The calendar has turned to February, and the Pirates have still not signed a free agent to a guaranteed contract.
That makes them one of five teams -- including the Athletics, Reds, Diamondbacks and Rockies -- who have only signed players to minor-league deals. Nobody expected them to make a huge splash, but at this point last year they had inked Luke Maile and Guillermo Heredia to Major League contracts. Jarrod Dyson was, well, still exploring his options at the time, but eventually took what he could get with a one-year deal with the Pirates.
They’re in the market to potentially add to the roster, with Ben Cherington identifying starting pitching and the outfield as particular areas they’d like to upgrade. Not that those upgrades will make a significant impact for this season. The Pirates are very likely headed to a last place finish in the worst division in baseball.
But those free agent signings could be flipped for prospects at the deadline. The Pirates have done that the last two years, even. In 2019 they signed Jordan Lyles during the offseason and then traded him to the Brewers for Cody Ponce in late July. Last year, Dyson was shipped to the White Sox for the rest of their international bonus pool allotment. That’s hardly a lot, but the Pirates were able to make several similar moves to pull off a late splash in that market, including right-hander Po-Yu Chen.
The Pirates are considering players who could contribute for a couple months and then get traded, but it isn’t always so easy to rope those types of players in.
“Players are really smart and certainly free agents are really smart,” Cherington said recently. “They know what's going on. They know if they sign and for whatever reason, the team is not in contention at the deadline and they're performing well, it probably means their names (come) up in a trade. I think most guys are prepared for that and we're honest about it. There's no reason to hide that.”
Looking back at the players the Pirates traded, Lyles was given a chance to start. That’s worth the risk of maybe being traded. Dyson was faced with the choice of either signing with the Pirates or potentially nobody. That’s worth the possibility of getting dealt. For a lot of players though, it isn’t just as simple as offering more money. It has to be the right opportunity to potentially get up and move again in a couple months. That drastically reduces potential trade value.
Lyles and Dyson were both heading out the door at the end of the season, so getting Ponce and chipping in to acquire basically the equivalent of an extra second-round high school pitcher is a pretty good return. But that is just about it – only pretty good. Ponce was traded partially because he was Rule 5 eligible that winter and the Brewers didn’t want to keep him on the roster. The Pirates could have potentially picked him up that way. Dyson brought back less than one-fifth the money it took to sign Chen.
That might be the best way to describe these “sign and trade” deals. Players who signed in the offseason and were traded during the following regular season. They happen often, but they are often inconsequential.
Last year, there were 33 trades leading up to the Aug. 31 deadline. Of those, 13 were for players who had signed as free agents the year before, or roughly 40%. I’m excluding players who were acquired via waiver claim and trades that happened the offseason before, or deals that had a team sending a player who had signed that winter and a second player who had previously been with that organization. Here’s a true way to gage how much a sign and trade player brings back.
Spoilers: It’s not a lot…
Two notes before we continue. I used FanGraphs’ prospect rankings and future value because I feel they have the best analysis of players outside a team’s top 10 or 15 prospects. The “top 30” prospect idea is good shorthand, but not every team has 30 viable prospects. Some have only a dozen or so, some have 40 or 50. Going strictly by scouting grades will acknowledge prospects outside a team’s top 30 who have potential and not oversell a non-prospect who was in a bad farm system’s top 20.
Second, I couldn’t find which players came back in the Robinson Chirinos or Josh Osich trades. With Osich, I would hazard a guess and say he was traded for cash. Chirinos and Todd Frazier were technically traded in separate deals between the same teams minutes apart. Maybe the Rangers only got the one player back. Who knows?
In those 13 trades I listed above, at least 15 prospects changed hands (potentially 17 based on how Chirinos and Osich shake out). Of those 15, the highest graded one was third baseman Hudson Potts, a 45-grade third baseman. One was 40+, four were 40, three were 35+ and six were not graded.
So even though 40% of the deadline deals were sign and trades, 40% of the minor-leaguers traded were non-prospects. Almost like these were low risk, and thus low-reward opportunities.
Now the 2020 trade deadline was unlike any other one for a multitude of reasons, including that teams were buying players for a month rather than two. Yes, it was for a greater percentage of the season, but teams would have rental players for half as many games than usual. Perhaps that drove the asking price down.
So let’s dive deeper. FanGraphs’ prospect board keeps track of how prospects were ranked every year since 2017. Let’s look at the non-waiver trade deadline from 2017-2019 and see what these types of players brought back.
One thing to note is there were only 24 sign and trades during these three years, so 2020’s trade deadline was a bit of an outlier. Or maybe it’s the start of a trend. Given the number of short-term deals across the league this winter, I’d believe the latter. Time will tell.
Again, teams didn’t part with highly-rated prospects. There were two 45-grade hitters who were dealt in 2018. One was for Mike Moustakas, a legitimate power bat. The other was for the Rockies acquiring relief pitcher Seung-Hwan Oh, a very on-brand move for a franchise that just doesn’t seem to understand how trades work.
But the majority of these players that traded hands weren’t prospects. Guys who were either ranked 35+, which is the fringiest of fringe, or lower. I only put cash in the deal when the player was traded for just that, cash, and nothing else. (International money is its own bargaining chip and was counted as such.) Teams were more likely to get pocket change than a player who projects to be a real contributor.
And why should teams give up good prospects to get these guys? They could have signed them during the offseason. Sure, sometimes a player gets hurt or underperforms and it creates an unexpected hole, but there are other avenues they can go. They could trade for a rental who has been with a club for a couple years. Acquire someone who has some team control. There are other options available during the trade deadline that might not have been available during the offseason. Those are worth exploring.
With all that said, should this still be an opportunity the Pirates should pursue? Absolutely. Every once in a while a 40-grade turns into a good reliever or platoon. They could also continue to develop into better players. The Pirates are putting a lot of eggs into that player development basket. Here’s a chance to pick up another egg or two.
There’s just two things to take into consideration. The first is to not bite off more than they can chew. With any player they sign, they have to be prepared to keep them for the whole season in case a trade doesn’t materialize. The second is don’t’ expect it to speed up the rebuild that much, if at all.