On Brad Hand and Sure Things
Brad Hand was a sure thing to be traded in 2017. He was an All-Star, the Padres' only All-Star, and he wasn't there simply to make up the numbers, satisfying the MLB mandate that all clubs must have one representative in the All-Star team. No, Brad Hand earned his All-Star spot on merit, which is not something you can say about a whole lot of Padre All-Stars over the past 50 years. So, of course, it made perfect sense to trade him. Why would a team like the 2017 San Diego Padres, a team that carried three (3!) Rule 5 players on their roster, want to hold on to an All-Star lefty reliever? How would Brad Hand remaining a Padre help the franchise get any closer to winning a World Series? How do you even let him get to the All-Star break still a member of the team?
But Brad Hand wasn't traded before the All-Star break. And, as the trade deadline inched closer, and reports started emerging that AJ Preller would be happy to hold onto Hand if he couldn't find exactly the return he was looking for, Padres fans' anxiety levels began to rise. When the trade deadline passed and people realised Hand was still with the team, the reaction from Padres fans was something approaching the head explosion scene from Scanners. The general sentiment was that AJ Preller had made a monumental error, the type of error that haunts a franchise for years. By not trading their prized asset the Padres' trade deadline, it was agreed, had been a disaster.
But Hand continued to pitch well, moving from a general reliever to the closer role, and if you bothered to look toward the mound at AT&T Park on September 30th, in game 161 of a supremely, manifestly forgettable Padres season, you would have found him earning his 21st and final save of the year against a Giants team that was as eager to call it quits as their opponents. By that point most Padres fans had calmed down a bit, comfortable in their belief that Hand had built up significant value on the trade market going into the off-season. With the Craig Kimbrel-for-Manny Margot etc. trade, after all, Preller had already demonstrated his prowess when it comes to off-season dealing. But then the Pads didn't trade Hand at the Winter Meetings. And then they signed him to a three-year extension, with a club option for year four. And so Brad Hand is going to be a Padre for as long as the club wants him to be one.
And now nobody seems to know what to make of how the Padres are managing their one undeniably valuable trade asset.
Some might argue that trading Hand in 2017, whether during the season or over the winter, was the objectively correct thing to do. This current iteration of the Padres is not a contender, they aren't even particularly close to being a contender, so a stud reliever is essentially an unnecessary luxury item. To paraphrase Branch Rickey, the Padres could have finished second last without Brad Hand. To follow this line of thinking, the justification for trading Hand in 2017 was the same as when they traded Drew Pomeranz and Fernando Rodney in the middle of the 2016 season, or Kimbrel after the 2015 season - a team like the Padres has very little use for an All-Star, while the prospects a team is able to acquire by trading an All-Star are potential building blocks around which long-term success can be established. An All-Star for a top prospect is a good deal for all parties involved.
Case in point, the return the Padres got back from two trades already mentioned. After a nightmare 2015 in which Padres fans were told over and over again exactly how their GM had destroyed the franchise's future, the Kimbrel trade was like water to a man dying of thirst. Everyone knew the Padres had to trade Kimbrel - an unenviable position going into any negotiation - and yet Preller was nevertheless able to pry four prospects from the Red Sox. The two big names were Manny Margot and Javy Guerra; Margot was a future All-Star in centerfield, while Guerra, perhaps more excitingly, was sold as the answer to the Padres franchise-defining search for a shortstop. Preller followed this coup by acquiring Drew Pomeranz from the A's in December 2015 and then trading him in July 2016 to the Red Sox straight up for their top pitching prospect, Anderson Espinoza. This truly was the crowning achievement in AJ Preller's redemption tour - trading an All-Star pitcher the team didn't need for a sure thing, a prospect the Sporting News had compared to Pedro Martínez.
How has this all worked out for the Padres? Well, Margot has been as good as advertised, and spent most of 2017 in the bigs at age 22. Guerra, on the other hand, was fairly unimpressive at both Single-A and Double-A last year, hitting .222 and OPS-ing .615 across both leagues. He's young - almost exactly a year younger than Margot - and he's going to continue to develop, but he doesn't exactly inspire the same excitement these days that he did two years ago. I'm not breaking any new ground by pointing out that when it comes to prospects, there's no such thing as a sure thing.
The past 18 months of Anderson Espinoza's life are an object lesson in that truism. The kid who was supposed to be the next Pedro Martínez struggled a fair bit in Low-A in 2016, and never threw a single pitch in anger in 2017. Forearm tightness prevented him from starting the season, and the, erm, particular rehab program that the Padres organisation seems to have developed to deal with forearm tightness in a pitcher's throwing arm, in which they do nothing and hope for the best, achieved the same results it did with Tyson Ross. (Admittedly, Ross had a different injury, but the Padres' approach was exactly the same in both cases.) All of which is just a long way of saying Espinoza had Tommy John surgery in early August and will be out until 2019.
Life comes at you fast.
These days, advances in medical technology mean that Tommy John surgery is portrayed as being not too dissimilar to getting your wisdom teeth taken out or a mole removed from your leg. Nobody even says Tommy John surgery anymore, it's just "TJ," as innocent as a little kid with the same nickname. And the likelihood is that Espinoza will come back from the surgery and be as good as he was. (Or, hopefully, better.) It seems like every second person on the internet just now is a prospect analyst, able to break down swing plane, arm strength, fielding range, or pitching mechanics with the same ease and rapidity that you or I might process a weather report. Maybe when those people look at Espinoza they still see a future Pedro Martínez, despite the TJ and his overall disappointing time as a Padre so far. And I hope they're right.
But when I look at Espinoza now, I can't help but think back to 1998 and Matt Clement.
In that beautiful summer of 1998 - objectively the best baseball season of my life - if conversation ever turned away from the big club for a moment it almost inevitably landed on the name of one man: Matt Clement. Oh Matt Clement! What wasn't to love? Drafted as a 19-year old and now, in his age 24 season, the indisputable top prospect in the Padres farm system. A 2.05 ERA in the minors in 1997! 201 strikeouts in 189 innings pitched! We had all read the stories about how badly Florida wanted him included in the Kevin Brown trade, and how Kevin Towers absolutely refused to trade him. We hoped that Brown would stay in San Diego once he became a free agent, but even if he didn't we knew that Matt Clement was on his way, and that he was a potential All-Star. Matt Clement was a sure thing.
Matt Clement, the sure thing, ended up starting 67 games for the Padres over two-plus years and recording -.1 WAR. In 2000 he led the National League in walks and wild pitches. Matt Clement? Try Ebby Calvin LaLoosh, only if Nuke had never met Annie and Crash. And Derrek Lee, the guy we did trade to the Marlins? Well... See for yourself.
I don't mean to pick on Matt Clement. There are any number of disappointing Padres prospects I could have focused on: Ben Davis, Donavan Tate, Matt Bush, Tim Stauffer, Jimmy Jones... The list is as long as you want it to be, to the dismay of Padres fans everywhere. Maybe Anderson Espinoza will be the next Jake Peavy. Maybe he'll be the next Joey Hamilton. Or maybe he'll be the next Matt Clement. And if they had traded Brad Hand the Padres could have acquired the next Manny Margot. Or they could have acquired the next Anderson Espinoza.
When it comes down to it, baseball is a fundamentally uncertain business. A pitcher's arm can go at any second. A prospect can just not quite make the leap to established major leaguer. A hitter can forget how to hit, a fielder can forget how to throw. You can only be absolutely sure of what you have in the few seconds between one play ending and the next beginning.
So was not trading Brad Hand a mistake? I'm sure I don't know.