Ok, this started as a little “whoa, the Pirates did something seemingly dumb and then something seemingly smart!” thing, and then I realized it could be a bit, and now I feel like I owe some explanation for this Twitter thread:
Basically, what I’m doing here is using FanGraphs (and only FanGraphs, as will become important) to put a monetary value on each side of a trade, then comparing those two sides. If one of them is clearly better than the other, an admittedly subjective scope, it’s a fleeceing. We’ll get to why the team that got fleeced can still have made a good trade, but first, how I assign the monetary value:
Major Leaguers
Look at their projected WAR for the rest of their time under team control. Look at how much they’re expected to be paid for the rest of their time under team control. Convert WAR to dollars at the very generic, kind of outdated 8M/WAR $free agency value. Subtract the money the player will be paid from that WAR-based dollar value. If there’s an option in the contract, account for the more likely scenario. If the player’s still arbitration-eligible, look for rough comp’s in recent arbitrations.
Minor Leaguers
Using FanGraphs’s future values and their associated dollar amounts, well, that’s it. I just use FanGraphs’s dollar amounts corresponding to future value. If a pitcher’s a 45+ FV guy per FanGraphs, he’s worth $6M for the purposes of this exercise.
Cash
Cash is cash and is valued as such, so if a team pays another $2M, that’s taken into account.
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This is grossly simplistic and a rather limited view of the industry’s scouting on each prospect. But it’s also a quick-response Twitter thing, so I’m ok with it. Next year, if I do this again, I’d like to compile other minor league rankings into some sort of industry average (still using the FanGraphs FV-to-$ valuation—my guess is they’re ahead of the curve on that), and get a better sense of the value of postseason WAR, postseason WPA, championship value and probability, etc. It would be fun to make this scientific.
Even then, though, there would be “fleeceings” that could still be good trades. Trades where maybe a team has a very high or very low valuation of a specific prospect relative to the market, or where a player has greater or lesser value on one team or another due to roster constraints. Really, this is probably a better tool for evaluating sellers than buyers, and its greatest purpose might be as something evaluating the market itself (example: The Blue Jays paid a ton for José Berríos, demonstrating how starting pitching-starved the trade market was this go-round). For now, take it with all those grains of salt, and please, blame me, not FanGraphs. They didn’t ask for me to use them at complete face value with little to no nuance.
