Climb Up My Trunk and Swing From My Branches and Eat Apples and Play In My Shade.
The ongoing relevance of the Delmon Young trade tree.
The New Yorker ran a piece this month about Marvel Studios, telling the origin story of the Hollywood agent who wanted to run his own movie studio:
“That’s when I thought, Hey, if I can get a movie I can believe in, and every movie after that one is a sequel or a quasi-sequel—the same characters show up—then it can go on forever,” he told me. “Because it’s not thirty new movies. It’s one movie and twenty-nine sequels. What we call a universe.” This, Maisel claims, was the birth of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
So, in this formulation, all the excitement that fans bring to Thor: Ragnarok is seamlessly transferred into the post-credits stinger that generates equal excitement for the upcoming Avengers: Infinity War, and the anticipation for movies with titles that have colons keeps rolling over ad infinitum with no potential energy ever lost. The dream of such a perpetual motion machine dates back at least 1,000 years, to Bhāskara's Wheel, which was eventually discredited, as all perpetual motion machines have been. But ah, the dream; a cure for limits.
This is what I thought about as I watched Tyler Glasnow pitch for the first-place Rays Tuesday night, as I watched Isaac Paredes bat as the Rays’ hottest hitter.
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At Baseball Prospectus I used to do an annual retrospective of the best farm system in baseball from 10 years prior. The fourth and final edition, in 2016, was about the Rays, who before 2007 had been judged by Baseball America to have the sport’s best collection of minor league talent. Many of the club’s top prospects went on to flop, and yet in 2016 I found that those Rays squoze more juice from their farm than any of the three teams I’d previously looked at. They had, surprise!, done this by trading several of their young players for more and/or better players, and then trading some of those new players for ever more and/or better players, and so forth. The most extreme example was Delmon Young, the no. 1 prospect in baseball at the time, the former first-overall draft pick. The Rays would trade him after one full season, and 15 years later his trade tree—the players the Rays got back, and then players that they traded those players for, and so forth—still flourishes, arguably as healthy and undiminished as it has ever been.
To recap the tree highlights: Delmon Young was traded for Jason Bartlett and Matt Garza, Garza was later traded for Chris Archer and Brandon Guyer, and Archer was later traded for Tyler Glasnow and Austin Meadows and a player to be named later. There were, as well, 10 other players1 who the Rays acquired in those trades, or acquired in trades for players who had been acquired in those trades. Six of those 10 others would make the majors as Rays. All of this history was good enough to make the ESPN.com main page when I checked in on the tree in summer 2018.
Here’s what has happened since: The player to be named later was revealed to be Shane Baz, who was a very good pitching prospect. In the years since the trade he became one of the top two or three pitching prospects alive, debuted in the majors looking awfully good, then got hurt and had surgery and is expected to return with next year. Glasnow broke out as a dominant starter—with the sixth-best ERA among all starters since 2019—though one unable to stay healthy for long stretches. He’s got an Opening Day start under his belt, and the Rays signed him to an extension that will next year make him the best-compensated player in franchise history (if he’s still around). Meadows made the All-Star team in his first full season as a Ray, and over the span of three seasons he was their second or third best hitter. Then they traded him, before 2022, for third baseman Isaac Paredes. Paredes is what merits this update.
Here’s Paredes’ career progression—the first two years as a Tiger, these past two as a Ray—in OPS+ bars:
He had two homers in 57 games as a Tiger, but he had 20 in his first season as a Ray, and he should top that this year. He’s gotten even better as this season has gone on: His monthly OPS has gone up from .785 (in April) to .832 (May) to .997 (June), with more walks than strikeouts this month. His win probability added this year is ninth highest in the American League. There is, yes, some tepid stuff hidden in there—he doesn’t hit the ball very hard, and if you look at the Statcast expected-vs-reality stats he’s a candidate to regress. On the other hand, whatever, let’s go crazy—
The trade tree alone has now produced seven of the Rays’ top 60 players ever, by WAR. Collectively, all these players have produced 59 WAR as Rays, which is a borderline Hall of Fame career, and would be the ninth-best player in baseball since 2008. The Rays’ franchise WAR leader is Evan Longoria, with 51. The trade tree is better. The best four non-tree pitchers in Rays franchise history have produced 59 WAR. The tree is about that good.
(The slightly cruel kicker: All the players traded away to plant or replenish the tree—Young, Bartlett, Garza, César Ramos, Guyer, Archer, and Meadows—have produced a total of 6 WAR after the trades,
for various reasons, including some unforeseeable sadnesses.)
In modern ball, with roster turnover what it is, you sometimes have to squint to see the continuity that links a team of today with the same team of a decade ago. It can be a real ship of Theseus thing. But occasionally a team will maintain a through line through a single person, or a few people, or a characteristic—Brian Cashman and the Yankees, Joey Votto and the Reds, Clayton Kershaw and the Dodgers, Arte Moreno and the Angels, physics and the Rockies, the no-money-Monopoly-guy and Oakland. And for me, at least, the Delmon Young Trade Tree and the Rays. They’d just been the worst team in baseball when they made the trade; they’ve been the fourth-best in the 16 seasons since. The tree isn’t the whole reason why, but arguably the biggest on-field reason why.
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The real intrigue of tracking the tree has always been looking forward to see how much could be left. As it stands now, they’ve got Glasnow healthy, Paredes ascendant, and Baz on track to return next season. So where does this moment rank in the tree’s lifespan?
Perspective 1: The tree is in decline. There was a point when the Rays had nine players acquired in Young-and-Young-subsequent trades, but now they’re down to three. There was a time when the Rays got nearly 10 WAR in a season from tree players, and this year they’re on pace for a little under 5. And for all the nice things I’m about to say about Glasnow/Paredes/Baz, it is a precarious trio. Glasnow hasn’t been as dominant this year, his velocity is down a tick, and he’s always at risk of another injury; Baz, a young pitcher and a rehabbing pitcher, could falter in either direction; Paredes’ track record is short, and 3-WAR infielders turn to dust every day.
Perspective 2: Actually the tree is sturdier than ever. From 2011 to 2018—after the Bartlett and Garza trades—the tree dipped to about 2.5 WAR per year, and by 2017 it was reduced to just one valuable player—Chris Archer—and two unheralded minor leaguers.
The Archer trade turned that around, and the tree has been remarkably steady since then: 6 WAR in 2019, 3 WAR (prorated to a full season) in 2020, 4 WAR in 2021, 3 WAR in 2022, and something like 4 or 5 WAR (prorated to a full season) this year. Glasnow has another year and a half until free agency, Paredes has four and a half more years until free agency, and if Baz returns healthy next year he’ll have four years until free agency. This is the first time the Rays have ever had three clearly desirable tree-produced players at the same time. Mix and match the risks and upsides of those three players and it looks a lot like about 4 or 5 WAR per year for at least a few more years.
Perspective 3: Maybe synthesize the first two. The tree is thriving, so the tree must perish. To keep the tree going forever, the Rays would have to keep trading from it. The Rays have traded productive players during winning cycles before (e.g. Austin Meadows), but they do it less often than during down cycles (e.g. Chris Archer), for obvious reasons. In a perfect world, a team is so good that it looks at all the good players it has and says, yes, these are the ones who’ll get us there. Maybe that’s these Rays, with the best record in baseball, World Series favorites. Maybe this tree dies of a life lived well. That, more than perpetual motion, is the dream.
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Glasnow gets hit hard quickly on Tuesday. The Rays have a reliever moving around in the bullpen in the first inning. Lefties are taking comfortable swings on his slider, and he can’t quite put away righties. It’s 6-0 after two innings, the first time he’s allowed six runs in a start since 2018.
Then Glasnow settles down, blitzes through the third and fourth. And Paredes fights for a hard-earned walk in the third, the first Ray to reach base. Two innings later, Paredes reaches base again and comes around to score their first run. He singles and scores again in the sixth. He singles in the seventh. And finally, as the potential tying run in the ninth, he… strikes out. The tree doesn’t worry. It runs on tree time.
Sam Fuld, Robinson Chirinos, Cole Figueroa, Brandon Gomes, César Ramos and Adam Russell, who all played for the big-league Rays; and Jhonleider Salinas, Nathan Lukes, Mark Sappington and Hak-Ju Lee, who didn’t.
“Squoze.”
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Fun fact: Sam Fuld was my first favorite player.
Love a good trade tree retrospective. I’ve always wanted to do one for my fantasy and/or OOTP teams but I can’t figure out the best way to do so. Google sheets? Napkin? Some sort of drawing app?