Pinch Hit: The Ones Who Got Away

Tuesday, February 03 2004 @ 05:36 AM EST

Contributed by: Pepper Moffatt

Here's a pinch hit from regular Batter's Box reader Will Rainey:

For my first effort at an original contribution to Da Box, I present for your consideration an overview of "the ones who got away." One of the spinoff benefits of Leigh Sprague's magnificent overview of the Jays trade history is the ability to examine that history from a variety of angles. One of those angles is the history of the involvement of "prospects" in these trades.

The cliched "common knowledge" understanding of trading prospects is that you are trading away future greatness for current reward. Baseball fans who pay attention to their team's minor league talent are often heard to moan about the great talent being traded away in an attempt to "rent a player." But does this turn out to be true?

It seemed profitable to me to see whatever happened to those players that the Jays' various GM's "sacrificed" in order to acquire major league talent. A possible corollary to this would be to examine what we got when we acquired “prospects,” but that is for another day.

Before I begin, I’d like to mention a few preliminary considerations. This report is dependent on Leigh's work, and owes its existence to it. However, it goes beyond that work in surveying the rest of the traded "prospects" career, as opposed to just what that player did for the receiving team, to see just what we lost. That said, I did not include statistics, as Leigh did, for these players' entire career for the sake of brevity. However, I tried, as much as possible, to confine my comments on those careers to the obvious facts rather than opinions, since I would be making no effort to support those opinions within the body of this report. Also, for the sake of consistency, those players commented on are those who never played any significant role as Toronto Blue Jays. They were either traded as minor leaguers, or with no more than a "cup of coffee" in a Jays uniform.

So, with that out of the way, let’s dig in . . .

Our first consideration, the Peter Bavasi years, are sort of a write off for this study. The only "prospect" I see that Bavasi traded (as might be expected from a newly formed team) is Mike Weathers who never played in the majors.

Pat Gillick's Record


The Beloved Gord Ash


J.P. Ricciardi's Short Record



The Final Score



Finally to be fair and complete, the Jays have traded a number of players who were in the infancy of their major league careers who can be loosely considered "prospects." These include: Pete Vuckovich, Phil Huffman, Mauro Gozzo, Willie Blair, Denis Boucher, Jeff Kent, Paul Menhart, Edwin Hurtardo, Cesar Izturus, Felipe Lopez, and Mark Hendrickson, of whom four are still active on major league rosters. Only two of those (three if Lopez lives up to his clippings some day) were in any way significant major leaguers: Vuckovich and Kent.

So the question before the house is this:

Is the conventional wisdom about trading away future stardom when you deal minor leaguers completely false? Or have the Jays simply been incredibly lucky to have traded 78 such players and have lost only 5 important players, and only one real star player?

Further how does this record inform future decisions in regards to trading minor leaguers for major league help?

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