While responding to greenmachine's thoughtful comment to my look at the Santana trade, the issue came up about whether or not the Twins should have played for this year and a Young/Span/Cuddyer/Kuble OF-DH situation was proposed. My big problem with this is that it would have required us to make the Delmon Young trade in the first place, which I also really didn't like in the first place.
I think that the better way to get us to the playoffs this year would have been to make the Santana trade, but keep Garza and Bartlett. As I've argued, I think that the Santana trade was basically an even one for this year. The Young trade, however, I've had more trouble with from the very start. We traded three up-the-middle players for two corner players and a utility OF. It's really tough to come out ahead on a trade like that. I really believe that the Twins should have traded a lesser pitcher for a guy with a lower ceiling than Young. Young was a really risky acquisition because he's got almost no defensive value (he's nearly a DH already) and I really question his ceiling at this point. (This is perhaps not surprising since I was questioning his talent back when the AP line was that "no one questions his talent" rather than the current "the enigmatic Delmon Young.) I have a lot of trouble believing that he'll ever be a better hitter than Alfonso Soriano, and Soriano is probably a good 15 runs a season better than Delmon in a corner. It's really difficult for me to believe that Delmon will deserve to be an All-Star more than once or twice in his career, and I don't ever see him being worthy of a top 10 MVP finish, even though he supposedly had this crazy high ceiling when we traded for him.
Consider the players in that trade. Delmon had a 14.4 VORP. Huzzah. But he also had a -18.4 UZR.
Let's take a moment to compare Gomez and Delmon's contributions this season. Going by VORP and UZR, Delmon was 4 runs below replacement level and Gomez was 17 runs above replacement level. On top of that, Gomez was about 4 runs better than Delmon in baserunning. Add it all up and Gomez is about 2.5 wins better than Young. Maybe Gomez was more annoying to some people, but he sure looks like a better ballplayer to me.
Harris had a 10 VORP and about -5 UZR (not as bad as I thought he would be, honestly) and about 1 run above average on the bases, so he was about a 0.5-win player--practically a full win better than Delmon.
On the other hand, Garza himself was like a 3-win pitcher this year. (11 runs above average in pRAA Bartlett had a 13.6 VORP, a 1.5 UZR (definitely lower than he's been in the past), and was 0.7 runs above average on the bases. So say he's a 1.5-win player.
Adding it all up, the Twins got:
-0.5 wins from Delmon + 0.5 wins from Harris = 0 wins above replacement level
And the Twins gave up:
3.5 wins from Garza + 1.5 wins from Bartlett = 5 wins above replacement level
And they saved absolutely no money. Rays fans ought to start a thankyoubillsmith.blogspot.com, because we got completely and utterly PWNED in that trade and they got to the World Series.
Say the Twins instead went for someone like Gabe Gross. Gross is worth something like 13 runs/year above average on defense. This year he had about a 10 UZR and on offense he had about a 4.6 VORP. Gross is a lefty, but he's clearly okay with a part-time playing arrangement. So you split time in the OF/DH amongst Gross, Kubel, and Cuddyer (and have the decent option of Gross/Kubel in RF/DH if Cuddyer goes down), especially using Gross as a late-game replacement for Cuddyer, whose defense sucks rocks. Gabe Gross also gets paid essentially nothing. On the downside, no one ever expects Gabe Gross to be an All-Star. (Just thinking about the defense in this situation makes me happy all over. In any sort of important defensive situation after we called up Span, we could have had Mauer, Punto, Bartlett, Span, Gomez, and Gross all on the field. Morneau and whoever was playing 3B would be something of a liability, but that is a lot of plus defenders to put out on the field, and our bullpen would probably have looked a lot better than they did this year.)
The Rays got Gross for Joshua Butler, someone you will probably never hear of again. The Twins could have comfortably beaten that offer, probably even in the '07-'08 offseason, by giving up a prospect who is worth nothing this year and would likely be worth no more than one win above replacement in his entire career. Hell, the Twins used Eduardo Morlan as part of the Delmon deal, and if we're undoing that, I'm almost certain that the Brewers would have taken Morlan over Butler. Probably in a heartbeat. It might have been a slight overpay, but way less of an overpay than the Delmon Young deal.
Now, sure, it's possible the Twins couldn't have gotten Gross specifically, but it's not that difficult to find someone who is at least replacement level for cheap.
So if the Twins simply keep Bartlett and Garza, and get a 1.5-win corner outfielder with not much upside like Gabe Gross, they would have improved this season by something like 6.5 wins. Plus, the Twins wouldn't still be looking for a SS (hell, if the Twins had kept Bartlett and acquired Gross, I might almost have been okay with them signing Casey Blake) and even if they were still hell-bent on trading him, they could have found a taker with something better in return.
Way moreso than with the Gomez trade, the Delmon trade set the team back a lot this season. In fact, it's really no surprise whatsoever that the Twins are looking to pawn Delmon off on someone who doesn't respect his defensive liabilities and is willing to gamble that he'll become the next Vlad Guerrero or something. In his prime, Delmon will be better than he is right now, but he has a big hill to climb to be as good in any one season as Matt Garza was just this year.
This isn't really a completely retrospective take on the situation, either. At the time, it was pretty clear that this was a trade made for Young's ceiling, which he was very unlikely to reach this year, and would position the Twins better for 2010 than 2008. The one thing that I'll say about hindsight is that this season I've learned a lot more about how good Gomez is at defense and how bad Delmon is at defense. That is something that the Twins as an organization ought to have a lot more informatino about before they make the trades than some dude living in a rented-out house in Seattle.
If the Twins really wanted to be their best in 2008, the Delmon Young deal hurt them much, much, much worse than the Carlos Gomez deal. Even in the long run, I think this deal is a loser.
Don't forget that the trade was also done to get Garza out of Gardenhire's clubhouse. Apparently he's not familiar with the "Better the devil you know..." philosophy.
Good analysis, as always. I didn't like the deal when it happened and grew to like it less as the year passed.
I wonder about the opportunity cost of trading Garza for the wrong guy. The Twins can't afford bad exchange rates on their valuable chips, especially cheap ones under team control. Would the Reds have taken him for Hamilton? Does adding Garza back in the young pitchers mix makes a JJ Hardy trade with the Brewers more likely?
It's particularly amusing that you mention the Brewers probably taking Morlan for Gross since they just DID take Morlan.
I knew I would earn my Blind Squirrel badge sooner or later.
As far as I'm concerned, your blind squirrel has X-Ray vision, ubes.
You all think ubelmann is so smart. Well, David Wintheiser thinks you are all rubes. He takes apart this article here. He's never been a fan of mine, so I think he takes particular delight in ripping ME to shreds, mistakenly thinking that I wrote this. My favorite part of the article is this beautiful little ad hominem:
Let David know how you feel. But, be nice.
was I nice? That was a funny post.
Nicely filleted, doc. You did clean up the poor guy's kitchen afterwards, right?
He's a passionate guy and he defends difficult positions sometimes, to put it kindly. But, look. He starts out by asserting that ubes was saying that the season was a debacle and not the trade. He swiftly knocks down that strawman -- and it goes downhill from there.
He enjoys being the contrarian, even when one isn't needed. Just because.
Geeze, Boss, don't start up another war like the last one.
No war.
War? Huh. What is it good for?
LOL. I was just reading Joe Posnanski the other day and saw that David Wintheiser comment on something. I remember lots of back and forths with him on John Bonnes' Twins Territory (where I got my start in blogging, I should add), and I was thinking to myself how I was happy to not have him around anymore.
What would frustrate the hell out of me is that I'm convinced most of the time he knows his arguments are bullshit. He might believe that Delmon is better than Gomez, but he knows that he's created a bullshit argument to that effect. (Replete with strawmen of various shapes and sizes.) At the time, it was always Luis Rivas. I thought that people were too hard on Rivas in general--not because Rivas was great, but because he was taking up essentially zero payroll. Rivas wasn't good, but he wasn't the problem, either. But DW was constantly talking about how Rivas was going to go on to have a great career, blah, blah, blah.
At any rate, I've decided that it's not worth engaging in any kind of discourse with someone whose stated intention is simply to disagree with you.
I had forgotten his impassioned defense of Rivas. Good times!