Bradley’s Buzz: Vazquez-for-Cabrera discussed & dissected
Javier, we hardly knew ye. But we liked what we saw. (AJC photo by Curtis Compton)
You’ve heard what Frank Wren had to say, and maybe you’ve even read my cool-headed thoughts on the matter. Today we leave it to outsiders. Or, in point of fact, to folks like ESPN.com’s Insiders. We start with the estimable Keith Law, who says the Braves didn’t get completely fleeced. (Link requires registration.) Writes Law:
“The key player in this trade for Atlanta is Arodys Vizcaino, who becomes one of the top five prospects in the Braves’ system and gives them a trio of potential No. 1 or No. 2 starters in the low minors with Julio Teheran and Randall Delgado. Vizcaino, who pitched at short-season Staten Island this past season, has a live fastball that sits 91-93 mph and touches a little higher. He throws a curveball that flashes plus and should miss bats at the big league level when he reaches it. He already has good feel for pitching and just needs experience and a little cleanup in his delivery, as he often finds his arm slot drifting down, at which point he starts to sling the ball instead of just throwing it.
“The Braves also get a few years of control of Melky Cabrera, a capable fourth outfielder who can play an average center field and has a plus arm. I don’t think Cabrera has the offensive skills to play every day in a corner outfield spot, particularly because of his willingness to expand the zone and chase pitches that most hitters wouldn’t consider. Atlanta could use him as a platoonmate for Matt Diaz, a right-handed hitter who has a 200-point career platoon split, or as a backup at all three outfield spots, playing him behind Diaz, Nate McLouth and — assuming he makes the club — Jason Heyward, the top prospect in baseball.
“Cabrera was a Super Two [eligible for arbitration with less than three years of service] this past offseason and should earn between $2.5 million and $3 million this offseason in arbitration, which is fairly pricey for a fourth outfielder. The third piece going to the Braves, Mike Dunn, is a converted outfielder with arm strength — he hit 94 repeatedly when I saw him in the Arizona Fall League — but he has 40 command at best on the 20-80 scale. He also has an inconsistent slider with some late break but that he has trouble finishing. It’s possible he’ll improve his command and/or control with more experience, but after nearly 400 pro innings, he’s still below-average in both departments.
“Atlanta’s need to make this deal dates back a full year to the signing of Kenshin Kawakami, to whom the team owes more than $13 million in the next two years. The Braves signed Kawakami despite having Tommy Hanson knocking on the door of the majors last winter and Tim Hudson returning from injury — a situation perfect for a one-year stopgap but one that made signing Kawakami [along with Derek Lowe] superfluous. Kawakami is untradable given his contract, and to clear a roster spot and payroll, they had to move their best starter from 2009. It’s a salary dump, and one in which Atlanta is lucky to get a young pitcher as good as Vizcaino, who is among the top 100 prospects in the game.”
And now we turn to the equally estimable Jayson Stark, who believes (as many have suggested) the Braves aren’t finished dealing. (Link also requires registration.) Writes Mr. Stark:
“Let’s characterize the Braves’ next move this way: The [Javier] Vazquez deal frees up about $9 million for the Braves to spend on upgrading their offense — Vazquez’s $11.5-million salary and the half-million in cash they’ll get from the Yankees, minus the $3 million or so Cabrera will make via arbitration. They’ll now look to use that surplus on an outfield bat, a first baseman or possibly both.
Johnny Damon is one possibility, particularly because his home in Orlando is within minutes of the Braves’ spring-training complex. Another option is free agent Xavier Nady, who could play first or the outfield and would come at a relatively low base because he is recovering from his second Tommy John surgery. Or the Braves could look to deal an outfielder — either Cabrera or possibly Jordan Schafer — for a bat. They’ve been linked in trade rumors to Florida’s Dan Uggla, who could potentially slide to first base.”
Writing for SI.com, Andrew Marchman also sees the Braves’ glass as being half-full. Quoth Mr. Marchman:
“The Braves got, it should be said, a better package for Vazquez than the Phillies did for Cliff Lee last week. The most important player they acquired is righthander Arodys Vizcaino , who, like any other teenage pitcher, is liable to break his team’s heart but who has, by all accounts, a serious chance at becoming a star.
“Melky Cabrera is a bad fit for the Braves, as they already have a crowded outfield and a very good center fielder, and most of Cabrera’s value is in his ability to provide vaguely average offense and solid defense in center, but at least he’s a valuable player who gives the team a lot of options. The third player, lefty Mike Dunn, is the proverbial live arm.
“For the Braves, the deal will be judged a success or failure based on what they do with the roughly $8 million that they freed up by moving Vazquez. They have enough starting pitching to sustain the loss, so if they can add a needed bat with that money and trade a spare outfielder to fill another need, they’ll likely come out ahead. If not, they’ll have missed an opportunity. But judged in its own right, this is a fair trade.”
Finally, Danny Knobler of CBSsports.com believes this deal could be a precursor to another. But not, apparently, the needed Big Bat Trade. Writes Mr. Knobler:
“The Braves always intended to trade either Vazquez or Derek Lowe for a much-needed bat. Cabrera could help them, but he’s not really that bat. So the Braves will take the approximately $9 million they save and keep shopping. They say they still can’t afford Matt Holliday or Jason Bay (and probably not even Johnny Damon), but who does that leave them with? Jermaine Dye? Marlon Byrd? Or another trade? [And] if the Braves believe that the 25-year-old Cabrera can be a long-term answer in center field, does that mean they’d make Jordan Schafer available in a trade?”
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217 comments Add your comment
F-105 Thunderchief
December 23rd, 2009
12:01 pm
Glaus = expensive and bad.
gcs
December 23rd, 2009
12:05 pm
Have you noticed that the Braves have yet to do the ol’ new-player-introduction-try-on-Braves-jersey-and-cap press conference with Melky? Maybe he’ll get shipped off somewhere else (hopefully).
.
Ted Striker
December 23rd, 2009
12:07 pm
Methinks Mark has access to a lot of links requiring registration.
raleighbravefan
December 23rd, 2009
12:07 pm
Gary and Don – Wren still has money and trading pieces. Why don’t you give the man a chance. Cox said last night on sirius/xm that there will probably be a big move or moves in the next few days. TAKE A BIG BREATH!
tm
December 23rd, 2009
12:08 pm
FW why do you keep signing 250 hitters? FRANK WREN you SUCK!!!!
Melvin Flowers Macon Georgia
December 23rd, 2009
12:10 pm
Here we go again for another losing season dealing with a bunch of losing owners want spend money and give away great talent for nothing. The Braves will not be a contender no time soon, we will do more booing this season than ever.
Sell the team or spend money to be a contender. Trade Derrick Lowe he got to go………………………
tm
December 23rd, 2009
12:10 pm
Frank Wren Sucks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Frank Wren Sucks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Frank Wren Sucks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Frank Wren Sucks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Robert Nephew
December 23rd, 2009
12:11 pm
The really inexplicable moves to me were the resigning of Hudson, and the signing of Wagner. If we had just let Hudson go, we’d have the same $8-9 million we do now for another bat, and we’d still have Vazquez. If we had passed on Wagner, we could have kept Soriano, who is younger and better than Wagner, and wound up costing about the same as Wagner. I just don’t see how Wren’s hasty decisions to resign Hudson and to sign Wagner have helped this team at all — they just painted him into a corner by leaving him with six starters and three potential closers.
bvillebaron
December 23rd, 2009
12:17 pm
Robert Nephew:
Just let Hudson go? Are you serious man? I will take Hudson over Vazquez any day and they got him for less money. I realize Wagner is older, but please don’t tell me Soriano (who also had his health issues at a much younger age and really only pitched one full year with the Braves which just happened to be the year he became arbitration eligible) is better than a healthy Wagner.
raleighbravefan
December 23rd, 2009
12:17 pm
Don – Again I will remind you that Cox was the GM that put together most of the team that went worst to first in 1991.
Random
December 23rd, 2009
12:48 pm
Christina Kahrl’s BP article that I posted earlier at 11:28 am was apparently in response to the following:
[Baseball] Prospectus Today
The Braves’ New World
by Joe Sheehan
I miss Ted Turner. Turner was controversial, brash, difficult, prone to mistakes of commission, prone to getting himself suspended, prone to making people really, really dislike him. Turner, however, had one trait that you had to respect: he wanted to win. Perhaps I value that too highly—I’m hypercompetitive myself, perhaps my worst trait—but I can forgive a lot of things if they’re done in a sincere effort to succeed.
I’m thinking about Turner today as I watch his Braves, owned by something called “Liberty Media,” actively lessen their chance at success in an effort to ensure that they have positive cashflow in 2010. Last week, the team gave away reliever Rafael Soriano, who has been dominant when healthy and would have been available to them on a one-year deal for about $8 million, for a lesser reliever, Jesse Chavez, with a 3.91 career ERA… at Triple-A. It’s 4.48 in the majors, in 82 innings, and he just turned 26 last season. We can baseball-talk all we want about Chavez’ K/BB ratio last year or Soriano’s injury history, but the trade was a salary dump. Liberty Media didn’t want to pay the money, and forced the Braves and Frank Wren to make the deal, and if it wasn’t quite that explicit, it didn’t need to be.
Today, we get the latest example of why Liberty’s ownership of the Braves is starting to make Jeffrey Loria’s stewardship of the Marlins look inspired. With six starting pitchers after the healthy return of and contract agreement with Tim Hudson, the Braves have been looking to strike a deal all winter that would swap a starter for a hitter. With little outside interest in Derek Lowe, however, the Braves instead executed another salary dump, trading their best pitcher last season, Javier Vazquez, also with one year left on his deal, to the Yankees for Melky Cabrera. There are prospects involved on both sides, but the lesson is the same: the Braves made themselves worse entirely so that Liberty Media wouldn’t possibly have to use the red font in its spreadsheets. Vazquez makes $11.5 million in 2010, Cabrera will make about $4 million, maybe a little less (I’m guessing here, because of Cabrera’s arbitration eligibility). That’s $7.5 million in Liberty’s pockets, on top of the $7.5 million they saved on Soriano, for $15 million saved in two trades that make the team worse by maybe four games, maybe more, in 2010. Not that four wins is pretty much the difference in making the playoffs and not in the NL just about every season, and not that Liberty Media cares. They care that the Braves have positive cashflow, and everything else is irrelevant.
This stinks, and it doesn’t stink because the Yankees just added an expensive player. It stinks because there’s no reason why the Braves had to make either trade other than that Liberty Media wants this division of its billon-dollar conglomerate to spend a certain amount of money, and no more than that. It doesn’t matter that the $15 million these deals saved may, perhaps will, be used to pay a Jason Bay or a Matt Holliday next year; that’s a pretty good use of the money by a team that missed the playoffs in 2009 because it went cheap in left field. The Braves could well have made both the investment in a left fielder and kept its best starting pitcher and best reliever, counting on on-field success to produce returns at the gate that pay for those investments or even return a profit on them.
This is the way you run a baseball team: you make investments in the on-field product that are to some extent speculative, and you do so knowing that the only thing that brings people to a park, eyeballs to a screen, is winning. When you win, you collect the return on the investment you make. This has been true for decades in baseball, and it remans so today, as the Phillies could no doubt explain if you could hear them over the ringing of the cash registers. Hell, it’s been true in business for centuries, but for some reason we hear talk about “budgets” and decide that Major League Baseball teams are exempt from the normal practices of business. You make investments with an eye towards maximizing returns, and everything else—pointing to the Yankees, whining about the arbitration process, demonizing Scott Boras, lying about revenues—is just a distraction from that central point.
A corporate owner with no ties to baseball doesn’t want that kind of risk, however. A corporate owner with no ties to baseball looks at last year’s revenues, last year’s expenses, sets a budget that locks in a certain amount of profit, and runs away. For years, men and women owned baseball teams and ran them as businesses, but they also acted in a way that acknowledged the truth about the job, that owning the team carried intangible benefits that owning a factory or a grocery store or a car dealership didn’t. Owning the team provided a level of attention that had value, and owning a winning team made that all the better. Liberty Media, however, isn’t going to bask in the glow of ownership or success, so there are no intangible benefits. Liberty Media doesn’t even own the Braves because it wanted to add a baseball team to its portfolio; it owns them because there was a tax advantage to taking them in exchange for their Time Warner stock. I think A. Bartlett Giamatti wrote a poem about this back in the 1980s.
It’s not that we should be surprised by Liberty’s behavior. It’s that we should be shaming Bud Selig for allowing this to happen on his watch. Time and again, Selig has made it clear that he doesn’t want owners he cannot control, owners who will put winning above adhering to an industry-wide effort to tamp down labor costs. Just to name one example, he has repeatedly worked to keep Mark Cuban from owning a team, while blithely allowing a Liberty Media into the fold. Can there be any question but that Cuban would be a better owner, for both the fans of a given team and the industry as a whole than Liberty has been? Selig prefers the latter, which tells you so very much about how he views baseball.
This, the ongoing creep of bad ownership situations, is the industry’s biggest problem. The effects of ownership disconnected from the on-field success of the team permeate deeper and have longer-lasting negative effects than anything else within the game. The PED “problem” is a hangnail compared to the tumor that is Liberty Media, owning a team solely because there was a tax advantage for doing so, running that team like a corner grocery, passing on the opportunity for success because that opportunity comes with the risk of a loss along the lines of 10 percent of team revenue, or maybe a tenth of a percent of Liberty Media’s bottom line. Selig’s eagerness to see this kind of ownership in the game, moving the owners further along the path from competitors to partners, has been a huge negative for fans. It’s been particularly bad for fans of the Braves, essentially a ward under Liberty; or the Astros, with Drayton McLane signed on to the idea of draft slots; or the Marlins, who spent 15 years operating with one goal: get a half-billion dollars of your tax dollars into their pockets.
The difference between the Yankees and the Braves isn’t revenue. The difference between the Yankees and the Braves is ownership priorities. If MLB had 30 owners like the Steinbrenners or Arte Moreno or Mike Ilitch, the game wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be a damn sight better than it is now, because an ownership group that wants to win is a fan’s best friend. Liberty Media, which had $10 billion in revenue (warning: PDF) in 2008, decided that the Braves could only spend so much money in 2010, no matter how close the team might be to a championship. For that decision, Frank Wren has had to make two trades that will cost them three to five wins, wins that, given their team and the competition, could well be the difference between making the playoffs and not. Even replacing those wins by signing Bay or Holliday just leaves them where they were, instead of making a real charge at a winnable division.
The Braves’ decision is even more frustrating when you consider that the Phillies made a huge blunder in valuing $9 million instead of Cliff Lee’s services, a ridiculous decision that will cost them about five to six wins in 2010 (the approximate gap between Lee’s value and that of Jamie Moyer). The Phillies managed to turn acquiring Roy Halladay into a marginal upgrade, leaving the door open for the Braves to steal the division by making smart moves. Instead, the Braves dumped a pitcher well worth his contract for an outfielder who doesn’t have the bat to be an everyday left fielder, and doesn’t solve the Braves’ biggest problem, which is the need for an impact hitter. I’m starting to think that the new market inefficiency is having the phone numbers of general managers in the NL East.
Baseball is in trouble, but not for the reasons you think. It’s not in trouble because a handful of teams make and spend a lot of money. It’s in trouble because a handful of teams are run by people or entitites who really couldn’t care less about baseball. You want to tell me that the Pirates or Nationals or Royals should have a $40 million payroll, well I’m right here with you. Bad teams with no hope of being good in the short term should hoard cash until such time as spending it will make a difference. There are haves and have-nots, but what some “have” are owners motivated by the prospect of on-field success. Every fan deserves that, but until Bud Selig agrees, we’re going to be stuck with some teams trying harder than others to win, some trying less, and everyone getting what they deserve.
Hank44
December 23rd, 2009
8:31 pm
The way things are going so far this winter, why not bring back Smoltz.
erik
December 25th, 2009
4:11 pm
ya
Neil
December 29th, 2009
10:33 am
I’ve been following the Braves since 1956 and they are a good and capable organization. They have had different owners and managers over the years and they have caused (guess what)different occurences. We however find ourselves here 2009/10 with Bobby Cox and Frank Wren. I mostly don’t care for Cox’s style but he is not stupid nor does he have a lack of exper. He also wants to go out a winner. I like Wren alot. Last year we yelled over pitching and he built it up and made Atlanta noticable. He took that pitching and traded one that is a solid pitcher with a career year and has started to make us better yet again. This is to be the year that we get hitters whereas last was pitching. (remember we have to do this slowly and on a budget and with the guess in mind as to when do our two major rookies come into play). Melky offers alot to us if we keep him and was good enough to start with the Yankees for several years. He is 25 and runs as well as Diaz or better, much younger and less expensive. Oh yeah and switch hits and plays better D. I like Diaz but thats the fact. Atlanta has not finished yet and will never get everyone that we want them to get. Glaus is a gamble with major upside and his age, size and exper. will make Chipper better. Our young rookie outfielder will arrive at about the same time as last year and will have the same effect. We will still pick up one more mid to older major hitter for a year or two rental. All the while building a drop dead major pitching staff only a few years away with a 5 tool outfielder and a sleek fielding 1b both that can hit. We are slowing making our way back with half the financing as many.
Neil
December 29th, 2009
10:59 am
and what is all of this about Damon. He has no arm whatsoever, is 37-38 and hits well at hitter friendly Yankee playground, and you list him as a dream for us to answer our hitter prob. with. My gosh you should read your own articles and give up drinking.
Darrel Ormes
December 30th, 2009
11:27 am
Mark: I believe the braves had a good fill in David Ross. 128 at bats, 9 homers. If given 500 at bats, he would average 35 for the year. He would have been cheaper and I believe had filled there need. Lowe had 15 wins, average for him, I would have dumped the pitcher from Japan. Medlin would be a great fill in if needed. 2011 is coming very soon. I would strongly think of a new manager now. I would hire John Smothz as manager, Pitching coach Tom Glavine: Hitting coach: Chipper Jones, Bench coach: Dale Murphy. Completely new, and a fire that would help in an area vital to a team. Think hard on this. If you have the ear of the powers to be, lobby for them. I love your sports writting.
Darrel Ormes
December 30th, 2009
11:28 am
Ross would have been at first base.