Padres Acquire Lottery Ticket Edward Olivares
On Saturday, the Padres sent INF Yangervis Solarte to Toronto in exchange for 21-year-old Venezuelan OF Edward Olivares and 24-year-old org reliever Jared Carkuff.
Olivares is the prospect centerpiece of the deal. He had a fairly significant breakout in 2017 after he barely played affiliated ball in 2016 due to injury. He was hurt after just 15 games at Bluefield in 2016 and, aside from those organizations that had extended spring-training coverage in Florida, many clubs didn’t see him until last year. In 2017, he went to Low-A and hit .277/.330/.500 with 17 homers and 18 steals in 101 games. He was promoted to Dunedin in mid-August and struggled there for the final three weeks of the season.
Olivares has an exciting, but volatile, skillset. He’s a free swinger with mediocre breaking-ball recognition and a pull-heavy approach to contact. He takes his share of ugly, unbalanced hacks at pitches that aren’t anywhere near the strike zone. So while he struck out in just 17% of his Low-A plate appearances last year, scouts are concerned about how undercooked Olivares’s feel to hit is right no, and worry that it could become an issue against more advanced pro pitching.
But he’s also a plus-armed, plus-running, well-built 6-foot-2, with enough speed to merit continued development in center field. He also has above-average bat speed and raw power, and loads his hands at a height that helps produce natural fly-ball loft in his swing. Olivares’s hit-tool projection is volatile because so many of his current deficiencies are approach-driven and not something an instructor can just fix.
When we consider that Olivares’s 2016 injury limited him to just 15 actual games, however, these struggles seem much more reasonable. If his bat and indecisive feel for center field progress, and allow his power and speed to translate to on-field production, he could be an above-average everyday player. There’s also a real possibility that he never does much of anything, though. He’s a 45 FV prospect as a high-risk, potentially above-average regular. He could share reps with Buddy Reed at High-A to start the upcoming season.
Eric Longenhagen is from Catasauqua, PA and currently lives in Tempe, AZ. He spent four years working for the Phillies Triple-A affiliate, two with Baseball Info Solutions and two contributing to prospect coverage at ESPN.com. Previous work can also be found at Sports On Earth, CrashburnAlley and Prospect Insider.
After watching Gettys toil for the past few years, I have a hard time mentally reconciling Olivares lack of pitch recognition with his relatively pedestrian strikeout percentage.
A fast bat (Olivares) can make up some for bad pitch recognition, especially at Single-A. Poor swing timing and a long swing (Gettys) accentuates it.
I don’t think the two are comparable. I think Gettys just can’t recognize the pitch. Olivares seems to have the bat speed to compensate. Gettys’ time is running out. Was hoping he’d be the prospect traded for Galves 🙁
I’m having a hard time with the surplus-value calculation here. Solarte is a 2-win player controlled for three seasons at $17.5M total. Solarte’s 6 wins works out a whopping $37.5M in surplus value (at $9M/win), which does not seem commensurate with a 45-FV prospect I’d never heard of.
check back in in three seasons and I’m guessing Solarte is just barely a positive WAR player
That’s a poor guess.
Well I would put money on it…how many PA will he get next year 300-350?
A player who got over 2 wins just once in his MLB career
is NOT a 2 win player, not to mention he is on the wrong side of 30 now.
Not to mention kinda fat…Padres probably watched him add 15 pounds since the end of season and were like oh hell no.
He’s projected for 2.0 WAR per 600 PA.
That’s the 127th best projection for any position player. With 30 teams, that means he’d generally have the 4th best projection of starting position players on a given team- i.e. average.
http://www.fangraphs.com/projections.aspx?pos=all&stats=bat&type=steamer600&team=0&lg=all&players=0&sort=27%2cd
To be fair, the guy has never actually gotten to 600 PAs. He’s a really solid pickup for the Blue Jays and will probably be in the lineup as much as the Jays can get him in there but history suggests he’ll not be in there every single day.
I also have some questions about his home run projection, but that’s a slightly different issue.
Probably more like 1.5-win player today, and more like a 1-win player a couple years from now (maybe worse).
I don’t like the Padres return either but that is mostly because I’m skeptical this guy is really an FV45, since his breakout was in Low-A at 21. But most of us were wrong on Tatis Jr. too, so who knows.
If he’s an FV45 like Eric says then he’s fine. There just doesn’t seem to be much of a market for adequate third basemen/good utility players at the moment. Somehow Jed Lowrie is still a member of the Athletics despite teams needing a guy who can cover 2nd and/or 3rd base.
the return is underwhelming due to the glut of adequate 2B/3Bs on the market. I like Solarte but no one is going to overpay the Padres when they could just sign Neil Walker or about five other comparable guys.
Few things.
1) Solarte is extremely unlikely to be worth more than 5 fWAR over next 3 years
2). Solarte is one of many Padres fringe infielders and without upside, 2 of their top prospects will be up in 2018 and 2019. The glut of infielders available probably suppressed return to a extent..
3). Teams don’t want to pay for 1 win regulars and that might be what Solarte is the next 3 years, so they weren’t going to get much, this guy though seems to have real upside
Solarte has the 127th best WAR/600 PA projection for any position player. He’s roughly an average regular, it’s too far to say he’s ‘extremely unlikely’ to be worth more than 5 fWAR when that it roughly his 60th-percentile projection, even with less than full playing time.
Even with the 2016 injury, he seems old and raw for the low minors. Perhaps Toronto exploited the padres’ obvious glut of infielders.
if anything the return here should make everyone wonder how (and why) the padres valued galvis.
Yes! The Padres gave away a real prospect for one year of Freddy Galvis. Why???
Remember when the Angels traded some players for Danny Espinosa and how horribly that turned out? This could be just as bad, although it would be difficult to be that bad due to Galvis’ lower strikeout rate.
His defense projects to be average to slightly below average, though. He’s been worth a cumulative -10 DRS at SS throughout his career, including -5 DRS last season. (UZR is more favorable, +20 for career, +3.6 last season)
Am I the only one experiencing major Fernando Tatis Jr. deja vu?
If you’re seeing a ton of parallels between a 17-year-old with no in-game competition under his belt, a ton of physical projection, and a big league pedigree, and a nearly 22-year-old with three years stateside, a different set of skills and tools, a different swing path and a massive scouting history… yeah, that’s probably just you.
One potential parallel is that Pete DeYoung’s (and I think in both cases, Spencer Graham specifically) group deserves a lot of credit.
I saw Olivares take BP opening weekend at Lansing. He fouled a lot of pitches off the top of the cage, obviously trying to put some loft on the ball. I wondered to myself why a guy with his frame and speed wouldn’t try to hit line drives more. A few hours later, he hit one over the wall in Left-centre into a stiff breeze. Shows what I know….