Teixeira Trade

Well, that was nice – I laid out four scenarios this morning for the relative value of adding Mark Teixeira, and the Angels go and make a deal that makes the entire post irrelevant a few hours later, trading him for Casey Kotchman and Steven Marek.

So, now that we know the particulars of the deal, I figured I’ll look at it from a slightly different angle. The wins added for the rest of the year is pretty much the same with Kotchman being replaced instead of Rivera, and in reality, those extra runs don’t matter, because the Angels have already made the playoffs. Maybe not officially, but they have a double digit lead on the rest of their division, and Texas is the only other AL West team that isn’t selling off players. The Angels are winning their division with Kotchman, Teixeira, or Carrot Top playing first base. In terms of playoff odds, this trade doesn’t matter.

Instead, the Angels made this trade to try to do better in the playoffs. So, let’s take a look at how much better they’ll be on a per-game basis in October with Teixeira playing first base instead of Casey Kotchman. For this, I turned to Baseball Musing’s Line-Up Analysis Tool, plugging in the Marcel projection for Teixeira in place of Kotchman (and in turn, movie Kendrick up to #2 in the order).

With Teixeira, the Angels offense projects out to 5.023 runs per game.
With Kotchman, the Angels offense projects out to 4.828 runs per game.

Teixeira makes the Angels better, though just like this morning, the moral of the story is that one player simply doesn’t make as big a difference as is commonly believed. Punching the new runs scored/allowed numbers into the pythagorean formula, the Angels with Teixeira are a .591 club and with Kotchman they’re a .569 club. In reality, they’re not quite as good as either of those numbers, as we’ve held their run prevention static, while they’re over-performing by a decent amount in that area.

So, in reality, it’s probably more like they’re a .570 club with Teixeira and a .550 club with Kotchman. They move from good to very good, but overall, it doesn’t move their odds of winning the world series by more than a few points.

In the end, this is the kind of move that the Angels felt they had to make in order to show their fans and the players on the field that they were serious about going for it. As a P.R. move, it will work wonders. As a trade to dramatically improve the teams’s chances of making the playoffs or winning the world series, it’s really a very small step.





Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.

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Old Man Duggan
15 years ago

I don’t know that Carrot Top at first would be a bad thing. I don’t know how he handles the leather, but he’s scary strong. Weirdly so.