Trades, and Dbacks' Minor League Prospects

Would keeping those prospects have served the Diamondbacks better? In the great bulk of those cases, the answer is no: the majority of prospects never become even everyday players, let alone average or above-average players. And the Diamondbacks, with the exception of second-base, have just about every position occupied by a player fully under their control through 2010 or later. A prospect would need to offer a credible alternative – better and/or cheaper – to the current incumbent in order to have value for the Diamondbacks.

If your prospects are blocked and/.or not good enough, then sitting on them in Triple-A serves little or no purpose. They’re insurance if someone higher up the scale suffers a major injury, but otherwise… Wins by your Triple-A affiliate are not taken into account when deciding playoff spots.

The alternative is to convert those prospects into players who are able to help your team, and the Haren trade was a perfect example of this. You convert a number of potential players, who may or may not be successful down the line, into a player who can make a palpable difference to your team at the moment. There’s a certain amount of ‘win now’ involved in that: there’s no point making the trade when your team lost 95 games. But if you feel you’re one piece short of the postseason, then it may be worth the risk.

I think that’s the position the Diamondbacks were in after 2007. Yes, they’d made the playoffs, but Pythagoras whispered that this was more by luck than good judgment. Anothr starting pitcher seemed necessary to back up Webb and give the team a credible 1-2 punch, especially with Johnson’s recovery and effectiveness for 2008 being seriously in doubt.

On the other hand, there have been a number of very bad misevaluations of prospects. The obvious one is Quentin, but not protecting Dan Uggla was arguably even worse. If we had those two on our roster this season, I think the ongoing debate over who had the best lineup in the National League West would be significantly altered. Letting that kind of prospect leave without getting anything in exchange is especially detrimental to a mid-market franchise like Arizona, who need to use their farm system as a continuous source of talent, because free agency is not a useful way to spend their resources.

Outside of those, I can’t say I am too badly concerned by most of the prospects. Brett Anderson would have been nice to keep, but I think Haren is probably a better pitcher than Anderson will be [the numbers to date are certainly on my side, anyway!]. Hindsight is a wonderful thing: it’s easy to complain about any of these moves now, but if you weren’t equally as vocally against them at the time, you’ll pardon me if I treat your opinion with a certain amount of cynicism.

Although I do really, really love Danny I still feel like we gave up way too much for him, especially when you look at other recent trades for marquee pitchers (Johan, what’s his face on Seattle, and Harden).

I think we may have been better off seperating all these top prospects we gave for Danny into two trades for other things…(Less talented, proven pitcher and bullpen depth possibly?)

It would be nice if we could have kept either Anderson, Eveland, or Smith but things are never as easy in the MLB as we like to make them out to be.

If they gave me the chance to redo the deal I’d still confidently take Danny though because I always favor the proven over the potential.

The age of this team allows us time to rebuild the farm system while still being competitive. We should have a few years to pump it back up again and follow the D-Backs system of building internally. As said before around these parts the Backs have 5 of the first 40 picks in this draft, which should help immensely. (Could have had more due to Dunn, but thats a sore subject). Not to mention another top pick if anything ever happens in the Cruz Crisis. I think a better question is would you rather have that pick for Cruz or another year of above average service.

Combined those two went 9-1 out of the gates in the first month of the season in ‘08. It’s hard to keep up with a team that does that.