Why We Cut Yordan Alvarez: A Follow Up

It was two weeks ago that I discussed a difficult decision Niv Shah and I made to cut Yordan Alvarez in the FanGraphs Staff Ottoneu league. Today, I want to follow up on that and talk about where we are now, and how the cut worked out, so far.

One thing I am not going to cover in detail or take credit for, is the fact that Alvarez is now on the shelf even longer than expected, without a clear timeline to return. I do think it is important to remember that injured players don’t necessarily come back when you hope or expect, so one added risk to holding (or acquiring) an injured player is that they might be out longer than you anticipated. But we didn’t cut Alvarez thinking, “He might miss most of the year so who cares if someone else picks him up.” We didn’t cut him anticipating he wouldn’t have trade value again this year (which he might not). So we’ll leave that aside.

Instead, we wanted to free up cap space to improve our team’s long-term outlook and perhaps shake some interesting cuts loose from other teams as they tried to create space to add Alvarez. And that mostly worked.

We cut Alvarez on May 18, along with Joel Payamps, Yusei Kikuchi, and Andrew Benintendi. Those cuts allowed us to add Joe Boyle, Moises Ballesteros, Mike Yastrzemski, Andrew Abbott, and Colin Rea to our roster. On the most basic level, that already made our team better. Yordan hasn’t played, and the rest of those moves upgraded our team both currently and in the future. You could ask yourself: Would you trade Alvarez, Payamps, Kikuchi, and Benintendi for that quintet? It probably depends how you view Boyle and Ballesteros, to be honest. And we did that without a loan, since it wasn’t a trade.

But then there were the follow on effects. Alvarez and Kikuchi were quickly added by other teams, freeing up additional cap space for us by clearing their cap penalties. A handful of players were cut loose including:

• Walker Jenkins ($3 minimum bid to acquire)
• Jared Jones ($3)
• Carson Williams ($4)
• Triston Casas ($8)
• Bryce Miller ($13)
• Roki Sasaki ($16)
• Carlos Correa ($13)

We ended up acquiring none of those players, so far. Some (Sasaki and Miller) got bid up higher than we were comfortable. Others (Jenkins, Casas, Williams, and Jones) have seen their value decline, but could be interesting targets in the future.

However, the newfound cap space allowed us to make a bunch of other additions, while cutting players we no longer needed. We brought in: Travis Sykora, Arjun Nimmala, Drake Baldwin, Braden Montgomery and Jesus Made for $6 total. We couldn’t have done that easily before because we didn’t have any space space and most of our cuts were $1 players who wouldn’t create cap space. In fact, our cuts were Michael Massey, Jake Fraley, Tobias Myers, Caden Dana and Sean Burke. They were all $1 players and freed up $0 in cap space as a result.

The net of all this is that by cutting Alvarez, we cleared up enough cap space to cut and replace eight other players, and in the process reload our minor league system and add some cheap MLB production. Instead of an expensive Alvarez, we now have a long-term answer at C (Baldwin + Ballesteros), some cheap pitching to help now (Abbott and Rea, with Boyle likely coming soon) who could also help into the future, a cheap OF bat to keep our team legal, and four other prospects we are really high on.

And we aren’t done. The other 11 teams in that league all have $16 or less in cap space and less than $8 each on average. We have $45 remaining.

We could use that without making additional cuts to add guys on the 60-day IL – names like Gerrit Cole, Triston Casas, Justin Steele, Jonny DeLuca, and Jared Jones are varying degrees of interesting, depending on their timelines and outlooks.

We’re full up on prospects right now, but as call-ups happen, we could eye players like CJ Kayfus, Jace Jung, or Parker Messick. Or if players on our roster (Ballesteros, Boyle, Juan Brito) get promoted, we might be able to add another prospect who isn’t so close to a debut, such as Lazaro Montes, Josue de Paula, or Hagen Smith.

We’re also eying some MLB players who could get hot. Nolan Jones has had good Statcast numbers and has 36.5 points over his last four games. Are Jo Adell and Henry Davis just running hot or figuring things out? Is Lance McCullers legit?

We are trying to be cautious about burning our cap on every auction – we don’t want to bid $20 on a guy just cause we can. But when we want to win an auction, we have the ability to make a big bid and either win, or force a tough cut for another team. And that’s a nice luxury on top of all the guys we already added.