Wrigleyville, BP’s local website for the Chicago Cubs, provides a wealth of information on our favorite team. Many of the best writers around the beat provide articles for them; Sahadev Sharma, Brett Taylor, and Matthew Trueblood among them (when Bleacher Nation was hiring a nights writer, I actually e-mailed Brett saying ‘if Matt Trueblood applies, you’d be a fool not to hire him.’). You should absolutely bookmark that website, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.
That said, I think they put out a pretty lukewarm ‘trade Starlin Castro’ thinkpiece earlier this week. I’m not going to give it the Al Yellon treatment, because Jeff Lamb doesn’t deserve it. However, I’m going to give what I feel is a very strong deconstruction of his arguments.
First, let’s try to understand just how valuable Castro is going forward (we don’t care about past performance. we only care about future performance). Castro projects to hit .277/.318/.398 per PECOTA, with a slightly below average defensive skillset making him a 2.7 WARP player. That’s 11th in among shortstops last year (and projected to be very similar this year). Castro is what he is as a baseball player at this point, having logged over 3200 plate appearances with more-or-less this same exact line. It is eminently reasonable to bank on a slightly above-average shortstop for the entirety of his remaining contract. In fact, his 70th percentile and 30th percentile only separate his median WARP by 0.8 either way.
I’d calculate Castro’s excess value by signing his extension to be $30 million dollars. That’s a hefty chunk of change…but we can keep that value for ourselves by keeping Castro (a proved commodity) and leveraging that value in other places.
Let’s look at Addison Russell. As celebrated a prospect he is, he’s basically never played above AA. His median PECOTA for this season is .239/.298/.389. As good as he may be in the future, he is no sure thing. Only a fool would project Russell to be better than Castro this year, and only an extreme optimist would project Russell to better than Castro the year after.
There’s a time and place for playing prospects and dealing established veterans. That time and place are the Cubs of 3 years ago. To learn why, let’s learn a lesson about variance.
Imagine you are a team that scores exactly 3 runs every game. You can choose between two starting pitchers: one that always allows 4 runs every game, or one that allows 7 runs every other game, and 2 runs in the other games he pitches. Which would you rather have? The first one has a better ERA (4.00), but you’ll lose every game he pitches. The second one has an ERA of 4.50, but because he has a high variance, you actually win the games he pitches uncommonly well. This is a fundamental law of baseball, and it is probably the single most important thing a team can understand: when you are better than your opponent, you want to decrease variance. When you are worse than your opponent, you want to increase variance. This is the reason bad teams trade proven starters. If you can leverage your good player (that isn’t good enough to make your team good on his own) into a few players who might be better than him, it’s worth it, even if those players have a lower expected value than the first player. The outcome of the veteran is known; his variance is low. The outcome of Prospect X is very unknown; his variance is sky-high.
Trading Castro to open up room for Russell to play SS is a variance-positive play. For it to make sense, you have to believe that is more likely that Russell will provide at least some positive value than Castro will and in the near-term. Otherwise, you are losing ground.
It also isn’t like Russell has less trade value than Castro does right now. I calculated Castro’s excess value at $30 million or so. According to David “#6org” Cameron, that’s in the range of a Top 15-20 hitting prospect. Well, Russell is a Top 5 hitting prospect, so he’s presumably even more valuable.
How can this be, you might ask? How can Castro be more valuable to the Cubs than Russell, while Russell is more valuable in a trade? Well, the teams that would want to acquire Russell are generally on the other end of the spectrum – trading their stars and rebuilding. Those are the teams that need high-variance players to hopefully catapult them into contention. It’s also very possible, maybe even likely, that Russell ends up being a better player than Castro, eventually. I’m not trying to argue otherwise.
That isn’t the point, though. For a team in the Cubs situation, right now, a player like Castro makes more sense. You know that he’s very good. You control his future until 2020 (if you brought Russell up right now, you’d control his rights until…2020). Russell could very easily fetch a higher return for a competitive team than Castro could. Russell could flame out in any case. If you’re trading one of the two, trade Addison Russell.
Now that I’ve established that I’d rather have Starlin than Addison, it’s time to address the real issue; why on Earth would you trade either of them? Just play one at 3B/2B and the other at SS! The list of positions Castro could play and still be a positive with his bat is as follows: SS, 2B, 3B, LF, RF. At 2B, his bat makes him a Top 5 player in at the position!
Everything is all roses in Cubs nation right now, but the harsh truth is that at least one and possibly more of the big 4 prospects are going to fail (Big 4: Soler, Bryant, Baez, Russell). It is just the law of averages. Major League Baseball will winnow these options down, and you will find you suddenly have room to play all of your worthwhile prospects. It is not hard to imagine a scenario where Castro plays 2B, Russell plays SS, Bryant plays 3B, and Baez flounders in AAA for 3 seasons. It’s not hard to imagine Soler getting another hamstring injury and Bryant plays LF while Coghlan moves over, and Baez plays 3B. It’s not even that hard to imagine a scenario in which Bryant strikes out 35% of the time and platoons with Mike Olt. These things happen, and the Hope Monster never, ever goes hungry.
All of this is to say that it’s absurdly early to think about getting Castro on the next flight to New York. We don’t need to trade ANYONE yet, and if we do, we shouldn’t be trading the most proven major league commodity among our assets unless we are truly not trying to compete this year (and maybe not even next). There are probably 22-25 teams in baseball that would rather have Castro over their current shortstop. Let’s not make the mistake of being one of them.