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Remember when the Cards traded Dmitri Young for Jeff Brantley? Ouch!
Brantley was hurt and never returned to his dominant closer form. Young
went on and had a nice career. He could hit!! Granted he wasn’t a
strong defensive player and the Cards had traded for McGwire leaving
Young with no place to play. It would have been nice however if they
could have gotten a better return for one of their top prospects.Years later I thought maybe it had happened again. James Ramsey was
traded for Justin Masterson who pitched poorly for the Cards. Ramsey
was a 1st round pick and highly regarded but he never made it to
The Show and is coaching at Florida St. now.As Joaquin Andujar used to say “Youneverknow”
How about Keith Hernandez for Neil Allen and Rick Ownbey. Not a great track record for trading 1st basemen. Are we about to repeat this with Jose Martinez?
Good winter topic. There are two kinds of trades as I see it. One is prospects. The other is established MLB players.
On prospects, I recommend you read the article just below. You will feel a lot better. My conclusion was they should trade more prospects, not fewer. This was written prior to the Goldy trade.
On MLB players, over a decade ago, I took a shot at identifying the worst (and best) trades in the Cardinals’ prior 40 years. Amazingly, this article has survived the great Scout purge.
https://247sports.com/mlb/cardinals/Article/Worst-Cardinal-Trades-of-the-Last-40-Years-104306710/
Keith Hernandez was my no. 2 on the above list, but he is not a good comp for Jose Martinez at all. Hernandez is considered perhaps the best fielding first baseman of all time. He also won an MVP. Martinez is a lot less. A lot.
Brian, the link was only about the worst trades. I used google to find the Best Trades article:
https://247sports.com/mlb/cardinals/Article/Best-Cardinal-Trades-of-the-Last-40-Years-104306904/
While it wasn’t a trade – selling Jose Cruz to the Astros for $10K
should be mentioned. He played 13 seasons for the Astros and
ended up with over 2000 hits and 300+ stolen bases.How far back do we want to go? Trading Steve Carlton for Rick Wise wasn’t one of our better moments.
As for Mo, I can’t say he has made many trades in which the player we traded away went on to have sustained success.
Well, the Tommy Pham and Luke Voit trades haven’t looked good in the short term. The Ozuna trade may look bad in the long-term as could the Goldschmidt one.
Mozeliak has a lot of built-up goodwill for me after his Jay-Gyorko trade, the Craig-Lackey trade, the Holiday one and the Edmonds-Freese trade long ago.
Interesting how folks see trades differently. I thought the Ozuna deal was looking pretty good. The Cards got a middle of the order bat who hit 23 home runs and drove in 88 despite an injured shoulder – and they have him for another year plus a likely comp pick if he leaves.
Alcantara spent another season chasing his elusive control and wouldn’t likely have had a role with StL had he been here last year. Sierra was just awful and the other two guys are not a factor. Maybe Sandy will become a star later on, but it seems far from certain at this point.
As for Mo, I can’t say he has made many trades in which the player we traded away went on to have sustained success.
Yup. Really the only one that truly stands out for me is the Kyle Barraclough trade to Miami. He turned out to be a very good bullpen arm that wasn’t on any top prospects lists.
At the time of the Barraclough trade for Cishek, we had him ranked in the low 40s in the system. He turned out better.
Though some might be amazed by this, Barraclough’s career total of 2.3 fWAR pales in comparison to Gregerson’s 8.8. Of course, Gregerson had more years to accrue it, but he had been a good reliever for a long time. Full details are in the Trading Prospects article I linked to above.
Brian Walton
Interesting how folks see trades differently. I thought the Ozuna deal was looking pretty good. The Cards got a middle of the order bat who hit 23 home runs and drove in 88 despite an injured shoulder – and they have him for another year plus a likely comp pick if he leaves.
Alcantara spent another season chasing his elusive control and wouldn’t likely have had a role with StL had he been here last year. Sierra was just awful and the other two guys are not a factor. Maybe Sandy will become a star later on, but it seems far from certain at this point.
Ozuna did not hit nearly as well as I would have liked and I think most would agree. He was under 3 WAR for the year. Alcantara did okay in AAA. Gallen did as well. They have them both starting still and in the picture for the 2019 roster. Alcantara looked a lot like Hicks last year for the major league team, but in a starting role.
It is fun to look back on deals and see what worked and what did not. My track record is pretty good in that most of the deals I liked, even as a kid in the ‘60s, turned out good and most I did not like were indeed bad, some even worse than I thought they would be (Carlton/Wise, Hernandez/Allen,Ownbey, Van Slyke+/Pena are three examples).
The first big trade I remember was acquiring Dick Groat from Pittsburgh for Julio Gotay and Don Caldwell. I liked that trade a lot because as a youngster, I thought Groat was a great shortstop, and liked his baseball cards. It did turn out to be a good deal, although Branch Rickey did not like the deal.
I did not like the McGwire deal, which turned out good so that one was a miss. More recently, I did not like us giving up on Ottavino, which has indeed turned out to be a mistake. I did not like the Lackey trade, but that one was okay although Joe Kelly is still pitching, albeit he has been hot and cold in his career. He picked a nice time to be hot though, pitching great in the 2018 World Series.
I did not like Miller-for-Heyward, but it has not been a big factor either way, neither bust nor boom.
Was not real happy about the Pham trade, but understand it. Love the Goldschmidt deal though. We will see how that one turns out.
Miller for Heyward revisited.
Miller had one good year, his 2015 in Atlanta, 3.4 fWAR. In the three years since, in total, his fWAR was 0.9. He is currently looking for a job and may have to take a minor league contract.
The Cards got Heyward’s career-best season, which was 5.6 fWAR, also in 2015. For example, that is better than any single season from Matt Carpenter and Bryce Harper to date except one (2013 and 2014, respectively). St. Louis dodged the terrible follow on contract, solely because their uncanny long-term contract good luck avoidance came into play.
Tyrell Jenkins and Jordan Walden did nothing.
In other words, I think the Cards won the trade in 2015 alone.
On top of that, with the comp pick they received for Heyward leaving, the Cards drafted Dakota Hudson. I feel pretty good with this overall.
As soon as you include the comp pick in the deal (and you should) you have to also include the return the Braves got for Miller. Then the Cards probably lose the trade.
Yes, if you include all the downstream players, the Braves do win (unless Hudson becomes a huge star), but it isn’t like the Cards lost anything in that downstream trade.
From the Cardinals perspective only, one year of Heyward plus Hudson for Miller is ok with me. Right now, as bikemike suggested, it is probably neither bust or boom, but Hudson has plenty of runway ahead.
Other than Mulder for 1 year the trade of Dan Haren turned out to bite us. He had a pretty good 7 year run as a starter and turned into a decent back end guy towards the end of his career.
Yeah Carlton was a bad one as well. You really can’t beat that!
If you back a few years Branch Rickey made some of the worst trades.
In 1934 he traded Paul Derringer for light hitting shortstop Leo Durocher. Durocher had a .5 WAR for the Cardinals in 34 and 2.4 WAR of the remainder of his career. Derringer with a 3.9 WAR in 34 and 33.9 for a career. While the Cardinals needed a shortstop there were probably a fair number of .5 WAR shortstops they could have had without giving up Derringer. He also traded pitcher Tex Carleton to the Cubs for a couple of no names and cash. Carleton racked up 3.9 WAR over the next three seasons.
After giving up Derringer and Carleton the Dean brothers went down to injury and Wild Bill Hallahan’s career flamed out and the Cardinals were short of pitching in the late 30’s. As a further issue he traded minor league pitcher Bill Lee to the Cubs for two unnamed players and cash in 1933. Lee won 106 games for the Cubs over the next 6 years and was a two time all-star.
At the end of the 41 season Rickey traded Johnny Mize to the Giants for Jack Lohrman, Johnny McCarthey and Ken O’Dea. The 3 of them had a collective 5.7 WAR the remainder of their careers compared to 33.8 for Mize. The Cardinals also received $50,000 in the deal.
Two other items of note.
First Rickey’s contract called for a base salary and 10% of the Cardinals pre-tax profit per year. Rickey made a lot of deals involving cash received by the Cardinals.
Second, owner Sam Breadon cut the salaries of Rickey’s key scouts and other off field personel sometime in the late 30’s. This in a year that a dividend was paid to stockholders and the Cardinals made a profit. Rickey was so justifiedly angry that he told Breadon that he would dig ditches for $1 a day before he would work for him beyond his current contract. In 1942 he went to the Dodgers and took his highly skilled scouting team with him. In the meantime he had dumped Joe Medwick and pitcher Curt Davis to the Dodgers for some fringe players and $125,000. After he left Breadon traded off the Cooper brothers and Johnny Hopp among others.
The Cardinals won 4 pennants in the 40’s. But they also finished second 5 times. Without trading away the stars you wonder what could have been.
Having said all that I admire Rickey for his creativity and contributions to the sport. He surrounded himself with great people and on balance was very successful winning pennants with two organizations and put together the team that later won for the Pirates.
Most of all he is responsible for much of the rich Cardinal history and without him I believe the Cardinals would have lost their franchise early in the 20th century.
We can’t forget the Ozzie Smith trade. Ozzie became a better hitter, and Templeton basically disappeared after a season or 2. Or at the very least we got best years of both Templeton and Ozzie. I didn’t realize, but Templeton had 50 triples in 3 years with us.
Edmonds, Rolen, and Mcgwire were very good trades also. And how would 2011 have went if we didn’t make the Rasmus trade.
Roger Maris to the Cards, Charlie Smith to the Yanks. For me, one of the best. It was amazing to have Maris to root for, and man did I.
As a wee lad, I was ecstatic when we aquired power hitter Reggie Smith from Boston. Then a couple of years later we practically gave him away to LA, where he put up a couple of big years.
Maris was a good trade for this team at the time. I remember old timers saying he was a good fit and a team player.
Ozzie for Templeton was about an even swap at the time but man it worked out for us big time. lol
How about Cepeda for Torre as one that evened out. lol
Wasn’t Ozzie in his last year of team control in 1982? His subsequent extension and those years shouldn’t factor into the trade, just like they shouldn’t for Matt Holiday or Scott Rolen, or Mark McGwire, or Jim Edmonds, or, in the future, Paul Goldshmidt. Or should they?
Almost impossible to assess the value of getting a player comfortable with the team before he moves to free agency. Likely every person is different.
For example, would Ozzie (being California bred) have seriously considered St. Louis as a free agent if he wasn’t already playing there? Maybe he has touched on this in interviews or bios over the years…
I thought Ozzie was gone after ‘85, and would be in a Dodger uniform. But the club signed him early in the season and he finished his career in St. Louis.
Branch Rickey had his ups and downs. His agreement with Breadon incentivized him to make cash deals, as he got a portion of the proceeds. Players tended to resent him as he was cheap, but he was a visionary and saw how the game would evolve well before time caught up to the eventual changes. He not only played a big part in the success of three organizations, but was a major influence in three areas that are still staples today: the system of developing players, the integration of non-white players, and the expansion of the big leagues coast-to-coast.
Mulder-for-Haren was a deal I did not like at all. But I thought Barton would be the guy we most regretted giving up. I did not like losing Haren either, as my sense was his career trajectory was rising while Mulder’s was flattening out. But I thought once Barton hit the bigs, the deal would look like a steal for Oakland. As it was Barton never became the hitter a lot of us thought he would be, and St. Louis won in 2006 despite the deal.
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