looked at his stat line before. Wow. 60 PA’s and not a single extra base hit.That’s not great.
Here’s what I don’t get: Eric gives Sierra an FV40 on Sierra’s hit tool, and an FV30 on future game power. And then he hangs an FV50 on him overall and comps his game to a low-powered Jacoby Ellsbury.
1) Low-powered Jacoby Ellbury certainly has more than a 40 on his hit tool
2) That’s a lot of pressure on Sierra’s fielding to produce value. I mean, he’s good and fast but not like Billy Hamilton.
I like Sierra a lot better if he can actually make enough contact to do the slap-and-dash thing work, kind of like Dee Gordon does but maybe not quite as effectively. That may be what the Marlins are thinking he’s going to do but there’s a lot of mixed signals on him.
Agreed. I can understand why someone would see Alcantara and Sierra having 50 FV potential, but I personally find that to be optimistic.
If Ells didn’t have his pop, he would have had a 40-45 hit tool.
As a Cardinal fan, I’m glad they sold high on Sierra after a good couple of weeks with the team last year and gave up Alcantara, who might become fantastic but whose command isn’t very good, rather than Flaherty or Jordan Hicks.
Michael Martinez
This is the sort of return that I’d get, because I’d just be using public prospect rankings:
Give me Flaherty
No
O’Neill?
No
Bader?
No
Sierra?
Sure
OK awesome but I still need a pitcher. Hudson?
No
Alcantara?
Yeah fine.
You got yourself a trade!
/pats self on back
“And if I’m the Marlins, I’d be pretty worried that I just traded for the next Terrance Gore.” But Sierra, despite his speed, is not actually all that good at stealing bases. He’s not at Terrance Gore level yet. “But he’s only 21 and look at the speed!”
Sierra was really hyped a few years ago when he hit .386 in Johnson City. It was an empty .386, but he was only 18 and scouts could see a speedy Rod Carew, maybe a CF Maury Wills. Scouts still see what he could be, but what he is is something like a decent A+ ballplayer. He is fast, no doubt, but takes terrible routes, gets terrible jumps on the basepaths, and has a terrible swing.
The Cardinals have a reputation for strong development, which maybe plays a role in how toolsy guys in their system are (over)valued. But that reputation comes from developing guys with a carrying SKILL into something more than the industry evaluated them as. Alcantara and Mags Sierra have carrying TOOLS but have shown very little skill, relative to the competition, throughout their young careers.
“The Cardinals have a reputation for strong development, which maybe plays a role in how toolsy guys in their system are (over)valued. But that reputation comes from developing guys with a carrying SKILL”
I think this is right on here for another reason too: the information asymmetry in the trade. You don’t have to stretch too far to suspect that, if you buy that the Cardinals organization is good at this kind of development, they might know which players are likelier to turn the tools into skills — and try to use that sense to preferentially trade the less-likely-to-develop but still toolsy ones while they’re still overvalued.
Yep. A fun experiment: look at the prospects traded away from the Cardinals in the last decade, and see how they turned out.
The best any of them have done is turned into good relievers.
Dave with the slam on Terrance Gore out of no where!
As a Twins fan, this reminds me a bit of how I felt after the Twins traded Johann Santana: I thought, “That’s all we got?!” I can’t believe there are too many Marlins fans who are thinking that this was a good trade.
Couple this with the Stanton deal, and I can’t imagine there will BE any Marlins fans remaining. What a sad state of affairs for those fans.