The Offseason Monitor: A Trade Is Made
The Pirates and Red Sox dialed up a moderately interesting trade for fantasy purposes
It’s Jon back on the keys! The Winter Meetings are about to hit, and we got another significant roster move last night as the Pirates and Red Sox made a five-player deal. Essentially, it was Johan Oviedo for Jhostynxon Garcia. Your boy can spell Giannis Antetokounmpo no problem, but it’s going to take me a few posts to get this Jhostynxon thing down. Apparently, you pronounce it “JOES-tin-son”. I grew up in Pittsburgh. No matter how hard I try to squish is, I still long for the days of the Pirates being good. But I almost hope this guy doesn’t pan out, just because if he does, I’ll have to type and say his name a bunch on these pages.
I broke down the players on X last night, so I won’t repeat myself.
It seems to me that the big fan accounts on both sides are all pretty pumped about the deal.
That typically is going to mean that somebody is wrong. The “both sides won” thing doesn’t really make any sense when you get down to it. Sure, the Red Sox needed an SP more than an outfielder, and the Pirates needed a power-hitting outfielder way more than a starting pitcher. But in the real world, one of these players is going to be way more valuable to their team than the other. Someone will win this trade.
It was an obvious move for the Pirates to make. They’re flush with starting pitchers:
Paul Skenes
Bubba Chandler
Mitch Keller
Jared Jones
Mike Burrows
Braxton Ashcraft
Hunter Barco
And they scored the fewest runs in baseball last year. They’re bad everywhere, but particularly in the home run hitting department. There’s some hope in the lower levels of the minors, but outside of Oneil Cruz, there are no true 30-homer threats anywhere to be found.
Squads like the Pirates will always like the young guys with loads of team control. They will not have to pay Garcia much money at all for a few years, and chances are he’ll never get too expensive. They lose their SP4 (or so) for a high-upside 22-year-old power bat.
But yeah, there’s a chance that Garcia turns into another Jack Suwinski and never figures out how to hit Major League pitching. It’s a risk the Pirates should be taking, though. They need to bulk up the lineup in a hurry if they want any chance of competing. And when you’re spending less than $100 million a year on payroll, your only chance is to have a bunch of young guys all performing at the same time.
The Red Sox outfield:
Roman Anthony (probable star player in the making)
Ceddanne Rafaela (in there for defensive purposes)
Wilyer Abreu
Jarren Duran
Even with Garcia out of the mix, they have one more outfielder than they really need. You can play Rafaela at second base, but that would be a total waste since the best thing about that guy is his centerfield defense.
So they didn’t even have a spot for Garcia.
I was surprised they couldn’t bag a better arm than Johan Oviedo, though. But they must like the guy. He does not lack for STUFF. The pitch modelers are all about the guy. Your boy is slightly into the pitch modeling stuff as well. I can be whatever I want to be!
I’m an honest guy; I have never been able to fake anything. Every day in the real world, you encounter the fake laugh. You know what I’m talking about. It’s either a nervous tic or just a consciously, intentionally fabricated laugh for manipulative purposes. I’ve never been able to do that, and I think it makes me come off as rude or uncaring sometimes. So it has its negatives.
The one positive is that I don’t lie to you. When I have something that I think is good, I really think it’s good. And I also won’t hesitate to tell you the stuff that I do that sucks. And the JA Stuff model is closer to sucking than it is to good. I mean, it mostly matches other systems at least directionally. But I developed it (with AI) in like 20 minutes. I did no testing or proofing or refinements. The main problem is that the distribution is super tight. So you see the 102.1 on Oviedo’s four-seamer, and you don’t think that’s good. FanGraphs has the heater at 115. A 102 in that model is an ass bag. But 102 in mine is quite good. The league leader was Chapman at 110.
Oviedo lines up with guys like Cole Ragans, Andres Munoz, and Fernando Cruz at 102.
The slider is even better.
Two points to make:
I affirm that Oviedo’s stuff is really good
But if you want pitch modeling analysis, don’t use my tools; they suck
But good stuff is only good if you can somewhat control it. And so far, way too many of those nasty fastballs and sliders have landed well outside of the strike zone. He has an MLB career 11.2% BB% with a poor 20.6% K%. That’s a single-digit K-BB%, and nothing else matters if he can’t majorly improve that.
It’s a point of frustration for me with the pitch modeling accounts on X. All they do is look at movement numbers and declare guys good or bad based on that. It’s a little pathetic. Stuff+ is not a good standalone stat whatsoever. It does a fine job telling you about upside, but it’s not even one of the first five stats you should look at in my book.
The Red Sox must think they can take that raw material and turn Oviedo into a breakout pitcher. He’ll be 28 in March, so they don’t have a ton of time. A lot of people are bringing up Aroldis Chapman. Ever heard of that guy? 15 years in the league with a 15% walk rate, and then somehow Boston gets him down to 6.6% overnight. Insane stuff. I never would have thought that would be possible. And I’ll hand it to them, that is a sign that they can work with pitchers and help them improve.
But I don’t believe it’s that simple. I cannot believe that Boston has guys that know stuff about throwing baseballs that other organizations don’t have. In this scientific world where millions of dollars are spent to answer these questions, I have to believe that it’s very rare for a singular MLB organization to have some secret sauce that others don’t.
Just for kicks, I checked every SP who has thrown:
50+ innings with Boston
50+ innings with other organizations
since 2021. And then I compared their walk rates.
Three power lefties at the top, and those are the only three that Boston carved off at least 2.5 points from. They’ve added walk rates just as often as they’ve improved them.
This is a dumb study to do, bro. No doubt. But this is the Offseason Monitor. We’re just chilling. And at least it shows that no, the Red Sox do not have the secret elixir to solving walk problems.
Do I think the Red Sox are a sharper organization than the Pirates? You betcha! Is this a trade that Boston is likely to regret long-term? Nope! Probably the best we hope for with Garcia is for him to turn into like a .260 hitter with 25-30 bombs while playing fine defense in the outfield. That would make him a top-three offensive player for the Pirates, no doubt, but the Red Sox aren’t going to cry into their pillows at night over that kind of lost production. They’ll be just fine.
Garcia goes directly into left field for the Pirates, I think. He’s already been to the Major Leagues, playing five games for the Sox last August.
He’ll go right into their top five prospects. And maybe they’ll be tempted to start him in AAA for service time manipulation. But my confident bet is that he’s in the Opening Day lineup, hitting 5th or 6th.
Oviedo becomes the Red Sox SP4 or SP5. Crochet and Gray are obviously the 1-2, and then there’s some debate about who the next best guys are. Probably Bello, and then you have competition with guys like Kutter Crawford, Connelly Early, and Patrick Sandoval. But there’s no way the Red Sox made this trade with an eye on using Oviedo out of the bullpen. My projection
SP1 Crochet
SP2 Gray
SP3 Bello
SP4 Early
SP5 Oviedo
Kutter and Sandoval can kick rocks to the bullpen. Or maybe Krawford can go back to Worcester; he’s pretty familiar with that area.
Fantasy Impact
The entire freakin’ point of this Substack is to tell you guys what I think you should do for fantasy baseball. And I’m 1,300 words in here without doing that.
We haven’t had many 50s or DC drafts in the books now (those are the ones that go super deep). What we’ve seen so far, though:
Oviedo was around ADP 500, while Garcia was around 650, but was often not drafted at all.
Garcia gets a huge boost here. It’s a worse organization/park/lineup, but his playing time projection probably triples with this trade. I think he should probably start going around the OF90 range.
Oviedo should see an uptick as well, just by getting his name in the news and the people seeing that the Red Sox liked him enough to add him to the team. This is probably overly aggressive, but I could see him going around the same range.
More likely, though, around these guys:
Alright, well, that was fun. We’ll get a bunch more stuff cooking up next week when Winter Meetings get rolling.