Reading the "Dick Stuart" thread (or what it has evolved into), I wonder about the trading philosophies of perennial losing teams, the 1950s/60s Pirates, Senators, Red Sox, Mets, KC A’s, Cubs, Astros, etc., who some of us seem to have grown up rooting for. We compete for "My Team Sucked the Most!" titles because, well, what ELSE do we have to take pride in, but I wonder if our simmering resentment of the trading policies isn’t just blaming the victim.  (My team, if you care, definitely sucked the most, as seen by the acronym "My Entire Team Sucks.")

These were all bad teams, in various Calcuttan holes, with many sub-standard players and often weak farm systems and sometimes little money to go around, so all they could do was trade a lot and hope it worked out, which it rarely did. But what is the optimal trade policy, other than "Get Lucky," for a weak organization?

Bill castigated his KC A’s for their high turnover rate, trading their Manny Jimenezes the instant they had a decent season, but of course we also blame our lousy teams for hanging on to their mediocrities too long, letting them go only after they no longer have any trade appeal to a potential trading partner. As an over-arching philosophy, is it better to favor trading your young potential stars as soon as other teams express interest in them, or hang onto to them like Wily Coyote clinging to a cliff-ledge with one fragile fingernail?

It’s no good to respond "It depends," although that’s a sensible answer, because "It depends" just signifies that no particular philosophy applies, and all that matters is results: if trading young potential stars works out, then it’s a good move, and if not, then not, which skirts the issue of trading philosophies, and puts us back on square one, "Get Lucky."

We can all remember trades that worked out well and trades that worked poorly of both kinds, sometimes with the same player. I’m not sure if Mets fans remember more bitterly the famous Nolan Ryan trade for Jim Fregosi or the less-famous previous non-trade of Ryan for Joe Torre, who might have had a few of his HoF-worthy years in Flushing Meadows, had the Mets not overvalued Ryan and rejected that deal. Is the Fregosi deal hated more because it netted them a washed-up former star who could no longer play at a star level or because they surrendered a young player on the cusp of stardom? Probably both, although we could justify dealing off a future HoFer if we’d gotten any sort of immediate value in return.

Tigers’ fans don’t, after all, detest the John-Smoltz-for-Doyle-Alexander deal because it netted them a pennant, which has real value whatever it cost them. A pennant is something. But is that trade a good model for the form that trading a future star should take? Let’s explore a few philosophical issues:

1)      Trading quantity for quality (or vice-versa): is it wiser for a building team to deal off several players for one player of higher quality?

2)      Does a building team want to trade youth for age, or the other way around?

3)      Does a building team want to fill specific positions where they’re weak or to acquire the best players they can even if that overloads them at particular positions?

4)      Is there any wisdom in favoring a particular type of player to acquire? That is, do you always want to acquire faster players rather than slower ones, or more versatile players rather than players who are fixed at one position, pitchers rather than hitters, etc. Do you want to focus exclusively on the left side of the defensive spectrum, and assume you can always pick up DHes and 1B/LFers, for example? Do you want to look for bargains in players coming off injuries or do you regard injured players with suspicion?

5)      Is trading in general wise? That is to say, all else equal, does a building team do better to trade cautiously and keep their big-league roster stable, promoting players from the minor leagues when they’re ready but otherwise avoiding the kind of churning Bill criticized the 1960 A’s for?

Again, "It depends" is no answer. Of course trades that work are good ones and trades that implode are not, but is there any principle that you would say works for a club in the rebuilding stage?  (Even if it sometimes backfires—"works" means "works in general" here, not "works money-back-guaranteed.")

In general, I’d say that

1)  "E pluribus unum" works better than many players being traded for one. Bad teams are looking to maximize their luck. If you trade several players for one better player, you’re heavily dependent on that one better player to work out. This one, I’d say, is easy to answer: good teams looking to become excellent teams want to trade several players for one. They’ve got very few roster spots available and they’re trying to pack in as much talent at one position as they can, so I’d say the opposite principle applies to bad teams: acquire a lot of players if you can, because if you get really lucky, you might fill up several roster spots that badly need filling.

2) This one, I’d say, is the equivalent of David Mamet’s Philosophy of Salesmanship, ABC, Always Be Closing: ABGY, Always Be Getting Younger.  Just as a matter of principle, your future is off in the far distance, so why acquire players who won’t be there to help you when you’ll need them to?  As with most of these questions, my ideal bad-club GM would establish this as a principle to check most deals: individual trades can happen despite any principle, but it would be clear that the proponents of a youth-for-age deal will be compelled to make a hell of a case, and will often lose their argument on principle.

3) This one, too, has a clear answer: a bad team is so far from succeeding that it cannot possibly know which positions will be open by the time they’re ready to make a move, so they should have no problem acquiring two third basemen or two catchers if such become available. Players always can be shifted to a different position, if need be, or traded, while contending teams need to fill particular holes, often temporary holes, that will allow them to surrender more talent for less talent—when this situation presents itself, take advantage of it.

4) This one is I think borne out by research I did on the relative value of pitchers to hitters: ALWAYS trade pitching to get hitting if the values seem even roughly equivalent. Pitchers have much shorter shelf-lives than hitters. If you have a young pitcher who has a few good games back to back and someone expresses interest in him? See which young hitters they have available to trade, and don’t leave the room or hang up the phone without making a deal.

And 5) this one is the most open to debate. I feel Bill’s pain regarding the 1960’s A’s, and I agree that Charlie O. was the loudest jackass in captivity for trading anyone who had a decent year, or month, or week, but the counter-argument goes like this: losing breeds losing. A good rationale for a high turnover rate is that keeping the same bunch of ambitious young players together for very long requires that they start winning. If they don’t, an air of animosity will enter the locker-room. Players will resent each other for causing the losses, and will remember all the blown saves a closer has, the errors a fielder has, the strikeouts a slugger has, IF the end result is a losing season.  You don’t want a team where players are pointing fingers at each other, but that’s only natural if you’ve got a sub-performing team. So I’d say that a high turnover rate is at least tolerable in under-performing teams.

The upshot is that all of these principles, put together with a gigantic dash of luck, probably won’t help—getting into a deep hole means that it will often take a lot of time to work your way out of it, and that usually means in MLB that what you’ll need most of all is a productive farm system, the only reliable way to produce a quantity of young players on the cheap. But that’s a given. Without a productive source of your own young players, well, buy me a flute and a gun that shoots, ‘cause you ain’t going nowhere. With such a source, however, you’re better off with general principles than simply relying on good luck.

This entire argument must be taken in retrospect, of course, because so much of contemporary trading concerns money, free-agency, no-trade contracts, and other factors that were negligible fifty or sixty years ago, so many of the principles described above apply more firmly to our boyhood teams than to current teams, though maybe we could adapt a few that would apply. Let me muse on the 1960s Mets for an illustration: I was just reading the SABR-bio of Joe Christopher, a nothing-special outfielder who had a fluke-season for the 1964 Mets. Basically, Bill described it as a Roberto-Clemente year, by a guy who was as far from Clemente as you can possibly imagine. Oddly enough, Christopher broke in with Clemente’s Pirates, and as I just learned, made his major league debut substituting for an injured Clemente, playing right field in the famous Harvey Haddix 12-inning no-hitter that ended with a Big Joe Adcock HR and a Big Cock-up on the bases. It was over Christopher’s head, in fact, that Big Joe’s HR left County Stadium, and there were those who maintained that if Clemente had been playing RF, he would have prevented it from leaving the park in the first place. (Clemente was exactly one inch taller, but that’s what the SABR-bio claims. Of course Clemente was also a gifted defender, which Christopher was not, so the height difference might not be the crucial factor.) Anyway, Christopher had a good season in 1964, and never really had another: 135+ OPS vs. roughly 80 OPS+.

The question here: should the Mets have swapped him out for whatever they could get for their 28-year-old outfielder, on the principle that his value would never climb higher than in the winter of 1964-5?  They were able to deal him off after a bad 1965 to the Red Sox for Eddie Bressoud, a 34-year-old utility infielder, which is to say for not very much. Looking backwards, the answer is more than obvious—of course they would have been better off to trade Christopher sooner and for younger players, rather than later and for an older player as they did. (They also would have done well to have realize that Bressoud’s power numbers might have had something to do with playing in Fenway Park, and that his numbers might suffer when he came to play in Shea Stadium, but that’s a whole nother issue.) I suspect that they could have gotten some pretty good younger players in the 1964-5 winter from a team that needed a decent rightfielder. Who knows, the Astros, with the immortal Joe Gaines in RF, might have given up their 20-year-old second-base prospect (with a piddling 46 OPS+) or their 20-year-old IB-man/OF prospect (with a 78 OPS+) or, who knows, maybe both, in exchange for Christopher? (Eventual total: over 5000 MLB hits.)  I doubt the fledgling ‘Stros would have gone for that deal, but it doesn’t seem ludicrous on the face of it, and it sure makes more sense for the Mets than getting Ed Bressoud the next winter.

Or shall we take another look at the Nolan Ryan trade and non-trades? The thing that eats away at me about trading Ryan is that, according to principle #4 ("Always trade pitching for hitting") it’s a no-brainer, and it’s just bad luck that the Mets dealt him off for nobody special. This is a deal that I support in principle, detest it as much as I did and do and shall in practice, but thinking it over, my principal complaint is that the early Mets were so stubborn about hanging onto their young pitching as they were. I don’t mind that they finally did unload Ryan, after he’d lost some of his value, but how many of their other young pitchers did they refuse to deal on the grounds that they were THISCLOSE to superstardom? Supposedly, the Angels actually wanted Gary Gentry in the Fregosi deal but someone on the Mets (tell you who in a minute) insisted, No, you have to take Ryan or no deal. Other potential pitching stars—Steve Renko, Dick Selma, Dick Rusteck, Rob Gardner, Dennis Musgraves, Les Rohr, Don Shaw, Jim McAndrew, and several other young pitching stars you never heard of—were hoarded by the early Mets, most of them failing to have substantial big league careers. Even my buddy, Bill Wakefield, really shoulda gotten swapped out after his stellar 1964 for any decent young hitters anyone was willing to deal for him. (And Happy Birthday, Bill! He and Bob Dylan both turned 77 the other day.) I love young pitching, but sometimes your head has to assume control over your heart.

Anyway, this has now devolved into luck-of-the-draw bitching about my frustrated boyhood, but for one more thing: it has only recently occurred to me, on my re-reading of Ryan’s autobiography, THROWING HEAT (I propose that Noah Syndergaard should write one whose title transposes two letters: THOR-WING HEAT), Ryan writes skeptically about one of my heroes, Gil Hodges, whom Ryan claims mismanaged his early career and failed to appreciate Ryan’s potential. Apparently what really cheesed Ryan off was that Hodges was the Mets’ primary proponent of acquiring Jim Fregosi, at almost any cost, assessing Ryan as the cheapest cost the Mets would ever bear. That makes sense, since Hodges had managed in the AL during Fregosi’s early career, and had seen him playing an HOF-potential shortstop throughout the mid-1960s, but Ryan resented the hell out of Hodges’ somewhat sensible opinion.

The odd part, which I’d never realized before, was that if anyone was in a position to appreciate the young Ryan’s talents, it had to be Gil Hodges, who had been a teammate of Sandy Koufax’s from the beginning of his career, which as you know was all about wildness, and walks, and inconsistency, exactly as Ryan’s career had been up until that point. If anyone was in a position to assess Ryan’s potential, based on the model of Koufax’s career, and to preach patience, Gil Hodges had to be that man, yet he made the precise error in judgment that his managerial model, Walt Alston, restrained himself from making.  Hodges left the Dodgers, and soon left the National League, just as Koufax was starting to realize his fantastic potential, and he traded Ryan off just before he was able to realize his.

Playing alternate universe for a moment, the Koufaxian equivalent of the Nolan Ryan Trade would have been for the Dodgers, sick and tired of Koufax’s mediocrity by the winter of 1960 (36-40 in six seasons), to have decided to fill their hole at 2B by trading him off for the 32-year-old Nellie Fox. Like Fregosi, Fox would play another five seasons, but his best years were all behind him.

My point here, if I have one, is that Hodges may have relied more on his own personal feelings than on his professional judgment: he may have undervalued Ryan’s potential because he personally witnessed Koufax’s years of failure, and hadn’t witnessed personally so much of Koufax’s success. Instead, Hodges spent those years in the AL, managing the Senators and witnessing Jim Fregosi’s best seasons, when Fregosi was presumably beating the Senators’ ears in on a regular basis. (For some reason, I can’t find Fregosi’s actual stats vs. the Senators over his career https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/split.fcgi?id=fregoji01&year=Career&t=b#all_hmvis —no idea what’s going on, but bbref doesn’t seem to feature those. My guess is someone stuck "Montreal" where "Washington" belongs alphabetically, and dropped "Washington" altogether. Oops. Anyone know who to contact at BBref to alert them to this screwup?)  In other words, Hodges had every reason in the world to want to nurture Ryan and to regard Fregosi with deep skepticism, and was a cool, patient, intensely rational, unemotional-type manager to boot, yet if we look at what transpired, we could evaluate it as an emotional, almost hysterical, over-reaction to what he himself experienced.  "Ryan will never get any better, just like Koufax!! Fregosi is a flipping perennial All-Star shortstop!!"

Better to have principles, and stick to them, if you ask me, than to fly by the seat of your pants.