Hustle Loyalty Respect sends: SP Yordano Ventura ($23), 2017 5th Round Pick
Rocky Mtn Oysters sends: 2017 3rd Round Pick
Jordan’s thoughts: I’ll take a potentially useful pitcher for any back half draft pick any day. I get why HLR wants to get something in return for someone worth cutting, but this just makes crazy sense for Dusty.
Andrew’s thoughts: I’m not that into Yordano Ventura, but I certainly prefer him to a random 3rd round pick. Especially if you get 2014-15 Yordano.
Dusty has $522 of auction budget and Ventura only costs $23, so in some ways, this is just getting Yordano for free and still having the full $500 complement to work with (well, $499). The third round pick is something but I imagine with a little Google searching, you can find a guy in the fifth round or out of free agency at some point during the season that’ll be comparable. Still, if you’re just going to cut Yordano anyway, why not get a little something for him instead?
This is another scenario where, ideally, Yordano costs $13 instead of $23, so that if he (a) gets back to 2014-15, or better yet (b) improves on 2014-15 the way he was expected to in 2016, he’s priced to where you’re getting ample surplus. But again, given Dusty’s cap situation, that won’t even begin to matter until after next season. Honestly, for the mere cost of a third-round pick, Dusty could have pulled this trade off simply to ensure Yordano makes it to auction and can be bought for cheaper, and that’s still fine.
I can say that a year from now, if I’m in HLR’s shoes and have to make serious cuts, I’d like to think I’m just cutting a guy like Yordano rather than giving him away for a 3rd rounder. I mean, I get that “something is better than nothing,” but I think that on a spectrum of something to nothing, a third round pick is much closer to nothing. And again, is the guy you’re drafting 38th overall instead of 76th overall going to be markedly different? Yeah, sure, that’s a big jump. But we’re going to be 275 or so prospects deep by the time that 38th overall pick is made. Players are tiers anyway, and for prospects, those tiers are fairly arbitrary and subjective. I think the 38th pick and 76th pick are likely to be the same tier of player (a 45 FV type prospect). I’d rather throw the player back and hope three or four of my opponents bid themselves silly in the off-season or give myself the slim opportunity to win the guy back myself for cheaper.