The Value of a Buy Trade

On June 27, I had a team sitting in second place in a 4×4 league, 6.5 points out of first. This particular league, an Ottoneu league called the Food and Travel League, pays out prizes in the form of food and/or beverages. It is one of my favorite leagues, both for the prizes and the competition, and finishing top three in that league is a goal every year – it’s much more fun to receive food than to figure out how to ship it.

I had never won this league and while the gap to first made me wonder if this was the right year to push in my chips, I also saw a clear path to finishing second or third (fourth place was 7.5 points behind me). But I was behind the pace on innings pitched and needed arms. I was third in all of the pitching rate stats (HR/9, ERA, WHIP), but was ninth in IP and, as a result, tied for eighth in strikeouts. Gaining points in Ks while maintaining my rates was an obvious path forward.

So I made a trade. I ended up winning the league, but the trade was costly and it is worth wondering if the trade is why I won the league, or if I could have won without the deal.

It’s an important question for the future because the decision to buy isn’t an easy one, with pressure coming from both sides. Maybe the trade won’t be enough, and I’ll give up future value, and still not win, and be worse off in 2027! Maybe my team is good enough to win even without this trade, and I’ll give up future value, and I’ll win, but I would have won anyway, and now I am worse off in 2027!

And I did pay a steep price for this trade. My target was a $37 Tarik Skubal who was recently placed on the trade block. I targeted Skubal in part because of everything I said above – I needed innings, ideally high strikeout innings, that wouldn’t kill my rates. Skubal is certainly the guy for that job. But, in my experience, this league demands high prices for buy-trades, even rentals, and I felt it made more sense to pay an even bigger premium to get an ace who could anchor my staff for more than just this season. Skubal is a keeper at his price. Yes, he will attract arbitration driving his price up, but he’ll either still be a keeper or he’ll protect the rest of my roster. Either way, he helps my team in 2027.

To get that done, I gave up a quartet of young, exciting bats – Jordan Walker, Jordan Lawlar, Esmerlyn Valdez, Joshua Báez. To soften the blow, I requested a $50 Julio Rodríguez be part of the return.

I could break down these players in detail, but that isn’t really the point of this article. Suffice it to say:

• Skubal is a stud and he was the target.
• Walker looks legit and he was the hardest piece to give up.
• Lawlar could be something but can’t stay healthy and is going to lose positional flexibility.
• Valdez and Báez are still dice rolls – they have shown some really fun talent and skills but I have enough concerns that I felt they were worth trading. It’s worth noting that both of those guys are more valuable today than they were in June, but the flaws are still there.
• Rodríguez was struggling at the time and while I didn’t think he’d anchor my offense, I did expect a rebound that never really came.

So, back to the main question – did my team win because of this trade? Did it win in spite of this trade? Or did this trade not really matter?

The simplest way to answer this is to look at what my pitching stats look like without Skubal:

Well, that isn’t very inspiring, is it? I got 87 innings from Skubal, and they were great innings – 108 K, 0.52 HR/9, 2.28 ERA, 0.92 WHIP. That’s everything you want from an ace. But when you back those stats out, the impact on my final standings is pretty small. My rates all look worse without Skubal. I have 108 fewer strikeouts. But because of the gaps in the standings in this league, the impact is just three points in the standings. I won the league with 81 points; second place had 68.

This is mostly due to a bit of an odd outcome in strikeouts in this league. Six teams had more than 1450 strikeouts; six had 1325 or fewer. Being near the bottom of that top group gave me a huge way I could fall in strikeouts without impacting standings. The other contenders, most of whom had more K than me, would have lost 2-3 points with 108 fewer strikeouts. I don’t think that I, in June, could have predicted that I would be in a spot where 108 strikeouts simply didn’t matter much.

And so, in practice, there is a good chance I still would have chased strikeouts. So instead of just removing Skubal, let’s replace him with more innings from the guys who were in and out of my lineup – Jake Bennett, Walbert Ureña, and Tyler Mahle. This might not be exactly how things would have played out. Maybe I make another trade; maybe I find another free agent; maybe I eventually realize the strikeouts don’t matter and back off.

But those three were on my roster, I didn’t use them every single time out, and their last initials spell BUM, which makes for a nice title for the trio. Here is where I land without Skubal and instead with 87 innings from BUM:

So…basically the same? I lose one more point in HR/9. You could argue I am cherry-picking a bit here, for two reasons. First, I was selective about when to use those three. The numbers above were calculated assuming I kept getting from each of them what I was already getting, just over an extra 29 innings a piece. What if by being more aggressive, I got worse results from them? Let’s just assume they all pitched 0.25 worse by ERA, 0.03 worse by WHIP, 0.25 worse by HR/9 and had one less K/9 in the excess innings:

Well, now I am down seven points, thanks mostly to a big hit in ERA. In this case, I am still up by six points in the final standings, but things look very different. And, more importantly, there is no good way to predict in June, down 6.5 points, that no one would finish within 13 points of me. Let alone the possibility that my expanding lead changed the behavior of other managers – take away those seven points and who knows what someone else might have done.

Of course, that isn’t all that happened in this trade. Despite giving up a bunch of cheap bats, two of whom weren’t even playing MLB games at the time, for one $50 bat, I suspect I downgraded my offense. Here is the production I got from Rodríguez vs. the production my trade partner got from the bats I sent him:

That definitely looks like it hurts. How much? Actually, not much. I finished first in HR (only by one, but still!) and 10 extra runs scored wouldn’t have made a difference. The OBP bump is meaningless and the slugging bump would have netted me one extra point.

So how does this all net out? Did I make a huge mistake making this trade? I think the answer is no. Depending how you want to measure things, I gained anywhere from 3-7 pitching points and probably lost one hitting point. That’s a tradeoff worth making. It turns out that I didn’t need those 3-7 pitching points, but back in June, there was no way for me to know that.

If you told me in June, “If you make this trade, you will net a gain of at least two and as many as six points in the standings,” I would make that trade. I would feel really good making that trade.

And I think there are things not captured here. For example, Skubal was getting traded. If not to me, likely to a competitor. If I don’t net those 2-6 points and a competitor does, things look very different.

Plus, as mentioned earlier, it’s hard to know how this trade changed the behavior of others. By August 31, I was seven points clear in first. This is a generally active league but there were no deadline deals made this year. None. This trade in June was the last trade made. If someone else gets Skubal and we hit late August with a tighter race, the trade deadline could look very different.

There’s also one other knock on effect from this trade worth considering. Around the trade deadline, my team was struggling at 3B (it struggled at 3B all year), still needed strikeouts, and looked like it could use an OBP boost. But, as noted, I also had a pretty decent lead by then. Offers came in – Isaac Paredes or Jonathan Aranda for my Kade Anderson; Bo Bichette for my Charlie Condon and Walbert Ureña;  Francisco Lindor for Condon and Anderson. Just after the Skubal deal, I turned down a chance to acquire Kevin Gausman for Anderson and Daylen Lile.

Yes, I gave up four bats to get Skubal, but getting Skubal and building the lead I eventually built allowed me to trust the roster I had, which means that Anderson, Condon, Lile, and Ureña are all still on my roster, at low prices. Would I like to have Walker, Lawlar, Valdez, and Báez back? Yes, of course. But if I had them back, I likely would have ended up trading someone later – maybe one or more of them get traded anyway; maybe I give up Anderson or Ureña. And I don’t have $37 Skubal to build a rotation around for 2027.

The lesson here is three-fold, I think:

1. Trades don’t necessarily create massive swings in the standings, but small changes matter. In this league, 2-6 points turned out to be far less than the gap from first to second. Even if you don’t fully buy my argument that the gap was that big in part because I got Skubal instead of someone else, though, 2-6 points can be a lot. In my other 4×4 leagues, the gaps between the top two teams were six and two. In this league, six points was the gap from second to sixth.
2. If you are going to evaluate a trade, do it on the terms the trade was made. Don’t use hindsight to say, “Wow, I won by 13, guess this trade was a waste!” Think about what you knew at the time. It’s okay to question if you should have seen something coming – if there was reason for me to expect to win by 13, then it would be fair for September Me to criticize June Me for the trade – but don’t knock yourself because things worked out in an unexpected way.
3. Be sure to consider the big picture, not just the trade that was made. In a vacuum, I gave up four cheap bats for an expensive but keepable ace and a rental OF so that I could gain up to six points in a league I won by 13. But I also didn’t make other trades. I also prevented another team from adding that ace. I also built a strong enough lead to discourage teams from getting aggressive to chase me down. That all matters, too.