In pretty big news this early afternoon, the Toronto Blue Jays traded Jason Frasor and Zach Stewart to the Chicago White Sox for Edwin Jackson and Mark Teahen. From there the Blue Jays will trade Edwin Jackson, Octavio Dotel, and Mark Rzepczynski to the St. Louis Cardinals for Colby Rasmus. Wowzers. So let’s break this down.
St. Louis gets:
BUT…as of now both Edwin Jackson and Dotel are Type B free agents. So if St. Louis lets them go, they get an additional $5mil in value, bringing their net value return to $7.31mil. However, they did trade Colby Rasmus.
So the Cardinals lose about double the value they gain. For them, Rasmus figures to be worth about $21-$22mil, but they only get about $10mil of value in return through two rentals, and a middling relief pitcher. A dumb, dumb trade for the Cardinals, unless they truly believe whoever they pick with their presumed compensation picks will turn out better than Rasmus- a long shot bet to make.
Also, for 2012-2014 I projected Rasmus would accumulate about 11 WAR and be worth around $52mil while being paid around $31mil in arbitration.
Now, let’s look at the Jays. We know they are getting about $21-$22mil of value in Rasmus, but what about what they traded away.
So here we see they gave away about $14.5mil in value, mainly because of top pitching prospect Zach Stewart. But, both Dotel and Frasor are type B FAs, so add about $5mil to that. In the end, the Jays come out slightly in the black, and get a young, good center fielder who is under team control for another three seasons. The only person they might miss is Stewart- when that’s the case, it’s a good deal.
Time to see how Chicago did
Nice, so they get about $16mil in value because of prospect Zach Stewart. Also, I have his value at $15.9mil because according to Victor Wang, a top 26-50 pitching prospect is worth that much. I know he has 3 ML starts already, but for this sake I am treating like a prospect still.
So the Sox really are getting a steal here. They get $16mil in value, when they should have gotten -$3mil in value because that’s what they are giving up. Mark Teahen is so bad that just by giving him up, they shouldn’t expect anything in return. But instead they get Stewart- not bad. So it essentially comes down to Jackson v. Stewart. Jackson has done well in Chicago, but for them they’d rather go with the cheap, younger Stewart over the proven commodity. Can’t blame them.
So in the end, I like the deal for Toronto and Chicago. In the short-run, Jackson might help St. Louis win the division more in 2011 than Rasmus, but down the line it’s a terrible deal for them.
UPDATE: Apparently Trevor Miller, Brian Tallet, and PJ Walters are also in the deal going from the Cardinals to the Blue Jays, with Miller then going to Chicago. Corey Patterson is going to the Cardinals with three PTBNL. That doesn’t change much. The most important aspects of the trades are Stewart to Chicago, Rasmus to Toronto, and Jackson to St. Louis. Everyone else is a filler pretty much. I mean, if the PTBNL are nice prospects than it will be a decent deal for St. Louis, but that’s probably not the case.
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