2016 Retrospective: A Year of Dynasty Trades

I like trade analyses. And I assume most people reading fantasy baseball content in the middle of October are similar to me. While there is no shortage of content about trades as they happen, it’s rare to see retrospective reviews of how deals turned out. With that said, let’s take a gander at an entire year of dynasty trades in the industry league The Devil’s Rejects.

I’m going to split the analysis into two parts – preseason and in-season. First, some background for the uninitiated.

Chad Young and I co-manage a team. We executed eight trades before Opening Day and six more during the campaign. Overall, Chad and I narrowly edged out a fifth place finish which is meaningful because it’s the last paid spot in our league. We had the third best offense by a healthy margin, but our pitching ranked only eighth best. I had my sights set on a third place finish this year. In other words, our performance didn’t quite live up to expectations.

Without further ado…

There were a couple common themes to our preseason trading. Since we aimed to be a top contender, our focus was on aggregating win-now talent at the expensive of future roster depth. We specifically targeted older players like Werth. We believed they might be undervalued since young players are so highly coveted in this format. While we received Werth as a throw-in, our other inquiries for players over 30 were rebuffed.

Although the Seager deal looks particularly lopsided in retrospect, both I and our trade partner believed in Altherr as a useful 15/15 guy with ceiling for more. Factor in their respective ages and Altherr gets you most of the way to Seager – at least pre-2016. Unfortunately, a wrist injury ruined Altherr’s season. Susac and Refsnyder also came up much smaller than we both expected.

In re-acquiring Pompey (we had traded him during the 2015 season), we were targeting an easier-to-market near-majors asset. Similarly, we converted Gordon into an active albeit injured major leaguer with the intention of trading him for a better short term asset. Both Pompey and Travis were eventually included in the Blackmon and Pollock deals. Those were actually two separate trades with the same owner on the same day.

You may notice we traded Blackmon and Lowrie and later re-acquired them both. That particular roster fell under new ownership in early February. The owner brought a fresh rebuilding plan which emphasized high ceiling prospects. We originally traded Blackmon in December for fear he would be dealt away from Coors Field. We were less worried in February.

Chad and I felt our pitching staff needed a couple aces. Enter Cole and Archer. We paid a steep price for Archer at the height of his value. Neither gamble worked out nor did McCullers who we acquired and later traded for Cole. Pitchers are tricky beasts.

If there is a lesson to be learned, it’s that roster overhauls don’t have to occur in a straight line. We had a goal of converting young, unestablished talents into core components. We did that by adding Seager, Werth, Archer, Cole, Pollock, Wong, and Ramos at the cost of 13 players. Of those, none were major league regulars. The closest were McCullers, Paxton, Altherr, Travis, and Dietrich.

Let’s move onto the in-season trades which occurred in two phases.

Well, I sort of lied. The first phase could be titled “Tinker Mode.” It lasted until early June and included only one executed trade. Trust me, we tried for a dozen more during the early months. The Davis trade is interesting because we didn’t really want him, and we wouldn’t have finished in the money without him. His owner was swimming in outfield depth and had a desperate need for a warm body at third base. We needed some empty steals. It worked out.

In June, we started converting broken and developmental pieces into win-now components. The first domino was the Duda trade. He ultimately missed the rest of the season while Shoemaker gave us some solid numbers. It pained us to trade Pollock for Cabrera, but our team needed a jolt in OBP and RBI. Miggy provided it. He’s starting to show some chinks in his armor, but there’s little reason to doubt he’ll remain productive for years to come. His blistering final week saved our bacon.

The Mazara trade was the blockbuster to end all blockbusters. He’s primed to provide big value for most of the next decade, even if the next season or so might start slowly. Of course, we got a big piece back in the form of Story. Personally, I think we stole Sanchez away just before his value really surged. At the time, there was still a feeling he might turn pumpkin. This swap would have worked out much better if Story’s season hadn’t abruptly ended.

The final trade was a bit of a desperation move. We needed a specific two-start week out of Leake, and Schimpf provided a solid upgrade to Zack Cozart and Chase Utley in our middle infield slot. At the time, we thought there was a decent chance Maurer might outperform Robertson down the stretch. Maurer was cruising and Robertson was flailing. They promptly reversed roles. Now we own Maurer and Carter Capps so at least we should have the Padres 2017 closer.

Parting Shots

Our preseason moves looked good on paper, but underwhelming seasons from Archer and Cole really hurt our pitching staff. Losing Pollock was painful too. Many of our in-season moves were made to address the shortages left by that trio.

While not every move was a gem, I can state with certainty that we would have fallen short of the top five without making these trades. In fact, only the Shoemaker deal and the second Paxton swap weren’t absolutely necessary for our success.

And now, a final table. This is a list of the players we added and the players we lost. Transients (i.e. guys who we acquired then traded and vice versa) are not included. We had a good year adding current talent at the expense of future bits. Fortunately, most of the prospects we lost were originally found via the draft or on the waiver wire. We’ve already recovered some of that lost future value.