Twins Trade Phil Hughes, Draft Pick to San Diego

So the trade is basically Hughes and the 74th pick in the 2018 draft for C Villalobos and $7.5M in 2019. I don't hate the trade but I don't like it... Villalobos seems like a lottery ticket, but it could work out well if the money in 2019 is spent well. The draft is a crapshoot so losing the 74th pick isn't so bad (as an NFL draft junkie, I would not like this trade, but this is the MLB Draft).

The catcher Villalobos was almost 19 when he signed with the Padres, presumably for a negligible bonus (can't find it reported anywhere). Combined with his pedestrian numbers/advancement, he feels more like org depth than a real prospect.

Isnt a WAR around 8 million? So as long as the 74th pick and Hughes dont combine to have a net present value of a WAR its a good deal for the Twins.

Not quite so simple. The Padres could use the pick's slot money to go over-slot on another pick. (The Twins could have done likewise, had they kept the pick.)

 

Also, that dollars per WAR figure is an estimate, and it really varies by circumstance. For the Padres, or any rebuilding team, 1 WAR is worth a lot less than $8 mil. They just don't need marginal wins. For the Twins, a team that should be contending, we should rather have the 1 WAR than an extra $7-8 mil, could mean the difference between the 2nd wild card or staying home. That said, Hughes wasn't going to give us 1 WAR this year, and neither was the draft pick -- but if the pick was worth $7 mil, maybe we could have traded it for something other than salary relief?

 

Especially since technically the Hughes salary relief isn't until 2019. If the Twins are sticklers about year-to-year budgets, $7 mil would be a lot more useful for the 2018 team than for the 2019 team (which already had a lot of free payroll space).

Edited May 28, 2018 by spycake

The fact that they got something for Phil Hughes is a big win, no matter how you slice it.

I would agree, but they really didn't get anything for Hughes. They essentially sold the #74 draft pick for $7.5 mil. Hughes's deal was just the currency used for payment.

 

Seems like we fetched a decent price for that pick, but I don't know much about their relative value. And of course we don't yet know what the Twins are going to do with the money.

Per Cot's, the Twins only had $39 mil committed for 2019 anyway, even with Hughes. Obviously there are virtually guaranteed arb salaries to come, and probably Erv's option, but that does seem to dilute the value of saving $7 mil on Hughes next year.

 

Put another way -- if we were only looking at $20 mil payroll room, saving an extra $7 mil would be a lot more important than if we already had $60 mil payroll room.

They also got a 21 year old catcher with a career .408 OBP and 1.14 BB/K. Plate discipline is a great thing to have and does not really get affected that much by competition level. If a college catcher had Villalobos's numbers, he could have been a 74 overall pick.

I think you are reading way too much into Villalobos's limited stat line so far. He had a .437 OBP and 1.79 BB/K rate in 2016, but it was in 135 PA in the Dominican League, and with no power or average. Then he posted a .367 OBP in 2017, with an acceptable average and ISO, but in only 98 PA in the Arizona rookie league (and a rising K rate too -- his BB/K rate was down to 0.61). Those competition levels are so low, it is hard to know much -- Rosario and Danny Santana posted their career best BB% in rookie league seasons. And even if you think walk rates aren't affected much by competition levels, these are tiny samples.

 

And Villalobos hasn't even played yet in 2018 -- he's apparently ticketed for rookie league again at age 21. It is a big stretch to say he is the equivalent of a #74 overall pick based on those numbers and that progression.

 

Maybe the Twins found a diamond in the rough, but we can't really tell that from the stats at this point. He could just be org depth, or more favorably, still just a Willians Astudillo type of one-trick pony.

Last year the Twins the Twins picked up the 85th draft pick from the Angels for a $1 million in internal cap space. So it looks like good value.

$1 mil in international cap space is HUGE, with the new hard cap. That's like 20% of the average total pool. Adding $1 mil basically makes you a favorite to land the top international free agents in any given year. (And it helped the Angels land Ohtani this year.)

An interesting way to look at trades is, how would I feel if the Twins were on the other side of this deal? Taking on a bad vet would suck, but hopefully we could talk him into minor league assignment first and cut him quickly if he fails to perform. But buying a draft pick might be seen as a good, aggressive move.

 

Echoes of the Nolasco deal here too. Of course Nolasco had more value than Hughes at the time, but I always felt like that trade was mostly about the Angels "buying" Alex Meyer, which seemed like a good risk for them to take. I admit I was dismissive of Busenitz in that deal, and he looked like a diamond in the rough last year, but we've also seen how "AAAA reliever" is definitely a thing and maybe they're not so special. In any case, while Busenitz was a lightly regarded draft pick, by the time of the trade he was almost 26, pitching in AAA, and had already dominated AA. I can't imagine we could have anywhere near as close of confidence in Villalobos, at least not to assign him comparable value in this deal.

The point is that so can be the #74th overall pick who would have zero positive professional experience.

I have zero positive professional experience too, but you wouldn't suggest I might have comparable value to one of the top college catchers in the nation, would you? Even if I had 230 PA of mediocre, OBP-heavy experience over 2 seasons at the lowest levels of rookie ball, and I was ticketed for rookie leagues again at age 21, I think the simplest explanation probably pegs me as a fairly minor piece of any trade I might be involved in.

Is there any value to freeing him up off the 40 man or anything of that nature?

It will give us a spot for May or Ervin when they return. But that was accomplished as soon as we DFA'd Hughes -- in the context of freeing up the roster spot, it didn't really matter whether we traded him or released him, or how much money we ate.

With the 7 some million they can add a bat like Morrison for a year or a set up man for a year.

How useful is that, though? You are talking 1 WAR or less type players. Ideally you should be paying less than $7 mil guaranteed for such players/performances anyway (the Rays got Morrison for an average of $3.35 mil per season, for example), much less giving away the #74 overall pick and its associated bonus pool allotment too.

 

If we're planning on that kind of investment as a follow-up to this deal, that's not terribly encouraging. And if we're planning on making a run at, say, Machado -- well, $7 mil is just a drop in the bucket.

Edited May 28, 2018 by spycake