Trade Review: Prestige and Anal

Prestige receives:

SP Justin Verlander DET

Anal Hershiser receives:

SP Mike Minor ATL

A challenge trade! These can be great. Essentially a challenge trade is when two teams swap players one-for-one and see who wins the battle of wits. In this case, its slightly different in that you could easily make the case of Verlander as the preferable keeper and with Lars sitting in the basement of the standings. But both were keepers this year and had lots of promise. For this year, Minor looks like the better player. Verlander is just bad all the way around right now. His 4.59 xFIP and 4.04 FIP provide little hope of his 4.82 ERA only being a mirage. His 6.6 K/9 is worse than guys like Mike Leake and Bartolo Colon. The walks are awful – his 3.6 BB/9 is 14^th highest in the league, worse than guys like Lincecum  and Edinson Volquez.  His BABIP is a bit high at .321, but nothing terribly indicative of prolonged bad luck. And his velocity is notably down. It is to the point that when Andrew was shopping him, I wasn’t even willing to make a counter because the guy I would offer would be one of the worst guys on my roster. For 2014, he may be done.

With that in mind, he’s only 32 and while a decline in skills should be expected, he’s better than this. If he was living only on gas before, I’d say this was a bad trade for Lars. But he’s got stuff. He may need to come to grips with the lack of velocity, but I see no reason why he can’t be a top 30 starter for the next few years. Maybe he’ll figure it out this year, maybe not. But right now, I’d still rather have him going into next year than Minor.

The reason for that is track record. Minor is better than what he’s been, as his 3.48 xFIP indicates. The BABIP is high at .342 and the HR/FB ratio is elevated, but he also was kept after seasons of .272 and .252, respectively, which is low. His 3.21 ERA (3.64 xFIP), 2.02 BB/0, and 8.0 K/9, in his age 26 season were good, not great. He is an extreme fly ball pitcher, which can cause him problems. Lifetime, he’s at ERA is 3.97 (3.83 xFIP) and an 8.0/2.5 K/BB per 9. He’s good, not great. He may have a few season of borderline keeper in him, but he’ll never be what Verlander was.

Long-term, I still like Verlander as the better keeper. His stuff is too good, even if his velocity isn’t as high. For the 2014 season, Minor is your man. There’s little chance he turns things around enough to end the season with numbers good enough to justify being kept. I can’t blame Andrew for making a run this year and I can’t blame Lars for buying low. So pretty clean draw here.