Trade Review - One Nut and Urban

Urban Achievers receive:
SP Gio Gonzalez, WAS
2B Brandon Phillips CIN
21st rounder (15th)
23rd rounder (17th)

One Nut receives:
11th rounder (5th)
16th rounder (10th)

Nice deal here for both teams. Dan needed to improve his keepers one way or another and he did. Phillips does a lot of things good and nothing great, and is one of those players who is more valuable in leagues with average as a category rather than OBP (career avg is .272, obp is .322). PECOTA projections are a bit high in my opinion (89r/23hr/92rbi/20stl) as his last two seasons were something short of that in speed and power (18hr/16stl in 2010, 18/14 in 2011), but he’s gone 30/30 once, 20/20 twice, and is a lock for at least 80/15/80/15. Plus he’s only 31 and trying to get a new contract, certainly better than keeping Morneau, Kelly Johnson, or Gaby Sanchez. Gio is a tough one to peg as he can be extremely volatile. PECOTA has him at 163 ks (176ip) with at 4.08 era and 1.38 whip, which is not really keeper material. His 1.32 whip last year wasn’t killer and his 3.12 era and 197 ks (8.8 k/9) were quite good, but the projections indicate part of that was luck and you have to wonder what impact the change in leagues will have. In most cases, it helps, but Oakland is notorious for being a great pitcher’s park and the NL East looks pretty competitive this year. All in all, what keeps Gio from being a top tier pitcher (at least for our purposes) is a quality start percentage of 59%. By comparison, the top guys last year were Jered Weaver (85%) and Verlander (82%). He’s only 26, so there is room for improvement and he is a pretty decent number two guy. The bottom line is Dan’s keepers are much improved with CC, Desmond, Phillips, Gio, and probably Choo. He still has some questionable number six options as it is really tough to know what to expect from Chris Young and he could ultimately lose time to Parra, and Jesus Montero has a bright future but Yahoo has his only position as “Util.” The Olivio/Jaso platoon that Wedge has planned in Seattle may not leave many opportunities for the young gun to gain the eligibility that is really key to his overall value. It would be worth dealing with rookie volatility at catcher, but production from the UTIL slots is important for our league. You’d expect a better set of draft picks for a team that was out of it quite early last year (two picks in first five rounds), but the middle rounds are what separate the men from the boys in this league and he’s got plenty of those.

For Jason, it’s not much of a loss. His keepers include Braun, Weaver, Hanley, and Shields, with some other intriguing guys like Utley, Alex Gordon, and Miguel Montero. The drop off from Gio and Phillips to any of these three is either minimal or non-existent. Prior to the trade, Jason has a pretty sizable block of time where he wouldn’t do much picking, with only one pick from the 12th round to the 19th. The trade will give him a second in this period and a sixth pick in the first five rounds, so ultimately a good move. As you may expect, Jason is probably not done at least attempting to improve in the next two weeks.