Everybody is looking for something. People struggle to face their animal existence, where their sole reason for being, from the cell to the whole organism, is to proliferate, and we seek to find purpose and fulfillment wherever we can. People join the military to give their life a purpose, to give meaning, drawn to adventurism and to be part of something greater than themselves. Some immerse themselves in a religion and others are consumed by addiction. Some people obsess over conspiracy theories or spend their lives looking for aliens, bigfoot, and the lochness monster. The point is, it's all irrational, and born of a need to believe there's some grand scheme, something more powerful than ourselves, malevolent or otherwise, pulling the strings, instrumental in our successes or to blame for our failures. It's a more comfortable existence than accepting we're mediocre people, generally motivated by selfishness, destroying one another for the right to marshal finite resources. These things comfort us to the defeat of our will power, to the fear of suffocating in the narrow confines of our world, bringing us hope of new victories and conquests.
The Baltimore Orioles, too, are looking for something. You could be excused for suspecting the Orioles themselves haven't a clue what that might be, as the team has stumbled through a decade of mediocrity, marred by an inability to develop a single worthwhile starting pitcher since Mike Mussina, while demonstrating a proclivity for employing a revolving door of bumbling, defensively inept sluggers in the corner outfield positions. However, when it comes to shopping Manny Machado, the Orioles are purportedly uncompromising in their demand for not one but two Major League ready starting pitchers. Try making that request with a straight face...
They might as well be looking for bigfoot.
A few days ago, Jesse Rogers of ESPN: Chicago, wrote an article proposing a Manny Machado for Addison Russell swap. As far as I can tell, all the momentum for this proposal has been driven by Jesse and the Twitter shitstorm it's kicked off. The Cubs have been interested in acquiring Machado, according to reports, but there's no evidence that negotiations have advanced past preliminary inquiries, or that Russell has been offered or even discussed, though it's presumed Machado would supplant Russell at Shortstop, making the young infielder expendable, with Kris Bryant firmly entrenched as the Cubs everyday third baseman, if the Cubs were to trade for the Baltimore star, that is.
In a vacuum, Machado would be an upgrade over Russell at shortstop and would make the Cubs a better team in 2018. Unfortunately, the calculus isn't that simple. Macahdo is a free-agent following the 2018 season, and is expected to receive offers in the $300 million range, whereas Russell is under team control through 2021. With a 6.0-6.5 WAR projection, Machado, due to make about $15 million in his final season of arbitration, making him as much as a $45-$50 million asset, even as a 1-year rental. Russell, with an average projection of 3.0 WAR over the next four years, is about to enter his first of four arbitration years, where he'll earn a total in the range of $35 million, providing a surplus value around $80 million. While Machado is the better player, Russell is the more valuable asset. It's more realistic than the Orioles asking price of two controllable starting pitchers (or roughly $100 million in surplus, +/- depending on the quality of pitchers), but it's still a sizable overpay. Josh Donaldson, a comparable talent, was traded in late 2014, with a remaining three years of team control, for a universally despised third baseman (who's out of professional baseball), two fringy pitching prospects (amassing a combined 3.4 ML WAR in three seasons since the trade), and a highly regarded 18-year old Shortstop prospect who's yet to debut. As Dave Cameron of Fangraphs wrote the other day (here), a player of similar trade value, Marcell Ozuna, just a week ago returned a "back-end top 100 prospect, a lottery ticket speedster who can’t hit, a lower-level arm of some note, and a throw-in". What's being suggested as a reasonable return for Manny Machado hasn't been reasonable at all.
Now, under some circumstances I would defend an overpay for a short-term asset. Mainly, for a team who's competitive window is closing. If you're going to have to begin a rebuild in a year or two, there are diminishing returns for having a good-not-great player, like Addison Russell, under control for four seasons. The Cubs, however, are not in that situation. They're still firmly in the middle of their competitive window, with core players like Rizzo, Bryant, Russell, Baez, Contreras, Schwarber, and Happ all under team control through 2021. The Cubs do have a short-term surplus of infielders, and could leverage on their more valuable pieces to make an addition, but part of what makes them appealing as a contender is their quality depth. Any potential move, whether it's Russell, Happ, or Schwarber, is guaranteed to have a chain effect around the diamond in years to come. Moving Russell, in particular, would necessitate sliding as many as 4 players up the defensive spectrum, possibly into positions they're not fit to handle full-time, in years to come. We can look back at the recent success of the Milwaukee Brewers as an example of what mediocrity, and perhaps better defined - avoiding disaster - across all positions translates to. Risking depth, and potentially opening up holes on a team that's pretty well set for four more season, for a marginal one-season upgrade, is a real gamble, and I'm not convinced it's one that makes sense. As I've written about before regarding the Dodgers, remaining in a competitive cycle for multiple seasons yields higher odds of winning a World Series than maximizing odds for any individual season at a cost to subsequent opportunities.
So, let's do some more math...
The Cubs are currently projected to win 95 games in 2018, third best in MLB behind only the Dodgers and the Astros. In 2017, a 96-win projection was worth roughly 15.5% World Series odds. We can expect the 2018 odds to be similar, perhaps around 15%. Now, with Manny Machado instead of Addison Russell in 2018, the Cubs would be projected about 3-wins better, to 98 wins, edging them above the Dodgers but still behind Houston. The Dodgers, in 2017, had a 97-win projection and 16% World Series odds, so I'll assume a 0.5% jump from 97 to 98 wins, bringing the 98-win odds to 16.5%, a 1.5% improvement in 2018 World Series odds. That's pretty good.
Now, after 2018, Russell is in Baltimore, and Machado is gone. He's got all the money in the world and retires to his own luxury island resort somewhere in the Cayman Islands... or more likely to the New York Yankees, which is somehow more despicable. In his wake, the Cubs are left with Javier Baez, who'd presumably take over full-time duties at shortstop. The Cubs 2nd base options are now a 38-year old Ben Zobrist, in the final year of his 4 year/$56 million deal, or Ian Happ. If it's Zobrist, that's a considerably worse up-the-middle combo than Russell/Baez, with even more uncertainty beyond 2019. If it's Happ, the Cubs either have no Center Fielder, or Jason Heyward shifts to Center Field and the Cubs have no Right Fielder. This is where people start screaming for Bryce Harper, and while that's great, remember, you now have two players playing out of position (Happ and Heyward) to accommodate Harper, and with Harper's sure to be enormous contract, possibly as much $35 million annually, that's $35 million that can't go to addressing a pitching staff that features a 35-year old Jon Lester, Jose Quintana, Kyle Hendricks, and then ???. Any way you look at it, you're sacrificing major $ per WAR value by not having Russell in years 2-4, where payroll is already going to be projected to increase considerably as your core players move deeper into the arbitration process, and more pitching is needed. Assuming there is a cap to what Cubs ownership is willing to spend, it's difficult to project a Cubs team without Russell to be better in years 2-4 than they would be with him. Having calculated a 3-win upgrade as worth 1.5% in World Series odds, and assuming the Cubs won't replace Russell's 3.0 WAR/per year projection with a 0, I'll estimate the penalty in year 2 is 0.75%, or half of Russell's contribution to the team. Without having the money to add pitching, or having not effectively replaced Russell, I'll estimate a 1% penalty for year 3, and 1.25 % for year 4. Obviously this is all speculation, but like I reasoned, the more long-term assets the Cubs part with now, the more holes they'll have to fill by the end of their competitive window, with limited resources to fill them. This also doesn't consider beyond 2021, and how the extra $30-35 million in surplus value Russell provides over that time span might impact the Cubs spending over the coming seasons in order to extent the competitive window beyond 2021.
4-year projection w/ Russell (no trade):
2018: 15%
2019: 15%
2020: 15%
2021: 15%
Total Odds: 47.8%
4-year projection w/ Machado trade:
2018: 16.5%
2019: 14.25%
2020: 14%
2021: 13.75%
Total Odds: 46.9%
As you can see, adding Machado, despite improving the Cubs 2018 World Series odds would actually slightly decrease the team's odds of winning a World Series at some point over the next four years.
What this becomes is a conversation about what we're looking for out of sports. As Cubs fans, we are, for the first time in our lives, experiencing being spoiled by success. I think many of us have become bored with just being good. In a constant drive for something greater, we're already looking towards sacrificing "the process", the long-term approach that got us here, for short-term rewards because it's new and exciting. It's an adventure and gives us a new purpose. If it's solely about maximizing odds, it's irrational to make this trade. If what we're seeking is the experience and the adventurism, then maybe it's not wrong to go looking for bigfoot. Much like the human experience, our fandom is largely a question of what we want our experience to be. Is it ideal, or are we even capable of behaving completely rationally, and making the moves that are demonstrably correct, being willing to accept the outcomes, whatever they might be? Or, do we lose ourselves in the abstract, and embrace the uncertainty, adding worlds onto our own, and perhaps, Manny Machado to "the process"? The truth is out there.
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