JotCast | Ben Clemens Trade Value Series Chat -7/26/24

Ben Clemens Trade Value Series Chat -7/26/24

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Ben Clemens

10:00

Hey everybody, welcome

10:01

For today's chat, I'm going to be going deeper on every question than normal. I imagine a lot of the questions are similar (what about player x, why was player y ranked like that, etc) so I'm going to try to go a little bit more in depth on each one, so expect longer answers and a little more evidence than normal. I'm gonna try to pack this with content as much as I can for the next hour and a half or so

Let's get started

Nate

10:02

No mention of Devers seemed a bit surprising to me. Under team control for a decade, still only 27, consistently posting batting lines 20-40% better than average. Not a fantastic defender but not a total butcher. What was your reasoning there

Ben Clemens

10:02

Yeah, plenty of Devers questions, so I'll go here first

10:04

I can tell you specifically why he's not on the list in the 40's near some other stars: I compared him to Harper and Seager and that comparison was not that close to me. I'd prefer both of their offensive lines to his, I don't think he has more defensive value, the contract isn't better. So like.... he can't be ahead of those guys

10:05

I'm not saying he's a bad hitter but I think he's a touch overrated. Like in 2024, he's the 12th-best hitter in baseball, in his best year

10:06

Over the past 2 years, 18th, 3 years 13th, 4 years 15th

really nice player, absolutely, but he's, like you said, 20-40% above average

10:07

On the Harper point specifically, I don't think Devers has more defensive value than Harper. He's a below-average third baseman, probably a 30 on the scouting scale, consistently big negative grades on every metric and the eye test agrees.

We've talked a lot about how first base and DH are probably over-penalized by positional adjustments, and I definitely take that into account in my rankings, I'm not just looking at WAR

10:09

and if Harper is over-penalized, a hitter like Devers is the kind of guy who's over-rewarded. A minus defender at a not-super-challenging spot. Realistically I think he's similarly useful defensively. But he's seven runs better than Harper in DEF over the lats two years. So I applied a bit of a hit there to true everything up

As for why he wasn't in the honorable mentions section, he easily could have been, I just had to draw the line somewhere. He had the largest contract and lowest projections so I just lopped him off hte list

He was definitely considered

Kenshin Kawakami

10:10

Is this going to be a 1 hour EDLC victory lap? Well deserved imo

Ben Clemens

10:10

Nah, I feel good about Elly's ranking and eh, I think my work there is done

Kenshin Kawakami

10:10

Does Michael Harris fall down the list last year if there’s no improvement in either his plate discipline or his ground ball rate? Floor is still so high but the bay simultaneously feels quite shaky but also not near its ceiling

Ben Clemens

10:10

100% yes. Harris was a really hard player to place, and while Robert produced the strongest disagreements because he's a polarizing player, I think that people's disagreements on Harris might have been greater in terms of absolute value

10:11

I'm always trying to manage my own biases in this exercise because that's really an easy way to look silly, and I definitely tend to like defensive players on cost-controlled deals a lot, even if their hitting is inconsistent. Look at where i had Ke'Bryan Hayes all these years

10:12

Not all teams value the same things but plenty of teams think that way as well, and Harris is just a really great combination of a ton of things that are good in isolation

10:13

It's also one of these cases where the projections aren't worried about him hitting, or at least they think he's probably still a 3.5-4 win player even if he doesn't completely come back offensively, and then you have to ask yourself how much you trust the projections

10:14

I think that if it's 2025 and he's still hitting below league average b/c he can't lift the ball, those projections won't still be there

so this problem is going to take care of itself

Orange Fire

10:14

Self-centered question by this Astros fan: Why didn't Yainer Diaz make the list, even as a HM?

Ben Clemens

10:15

He was on my list, but pretty far down. I'm not a believer in the defense at all, and I don't really think the Astros are either

10:16

That puts a LOT of pressure on his bat, because I'm just skeptical that he can stay behind the plate in the long run

I didn't think he cleared the bar for me there

10:17

I think that Logan O'Hoppe is probably a more interesting catcher name I left off, and that one was pretty cuspy for me. Similar issues to Diaz where I'm worried that he might not be able to stay at catcher in the long run. He looks below average kind of across the board behind the plate. But I like his bat better

Eli

10:18

Re:Volpe's ranking - are you factoring in the Cashman regime's skill in breaking young hitters (Bird, Frazier, Sanchez, Torres, Andujar, etc.)?

Ben Clemens

10:19

Haha no, I did not factor that in. I actually found Volpe to be really interesting because I was surprised how many people really like him. I'm not super sold, I consistently rank good-glove shortstops highly in this list because I think that matches their real-world evaluations but I am not a believer in Volpe's bat

I think that the industry is, at least more than I am

10:20

One thing that is really tricky to weight is that sometimes prospects just don't hit for a year or two because they're bad, and sometimes they don't hit for a year or two and then they just fix it

10:21

obviously you want to make some kind of probabilistic estimation and keep changing it as you get more evidence, but that's what the projection systems do, and they sure seem to still like Volpe. I weight recent performance a bit more heavily than the models do, I'd say, but certainly lots of teams still think he'll hit

Phil

10:21

Any consideration to Houck? Another ongoing breakout, but I feel like I'd take him over most pitchers with fewer years of team control remaining.

Ben Clemens

10:21

Yeah he was #51

10:22

I think he is essentially indistinguishable from the pitchers at the bottom of the list in terms of value. Someone had to be the first out and this was my best guess at an ordering, I don't feel confident in it at all

Dan

10:22

If you tried to trade a player on the list 1 for 1 for another player on the list how likely would both teams say no since you take a bigger risk trading away the star you know?

Ben Clemens

10:22

Gary Wise asked me this question on Twitter and I thought it was really good

I think both teams would probably say no almost all of the time (he asked specifically about Skubal for Gilbert)

10:23

There's some real 'the problem with lemons' effect here where if they're trading their guy, what do they know about him that you don't?

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