Defensive Indifference

This guy would be St. Paul Pioneer Press Twins beat writer Bob Sansevere. And this guy thinks this is how GM Bill Smith should conduct his negotiations with the Red Sox in the seemingly inevitable Johan Santana trade.

I get on the horn with Boston Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein and say, “You want Johan Santana, right?”

Epstein likely will say, “Right.”

Then I say, “Tell you what. I’ll trade you Santana and Carlos Silva and Joe Nathan.”

Then I wait for Epstein to pick the phone up off the floor, and I say, “I don’t really want to part with Santana or Nathan, but my owner is a cheapskate and won’t pay what it will take to sign them long term. So, you give me center fielder Jacoby Ellsbury, second baseman Dustin Pedroia, closer Jonathan Papelbon, starters Jon Lester and Clay Buchholz, and we’ve got a deal.”

OK, now dust yourself off, puts your chair back on its legs and try to stop laughing. If you want sarcasm and true humor, go to FJM for their priceless reaction. Me, I’m going to pretend this lunatic/Warren from There’s Something About the Mary clone is actually serious and break it down. (And we’ll just ignore that Carlos Silva is a free agent).

I did a quick cost-to-performance analysis of the players involved in this trade using the four-year projected WARPs of the players in Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA and using salary data from Cot’s Contracts as well as my by best guess of the approximate value of the players in free agency, should they reach it (none of the Red Sox players will). Here’s what I found.

Through 2011, the five Red Sox players heading to Minnesota in this hypothetical trade would amass 65.9 WARP. The projected cost of the quintet is around $36 million (unlikely to fluctuate much since all of the players are cost-controlled). Through 2011, the three Twins heading Boston would amass 45.4 WARP. The projected cost of the trio is around $160.25 million.

So Sansevere’s idea of a good trade is one where the Red Sox surrender over 20 wins of talent while paying $130 million more. He wants Boston to pay $3.5 million per marginal win while giving up 20 marginal wins in talent that costs a little more than $500,000 per marginal win. Right.

(And I haven’t even mentioned the fact that this would leave the Red Sox short a second baseman and that the PECOTA projections are from the beginning of 2007, before Pedroia won RoY, Clay Buchholz threw a no-hitter, Jon Lester won Game 4 of the World Series and Jacoby Ellsbury turned into a poor man’s Grady Sizemore.)

Way to go Bob Sansevere. You have truly raised the bar for stupidity.