How much better are the Blue Jays with Troy Tulowitzki?
— -- The long-awaited Troy Tulowitzki trade finally came to pass on Monday night, with the five-time All-Star heading to the Toronto Blue Jays as the key cog in a six-player blockbuster. Last week, I argued that the Blue Jays were the team with the most to gain by making a trade deadline acquisition. But was this a good one? Let's break it down, piece by piece.
The prize
There's little question that Tulowitzki has been the premier shortstop of the last decade. He's a worthy heir to the Big Four of Alex Rodriguez, Nomar Garciaparra, Derek Jeter and Miguel Tejada, the quartet that previously dominated the position. From 2007, Tulowitzki's first full season, to today, Tulo's 39.7 WAR (Baseball-Reference) ranks first in baseball among shortstops -- with only a single player, Hanley Ramirez, landing within 10 of that total (31.6).
Like most hitters who play at Coors Field, Tulowitzki has a significant disparity in his home/road statistics. The reputation of Denver ballparks as hitter havens is well-earned; Coors regularly ranks as one of the most hitter-friendly environments in terms of park factors. Tulowitzki's career road OPS of .817 may sound unimpressive on its face, especially when compared with his career .951 at Coors, but to be disappointed with the former number betrays an unfamiliarity with baseball history. Tulowitzki's career road OPS ranks 11th in history (minimum 3,000 plate appearances) compared with the overall line of other shortstops through age 30 going back to the start of the modern era in 1901.
And even that comparison is unfair to him. Looking only at road OPS means that he's not getting any benefit from the natural home-field advantage that hitters have (15-20 points of OPS above their overall numbers at home). If you project Rockies hitters by only their road OPS, you'll tend to underrate them going forward. It's an easy trap to fall into; I did it myself nearly 20 years ago when I greatly overrated the drop-off Andres Galarraga would have after he signed with the Atlanta Braves. Using OPS+, a park-and-league-neutral statistic, Tulowitzki through age 30 ranks eighth in baseball history, just below Cal Ripken and Lou Boudreau, and just ahead of Vern Stephens and Jeter.
So how will Tulowitzki age? That's the key question, so let's fire up the ZiPS projection system. ZiPS projects Tulowitzki to be worth 1.7 WAR the rest of the season for the Blue Jays. And then for the rest of his contract, which runs through 2020 with an option for 2021, the projected WAR numbers are 4.5, 4.0, 3.6, 3.2, 2.7 and 2.2 in his option year. Assuming $6.6 million for a win in 2016 and a 5 percent salary growth over the base five years remaining in his contract, a player with that projection would expect to get paid $130 million in free agency. And while $100 million sounds like a lot, there's quite a bit of cash floating around baseball these days. Tulowitzki is scheduled to make $94 million from 2016 to 2020, and I daresay that if he was actually a free agent this offseason, he'd certainly get that contract.
ZiPS isn't making optimistic assumptions, either. It never gives him a mean projection of as many as 120 games played in a season. Like Barry Larkin, the natural comp for Tulo, he fits a lot of awesomeness into fewer games. That projection only assumes he'll be a 3.6 WAR player over the next five years, well off the 4.8 WAR he's averaged over the last five. To break even on the $94 million part of the deal, the Jays just need him to be better than 2.6 a year.
The last issue is the artificial turf. The good news for Tulo is that it's not 1970. Modern turf isn't the same hard, unyielding surface that we used to see, and the evidence of significant injury differences between it and grass are mixed. One study found more ACL sprains in football players who played on turf, while another Virginia Tech meta-analysis of soccer injury studies found no difference. Baseball players do a lot of running, of course, but they don't make as many sudden changes of direction as, say, the average NFL running back does.
The consolation
We've talked a lot about Tulowitzki, but there are five more players in this trade! The biggest name -- though not the most valuable player the Rockies get back -- is Jose Reyes, a pretty good shortstop in his own right when he was in his prime. The problem for the Rockies is that Reyes comes with a contract of his own, with roughly $55 million remaining, and he's not the player Tulowitzki is. By Baseball-Reference's reckoning, Reyes has only been worth 0.6 WAR this season and has only two 3-WAR seasons going back to 2009. FanGraphs is kinder on the 2015 Reyes, but even then has him on pace for only a 2-WAR 2015 season. ZiPS projects Reyes to be worth another 0.7 WAR this season, 2.0 WAR in 2015 and 1.8 WAR in 2016. With the option buyout included, ZiPS estimates 2 1/3 seasons of Reyes to be worth $30 million, a far cry from the $55 million he'll actually make.
When we talk about surplus value, one thing worth considering is the value of actually having the player signed. This comes up a lot in Cole Hamels discussions -- the ability to actually have Hamels signed and under contract has value in and of itself. After all, if you want a Cole Hamels, you can't just go down to the Cole Hamels store and pick up a six-pack. The star premium doesn't apply to Reyes, however, who is essentially a league-average player, something in much more plentiful supply.
That makes the idea that the Rockies can just flip Reyes into more prospects a bit of a stretch. To get prospects for Reyes, the Rockies need to also send money. As it is, if Reyes was on the free-agent market today, there's no chance anybody would offer him a 2 1/3-year contract for $55 million, so to get someone to pay for the privilege is quite tricky. One might say "Hey, the Mets paid a first-round pick for the privilege of signing Michael Cuddyer," and they would be correct, but most teams wouldn't have done that and even the Mets don't seem to be in spending mode considering that they actually received money from the A's in the Tyler Clippard trade.
The Reds discovered this phenomenon firsthand last winter, when they were trying to trade Brandon Phillips. A team would very likely have offered Phillips three years and $39 million (what was left in his long-term deal with the Reds) as a free agent. But giving up a premium prospect to get to do that? The Phillips market went above-the-Arctic-Circle cold.
The prospects
A straight-up Tulowitzki/Reyes swap would be something that ZiPS would say is an unmitigated disaster, a net loss of somewhere around $60 million. Luckily for the Rockies, three starting pitcher prospects were included in the trade, and this is what will eventually make or break the trade for Colorado. Miguel Castro, Keith Law's preseason No. 4 prospect for the Blue Jays, opened the season in Toronto's bullpen, but was sent down in May after putting up a 4.38 ERA in 13 appearances. In truth, that doesn't reflect poorly on Castro's future, just the fact that the 20-year-old was rushed, having pitched in only two games at the high-A level in the minors. ZiPS projects 7.4 WAR for Castro from 2016 to 2021 in the majors if used as a starter, and while that may sound disappointing, it's simply a reflection of the uncertainty of a low-level pitching prospect.
Jeff Hoffman, Law's No. 6 prospect this preseason, is a trickier prospect for a projection system to get a handle on. After all, he's coming back from Tommy John surgery, so he only has 13 professional starts. But on the good side, he didn't leave his upper-90s fastball on the operating table. He's pitched well, with a low strikeout rate, but you have to expect some Tommy John rust and the fact that this is his first exposure to professional hitters. Jesus Tinoco is the last prospect involved, another pitcher with a big, heavy fastball, but still a few years out.
The extra
With Tulowitzki involved, it's easy to forget that the Blue Jays acquired another player to fill a short-term need: ancient reliever LaTroy Hawkins. Hawkins, now 42 and in his 21st season, has continued his late-career renaissance, and his 3.63 ERA/3.56 FIP are solid numbers for Coors Field. ZiPS projected the Blue Jays to have the No. 25 bullpen over the rest of the season, so a solid B-plus reliever here has a small, but real impact. He's not the shutdown reliever the Jays have been looking for, but if Tulo's the main course, Hawkins is a nice side dish.
The bottom line
The Rockies, a team perennially in search of direction, appear to have found one by finally facing up to the need for a thorough rebuild rather than a year-by-year quest to win 81 games. Maybe. We'll have to see whether they follow this up with more moves of this type over the next six months. They get some solid pitching prospects for their franchise shortstop, but all are of the high-risk variety -- they didn't get any of Toronto's big three of Aaron Sanchez, Daniel Norris or Dalton Pompey. They also took all pitchers, in itself risky both because of the nature of pitchers and the fact that we still don't know how much of the team's trouble developing pitching prospects is because of Coors and how of it much is the team itself. Getting a hitter would have made this trade less of a dice roll.
The Blue Jays needed a big addition, and that's what they got. No, Tulowitzki isn't going to pitch, and Toronto should still be looking at starters -- but he's not a short-term rental and he will help the Jays beyond 2015. By not moving its very top prospects, Toronto could still bring in a starter. The Johnny Cueto and Scott Kazmir trades indicate that nobody's giving up a giant array of top prospects for two-month rentals these days. Toronto has the longest postseason drought in baseball, at 21 years, well ahead of the Mariners at 13. After two decades of playoff-less baseball, the Blue Jays needed to push ahead when the opportunity to play October baseball presented itself. It has and they did. The Jays could very well fall short -- the wild card is looking like their most likely target -- but even if they end up watching postseason baseball on TV rather than as participants, at least they tried to get there.
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