The Rays Just Trimmed Payroll Without Getting Worse
It got kind of lost on Saturday, because Eric Hosmer signed with the Padres on Saturday, and that became baseball’s big news. But the Padres weren’t the only team active over the weekend, as the Rays pulled off a trio of transactions. Jake Odorizzi was traded to the Twins for a low-level infielder. Additionally, C.J. Cron was acquired for a player to be named later, and, to make roster room, Corey Dickerson was designated for assignment. The moves all happened so fast it got confusing, but the sequence made an unpleasant impression. Dickerson was a 2017 AL All-Star, and Odorizzi had been a regular starter for four years. It looked as if the Rays were partially tearing down.
Indeed, in a sense, that’s true — ownership was looking for the front office to cut payroll. Even though the Rays’ payrolls have always been modest, money is a factor in everything, and the 2017 club apparently got a little pricey. The owners asked for a payroll reduction, and an ownership ask is an ownership demand. This is how the Rays have long operated. Ideally, it wouldn’t be the case, but it is what it is. I can’t compel the owners to spend more than they do.
But while many have been upset by the departures of Odorizzi and Dickerson — including Kevin Kiermaier — it should also be understood just where the Rays are. The Rays now aren’t really worse off compared to where they were. The team isn’t tanking, as far as I can tell, and they’re not planning to lose 95 games. Two big contributors from the past are now gone, yet the roster is still okay. That’s not a bad outcome after shedding $10 million.
To go into specifics: Odorizzi is gone, and his salary was going to be $6.3 million. Dickerson is gone, and his salary was going to be $5.95 million. The Rays designated Dickerson for assignment to goose along trade negotiations, and something will probably get done, but even if it doesn’t, and Dickerson is just let go, the Rays will owe him one-sixth of his salary, which would be about $1 million. Cron’s salary will be $2.3 million. I’ll note that, while Odorizzi and Dickerson have two remaining years of team control, Cron has three. I’m certain that was a selling point.
I’ve seen comments to the effect of, well, the Rays are blowing it up. One can’t forget they also traded Evan Longoria. Other value is being lost to free agency. I understand that not all reactionary comments are thought all the way through, but the 2018 Rays are probably being underestimated. While last year’s club finished 80-82, they also had a BaseRuns record of 87-75, which was the same as the Red Sox. This year’s team currently projects here to go 80-82, and over at Baseball Prospectus, PECOTA projects 85-77. The Rays clearly aren’t one of the super-teams. They’re not the Red Sox, and they’re not the Yankees. But they look about the same as, say, the Twins. Is anyone extremely down on the Twins?
Let’s walk through these things. Odorizzi is gone, and while the Rays say they like the prospect they got, he won’t make a difference for a while. How do you replace Odorizzi’s innings? The Rays are actually set up pretty well to do it. Of course, Chris Archer and Blake Snell were already going to be at the front of the rotation. Behind them, however, are Jake Faria, Nathan Eovaldi, Matt Andriese, Brent Honeywell, Jose De Leon, Yonny Chirinos, and Ryan Yarbrough, among others. With Odorizzi out, some number of those pitchers slide one slot up the depth chart, but each one of them should be perfectly capable. The Rays have assembled enviable rotation depth. Odorizzi was superfluous.
And while it’s not as if Odorizzi isn’t worth anything, a good deal of shine has come off the apple. His strikeouts have dropped from their 2014 peak. His walks just reached a career high. Even though 2017 Odorizzi made 28 starts, he was worth all of 0.1 WAR. If you prefer to give him credit for actual runs allowed, then that version of WAR put him at 1.1, and that’s with a minuscule .227 BABIP. Odorizzi didn’t work deep into starts, and his numbers took a tumble. The Rays have confidence they can replace him internally. They probably can.
More shocking than the Odorizzi trade was the Dickerson DFA. An Odorizzi trade was probably inevitable. Dickerson, again, was an All-Star. Granted, Jason Vargas was also an All-Star, but Dickerson was a 2.6-win player. It feels like mismanagement. Yet the Rays deserve some benefit of the doubt; it goes without question they’re cheap, but the front office always does its due diligence. No team is more determined to maximize its surplus value where possible. Dickerson feels more valuable than he is. In this market, he’s just not considered special.
While Dickerson just finished with a solid 115 wRC+, the other numbers suggest he somewhat overachieved. The projections put him at 103. Dickerson is a talented hitter, but he’s not a great hitter, and he had a bad second half. He’s not an above-average baserunner, and he’s not an above-average defender. The Rays saw him as a left fielder and a DH.
The Rays called around, and they couldn’t find an enthusiastic trade partner. They might find a trade partner now, but any return won’t be significant. Why? Matt Adams signed for one year and $4 million. Curtis Granderson signed for one year and $5 million. Austin Jackson signed for two years and $6 million, while Howie Kendrick signed for two years and $7 million. Among the remaining free agents are Melky Cabrera, Lucas Duda, Jon Jay, Adam Lind, and Seth Smith. There are half-decent bats out there to be acquired. If Dickerson is a potential bargain, so are all of these players. They’re just not thought of very highly, so no one wants to trade the Rays a real prospect.
That doesn’t mean the Rays had to drop Dickerson, but Cron is actually a better fit, and he’s cheaper. While Cron doesn’t play the outfield, the Rays didn’t want Dickerson out there much anyway, and where Dickerson bats from the left side, Cron is a righty. That’ll allow him to more easily split time with guys like Brad Miller and Denard Span. Dickerson, again, projects for a 103 wRC+, and he had a bad second half. Cron projects for a 99 wRC+, but he had a good second half. A second half in which he lifted the ball and pulled it.
Cron has always hit the ball hard. Like Dickerson, he probably swings too much. But he’s been a better-than-average hitter over his career, even though the Angels never seemed to like him very much. There’s some lingering upside here, if Cron’s 2017 second half is in any way indicative. It feels a little bit like what Logan Morrison did before he broke out. The Rays are happy to take the chance, since Cron fits their active roster.
This isn’t some case of the Rays acting like geniuses. It doesn’t take a genius to designate a player for assignment, and it doesn’t take a genius to trade a starting pitcher for a low-level prospect. I do personally like Cron a fair amount, but it’s not like the Rays had to drive a hard bargain. Cron was obviously very available. The Rays got him for nothing. He’ll help, as at least a semi-regular.
The Rays didn’t pull off any wizardry. It’s just that the total impact of all this is less than it looks like. I don’t think the perception matches the reality here. Yeah, the Rays dumped an All-Star, and a member of their starting rotation. But I don’t think the team is worse off for the moves. And even though the front office has been told to drop payroll, the club still looks borderline competitive, depending on how the young pitching holds up. All in all, this weekend was very Rays. It’s frustrating, because fans want players they recognize, players they can count on sticking around. But the Rays are just trying to squeeze out as many wins as possible. It’s as much as they can do, given the spending constraints in place.
Jeff made Lookout Landing a thing, but he does not still write there about the Mariners. He does write here, sometimes about the Mariners, but usually not.
I’m sorry, I might have missed this, but:
Did the 2018 Rays season win projection actually not go down, or did it just not go down as much as the tone of the conversation implies it went down?
I believe it went up a couple tenths of a win.
The Cron for Dickerson swap is a little loss, but by taking out Odorizzi most of the innings went to Honeywell which improve the projection there.
Ah, thanks! I wish that line were in the actual article, though.
Interesting that swapping Honeywell for Odorizzi ups their team projection. Odorizzi has an option left, right? I wonder how high FG writers can get team projections if they had free reign to run the team how they like.
I forgot to note where the Rays’ projection was before. All I remember is it was similar. Also, just yesterday we included ZiPS in our projections, instead of just going off straight-up Steamer, so there were changes being made anyway.
I know it’s kind of a ridiculous thing, but if you’re consulting my wishlist, I would really love to have a data structure such that we could get historical daily snapshots of team projections. I think that would be really nice for whoever’s writing articles like yours in 2028.
You can see at least some days in the past using the wayback machine. If “they” are going to the trouble to “backup” most of the internet and make those “backups” public, might as well make use of them 🙂
https://web.archive.org/web/20180207094652/https://www.fangraphs.com/depthcharts.aspx?position=Standings
On the most recent capture, 2/7/18, the Rays were projected at 80-82 and now they are listed at 78-84 — though as Jeff Sullivan mentions above, how much of that is STEAMER->ZiPS would have to be considered.
Of course, I won’t argue that being able to do it right on fangraphs.com [like the post season odds] wouldn’t be easier [and more complete] 🙂
This to me is honestly a great argument that the projections aren’t adequately accounting for the benefits of depth and/or injury risk. “Addition by subtraction” to something like a starting rotation isn’t typically (in my view) an adequate account of how things are likely to shake out across a whole 162-game season.
Jeff, very helpful for understanding these moves. Thank you!
Chad Mottola probably deserves a lot of credit for the success of Dickerson, Souza, and Morrison last season. It will be fun to see if he can help Cron be more productive. Same goes for Span if they’re stuck with him.
The rays should actually tear down. They have been a 78 or so win team for 4 years now. I don’t see how patchworking at the fringes of the roster really gets the job done, especially with their weak resources. Maybe they can luck into a wild card but for that they probably need to beat their projections by 6-7 games.
I would tank and try to build a super team. I mean attendance sucks anyway, so why not suck a little more?
Beating a projection by 6-7 wins may sound like a lot, but it’s important to keep in mind that that’s not even 1 standard deviation.
Also, Jeff mentioned in the article (and I believe a previous article as well) that the Rays’ BaseRuns record has been quite a bit better than their actual records. That would indicate that their talent level is most likely well above that of a “78 or so win team”.
I recall that 6 wins deviance is 1 SD
It varies by year — I think it was around 10 wins in 2017! What I recall about a figure around 6 wins was that it was considered the rough best case for a projection system, since certain things are very nearly impossible to predict.
If you could predict that a pitcher would sustain a major injury in a given season, you’d probably pitch them differently that season and that would change the prediction.
Or maybe not
https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/tampa-bays-lost-window-of-contention/
You may get your wish.
Sincerely,
-Steven Souza
There are some issues that I see with the “build a super team” idea for the Rays, besides the general point for all teams that overachieving projections by 6 or 7 wins isn’t that rare (as others point out).
On the business side, they are in the midst of trying to get a deal for a new stadium in Tampa. Being a reasonably competitive team around .500 very likely does help with the PR of that process compared to deciding to tear down and win 65 to 70 games.
More generally, the “build a super team” idea pretty much requires the willingness/ability to increase payroll at some point to well above where the Rays (or A’s, as another example) operate. That might be supplementing a young core with free agents, or taking on veterans with decent-sized contract commitments in trades. Some of it, though, is just that high-level young talent gets expensive (by Rays or A’s standards) in the latter years of arbitration. It’s a dynamic that Billy Beane described to Eno a couple years ago – https://www.fangraphs.com/plus/why-the-as-rebuild-cant-work-like-houstons-or-chicagos/
Btw I think that this very efficient win squeezing they (and also the As) did for many years doesn’t really help the attendance. Sure most important is to win but a revolving door of players with a gazillion moves doesn’t really help identification. Now depth is important in modern baseball but fans also want to see stars they can cheer for years.
Of course that is not the biggest factor in attendance, mostly it is their crappy market and lack of winning but that type of roster management probably doesn’t help the attendance.
Nobody showed up last year to see Odorizzi and Dickerson, so it’s not like there will be any material difference when two other guys replace Odorizzi and Dickerson this year.
Not even Ma and Pa Odorizzi and Dickerson senior?
Poor guys.
They will be more than adequately replaced by Denard Span’s mom.
At least as long as he doesn’t keep hitting her with foul balls.
I’ve been wondering about a thing post-Hosmer deal, and with the Twins adding yet another former player (Morneau) to their stable of post-retirement leadership. I wonder if we might be undervaluing the concept of generating those kinds of guys who are franchise lifers, particularly in terms of building up the marketing side of things. One of the things going on with the Padres is that Tony Gwynn’s early death really hurt them in that department, and they may be looking to Hosmer in that role long-term. The Rays’ methodology really almost prevents them from ever being able to do that.
I strongly agree with this. Teams need to keep some guys around for a while. The classic example for me was Jim Gantner with the Brewers. He wasn’t really all that good in the later years, but he was a guy who was recognizable and the casual fan could root for. It’s best if the player is good *and* they are signed long-term, but that’s not always possible.
The Rays had that with Longoria, but he was simply too expensive and they felt they had to trade him. It is something that the Rays should consider going forward.
Hmmm, Souza now on the move. May need to update this article!
Yabbut doesn’t the return for Odorizzi seem light regardless? When you look around at all the teams with giant holes in their rotations, (Brewers, Orioles, Twins, Phillies, Rangers) doesn’t it seem like they have done better?
Not to mention the, as of now, nothing they are getting in return for Dickerson.
To be fair, Odorizzi looks pretty busted. Who wants a fly-ball guy with a homer problem these days?
The Twins and their new out-of-nowhere pitching coach apparently.
Man I hope this narrative plays. Not just as a Twins fan, but this could be legitimately fun.
And now, moving Souza for a decent AA prospect 2B.
…plus Anthony Banda and 2 PTBNL. That’s a pretty decent return.
Hi Jeff, I enjoyed this article because your perspective is different than mine in looking at the series of moves the Rays made. I agree the Odorizzi deal was fairly justifiable and straightforward. They had a surplus of pitchers and Odorizzi was expendable, and coming off a really poor year. I didn’t think the return was very good, but that is another matter and not really of any significance.
The issue that I have and likely that many other people have is related to (essentially) the swap of Cron for Dickerson. It’s not that this indirect exchange of players will severely hurt the team or make much of a difference in their W/L record this year, but more that they objectively have a worse player filling a spot on the team than they had. Obviously, there’s a lot that goes into baseball decisions and I understand they wanted to save some money, but nonetheless I thought their decision to DFA Dickerson was simply perplexing and I would say unnecessary.
You make valid points about Cron’s upside, years of control, etc but ultimately this is a player who has, in his career (1475 PA), produced 2.2 WAR. He’s a below-average baserunner and a below-average fielder and barely breaks even because of his 107 wRC+ career. Corey Dickerson produced 2.6 WAR in just last season alone (629 PA), and while he’s a below-average fielder and baserunner, I think the argument can be made that he is superior to Cron in both areas, while also being an objectively better offensive player. Being an All-Star carries symbolism with it – it just adds to the profile of the player they gave away.
Mainly I view this move as being thematic for what the Rays strategy is, which is essentially to not have an offense. It seems to follow in line with some of their moves last year, like replacing Tim Beckham with Hechavvaria (something I definitely struggled to understand at the time). For this coming season, Depth Charts attributes 420 PA to Joey Wendle at 2B, 560 PA to Hechavvaria at SS, 350 PA to Matt Duffy at 3B, and a collection of other players who all project to be below-average offensive players. I just think it is very strange that Dickerson is the guy they gave up on, when he likely was the best hitter on the roster at this point. It is also compounded by not bringing back LoMo. They had 4 above average offensive players last year and 2 of them aren’t returning. I personally did a double-take when I saw Denard Span is going to be getting PAs as the DH.
The pitching staff will likely be fantastic, and maybe they figure that will carry them to whatever success they have. And I do completely agree with you that these moves essentially just save them money without having much of an impact on their full 162 game season. But either way, I think some of their decisions warrant criticism, at least for me personally.
Thanks for the great content as always!
Spin this Souza trade for a 23 year old with 130 ABs above A ball.
…plus Anthony Banda and 2 PTBNL. That’s a pretty decent return.
I studied Banda a bit this offseason and I like that return for the Rays. It’s obviously easier said than done, but if he can improve the location of his curve (too many hangers and too many way out of the zone) then he becomes pretty interesting.
Strange moves IMO.
Perhaps there is something else in the works. Could this be related to the Martinez deal? Boston may want to get under the tax and have Ramirez & Castillo as deadweight.
I could see Dombrowski doing something like this,
to Tampa
SP Jay Groome
3B Michael Chavis
1B Josh Ockimey
DH Hanley Ramirez
to Boston
DH Alex Dickerson
and though it would be a little out of character for Tampa to take on bad salary- (1) we haven’t really seen Tampa rebuild and what that looks like and (2) they might end up having a lot of budget room if there are more moves left.
The deal above would get Boston closer to the tax line- a Castillo trade away. I’m assuming Groome is a 50 FV and Chavis/Ockimey are 40 or 45- so near $40+m in value. Three incoming corner bats for Tampa would perhaps correlate to their moves to drop corner players, and perhaps ownership would want to see salary moved before taking on a bad contract like Ramirez. Ramirez has a NTC but maybe he would waive it for PT or if the Rays committed to eating the money and flipping him somewhere he’s wanted.
It’s hard to figure why Tampa would designate Dickerson now (and at all) if it’s not related to some larger move.
Think you mean Corey Dickerson, Alex Dickerson plays for the Padres. There is no way the Rays would take on Hanley Ramirez and his 22m contract. They designated Dickerson because he’s been with TB for 2 years now and for a year and a half of that he has been a player with .243 batting average and an OBP around .285.
I can’t see any motivation for that trade, on either side. Plus, it’s predicated on the assumption that Tampa will take on a salary dump — which they won’t — and on the assumption that Boston cares about the Luxury Tax this year — which it doesn’t.
Side note: Castillo isn’t on the 40-man roster and doesn’t count against the Luxury Tax.
“The Rays designated Dickerson for assignment to goose along trade negotiations, and something will probably get done, but even if it doesn’t, and Dickerson is just let go, the Rays will owe him one-sixth of his salary”
And for those confused, players on option in the minors are paid one-sixth of their MLB salary (given they were DFA’d or optioned). Hence the one-sixth.
Unless some of the young pitchers are bette than expected, I would think 72-90 is more like it. It could be last place in the division.
lol
You are now forever in a race to keep up with the everchanging landscape of the Rays win projections.
Good luck, sir.
Back to the drawing board. Better wait until you see who they get for KK too.
Thanks Jeff! Any thoughts on what kind of season Mallex Smith will have, if he plays full-time?
That’s what I love about these Rays payrolls, man. Team revenues keep getting higher, Ray’s stay in the same range.
awrite awrite awrite
Dickerson is obviously on his way to get some Aerosmith tickets. It’s his number one priority this summer.
Well, no, but the Twins don’t share a division with the Yankees and Red Sox or even the (possibly) sneaky-good Blue Jays. They have the Indians, sure, but then they’re looking down at three teams that are to one extent or another the Central’s version of the Rays. All the Rays have to pick up cheap wins is, maybe, the Orioles.
Which is not to say I disagree with the tenor or specifics of your article, and I realize that was kind of a throw-away line anyway, but in a league with unbalanced schedules the divisional context matters. And that’s true even when the projections arrive at the same win-total while taking the schedule into account, because as we know the projections tend to bunch teams in the most-probable middle whereas real-world results always have more outliers. When you have three potentially bad teams in your division, you have a much better chance at least one of them is going to go all fire-sale (or “bring up the kids to learn at the big league level”) and finish far worse than the pre-season projections estimated; those losses have to go somewhere and some of them are going to be easy wins for you. That’s the source of some of that un-projected spread in win totals, and that’s a reason to be more enthusiastic about the Twins’ chances vs the Rays for a wild card spot.
So I don’t often disagree with Jeff quite this much, but…I really disagree.
Trading Odorizzi, okay, that makes sense. The guy was busted, they had a ton of pitching depth, their projection actually improved because they dumped him. No complaints here.
But the Dickerson DFA? I like Cron more than most but Dickerson managed to put up 2.5 WAR last year despite DHing half the time. That’s really tough to do! Dickerson is simply a much better hitter than Cron, whether you look at past performance or the projections.
There’s just not a great way to spin this. If the Rays wanted to win, they could have traded for Cron and kept Dickerson. His salary was only $6 million…that’s a pretty good deal. Furthermore, if they wanted to save that amount of money they could have non-tendered Hechevarria or Brad Miller. Dan Szymborski wrote something on twitter like “if you’re only planning on getting value from pre-arb players, that’s not a sustainable way to run a team” and I agree, but getting rid of one of the better players you have going through the arbitration process is the really weird one.
Jeff says something to the effect of “you know, the Rays are really smart, maybe we should give them the benefit of the doubt on this.” I’m beginning to question exactly how much deference we should give them in the post-Friedman era. The trade for Hechevarria really made me wonder, and this one is a super-head scratcher.
If no one was willing to trade anything good for Dickerson, then if they wanted to win they should have held onto him, who is clearly more valuable than whatever they’re trotting out at DH to replace him. And if they wanted to cut salary then why did they tender all those guys at the beginning of the offseason?
EDIT: One more thought–I really do like Dickerson, and I think some smart team is about to get lucky by picking up Dickerson on the cheap. The Astros were the team that first popped into my head–he’d be a nice spot for them at DH if they don’t think Gattis will hit. The Twins would be a good spot if they don’t believe in Kennys Vargas or Robbie Grossman (I kind of like both). He’d probably be an upgrade on Kendrys Morales in Toronto. And if all else fails, I bet the White Sox might be interested in taking him on at that salary.
Agreed- don’t see the sense in Cron. Does he has encouraging EV or something other than a decent 2nd half?
Who is getting the corner OF opportunity? I assume Mallex Smith is first up in a corner spot unless Kiermeier is also moved. Lefty Justin Williams seems a very interesting guy to get a look later in the year, but hasn’t played above AA yet. Johnny Fields maybe another option.
It’s not just the 2nd half. Dickerson had an average of .243 with an OBP of .285 for 3/4 of the time he was on the TB roster. Cron put up 1.6 WAR in 2016 even though he only had 445 PAs and was DH for many of those, plus his second half in 2017 compiled with his 2016 stats are the exact opposite of DIckerson’s 2nd half and his 2016 stats. Overall for the past two years, Dickerson playing LF and DH with Cron playing 1b and DH, Cron has 2.1 WAR in 818 PAs while Dickerson has a 4.1 in 1177 PAs. While it still isn’t 100% equal because LF gets higher totals than 1b for WAR, it’s very close overall and they see Dickerson going down while Cron is going up. I mean, Cron with full time ABs will be pretty close to the same power numbers and average as Dickerson anyways. The last two years if you extrapolate for equal PAs Cron would have 46 HRs to Dickersons 41, with close to the same batting average and OBP.
So I like Cron, but he is a full-time first baseman. For his career, he has over 3 times as many PAs at first as at DH, and those came almost exclusively before 2016. In fact, much of his value comes from the fact that UZR loves his work at first base. As a hitter, Cron’s 2016 was worse than Dickerson’s 2017.
I really like the Cron acquisition, but not if it means ditching Dickerson.
The problem is that neither Mallex Smith nor Bauers have the arm for right field, so it’s going to be a weird season defensively for them.
There’s a little nugget about Cron about the 2nd half that I think is really important to why the Rays dealt for him (and why I think it was really foolish for the Rays to give up on him): His exit velocity went way up in the second half. So he wasn’t just getting lucky.
One thing I find amazing about the Cron trade/Dickerson DFA is that both teams somehow managed to make their teams worse, both now and for next year, and all for a couple of million dollars. This is classic “penny wise, pound foolish” behavior.
I might not have been clear enough, which is my fault. The Dickerson DFA is of course not driven by the motivation to win. Dickerson was DFA’d because of the money. That’s it — they want out from under the $5 – 6 million. Ideally, Dickerson would be traded for something young and neat, but in this market that doesn’t seem very likely, because these types of players are widely available.
What I do believe, however, is that the Rays won’t miss Dickerson very much. Now, I don’t like him as much as you do. And clearly this was all written before the Souza trade. But here’s what I think happened: ownership wanted a payroll reduction, and the front office cut payroll without weakening the team significantly. Cron does fit this roster a little better, and I assume that a replacement for Souza will now be found, among the late-offseason bargains. I don’t think there’s going to be any more selling.
So, this isn’t all a reflection of the Rays’ intention to win. A team fully committed to winning wouldn’t have to slash payroll in the first place. But there’s a separation between ownership and the front office. Ownership wanted to invest a little less, relative to 2017. I think the front office has found a way without totally destroying any hopes of 2018 contention. If payroll had to be slashed, I don’t think Dickerson or Odorizzi will be missed all that much. Souza is a far bigger blow, but that’s new information, and we’ll see what happens next to fill the outfield void.
Thanks for the response. I like that the writers here respond to pseudonymous commenters.
If you think Dickerson’s first half was a mirage and you think Cron’s exit velocity in the 2nd half is real, then yeah they’re not going to miss him at all. I actually do think Cron’s 2nd half is real, so that’s not the issue I have. Regarding Dickerson, he performed similarly in Colorado before, so I think it was him getting comfortable as a DH (his regression to a league-average batting line coincided with moving back to left field, although he was actually pretty good in left field). If you don’t believe that, and you buy Cron’s 2nd half then you’re replacing a 120 wRC+ guy at DH with a 120 wRC+ at first, which is objectively more valuable, but to do that you have to squint pretty hard because by both past performance and future projection Dickerson looks like a more valuable player by overall player value.
Okay, that’s a difference of opinion, but it’s fine. I get it. What I don’t get, and still don’t get even after your response, is why they would DFA him instead of Brad Miller or Hechevarria if it is actually all about money. And this is why I think there’s a lack of direction going on here. They tendered Dickerson, so they had an opportunity to move on from him earlier and decided not to. And then they sent the most valuable of the three packing, despite the fact that (a) Cron is well suited to replace Miller at first and (b) the Rays have Adames at AAA who will probably come up after the super two deadline and they also acquired Duffy to play SS not third. It’s like the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.
My guess is that they don’t see all that much of a difference between Miller and Dickerson, and Miller offers some more defensive flexibility. Could’ve easily been one or the other, but Miller can play around the infield. As for Hechavarria, while the bat is underwhelming, I have to think the Rays like his defensive ability — he’s an actual true shortstop, while Duffy isn’t, and Adames might not be. Could see Adames end up at second base, and the Rays are trying to field a good team defense in 2018. Dickerson hasn’t been a defensive asset. His skills are more easily replaced.
The Rays aren’t finishing with 78 wins in 2018. 72-90 is about right for the rebuilding Rays.
I wonder why Dickerson’s contract in particular was shed as opposed to Hechavaria’s $5.9 or Miller’s $4.5m- Cron’s $2.3m doesn’t make a ton of sense either, a 28 year old projected for 0.5 WAR.
Tampa could have saved $14.7m by just passing on Cron and releasing or trading cheap Hechavaria & Miller. The 3 players are projected for 1575 PAs next season, roughly full time roles for each- and a sum total of 2.6 combined WAR. That’s pretty awful, and while I respect the Rays I’m not sure there is some breakout or upside angle that they are on to with these guys.
Are they waiting to dump Hech & Miller after the super 2 deadline when Bauers, Arroyo and Adames come up? Even so, it would seem to make sense to just dump Hech & Miller now as they aren’t much better than inhouse alternatives like Schimpf, Wendle, Robertson, etc.
I don’t take issues with most of the Rays’ moves per se, but it seems like they often sell low on their own players and buy high on other organizations’ little-known players buried on the depth charts. The transactions aren’t *bad* in a vacuum – they are suboptimal in the context of a market that should include more teams than the returns they receive suggest – for example, it’s hard to believe that there was only one team who was willing to trade a 40 FV prospect for two arb years of a starting pitcher who has been above average for most of his career.
That being said, I think they just pretty good value for two years of Souza in the context of a market that is down on power hitting and on corner OFs, so maybe the Rays’ strategical acumen is more up and down than I have been led to believe over the last 7 months or so.
I think I’m in the minority here but I think Odorizzi is being penalized way too much for one down year, aided by injury. To give up a young, cost-controlled pitcher with three seasons of 2+ WAR on his resume for practically nothing is foolish IMO. Back end starting pitching still seems to be retaining value as Cashner and Garcia both just signed $10M deals. I would rather have Odorizzi than both of those pitchers straight up, never mind for $3.5M less and one more cost controlled year.
Glad I’m not a Rays fan.
hard to get worse when you are already at the bottom