Jays get Canadianer

Canada TV

Hey!  I kind of called this one!  Don't believe me?  Suck it.  Here's what I said in that particular post:

Speaking of rumor season, apparently Michael Saunders and Jack Z aren't seeing eye-to-eye in the Skydome Seattle.  Saunders, of course, is Canadian and seems to crush the Jays every time he plays them.  He's probably a part-time/ platoon player, but there's still upside there, and he was worth 2 WAR this year, powered by a .273/.341/.470 slash, and some roughly average fielding across the outfield.  He's actually a pretty reasonable comparison/replacement for Colby Rasmus.  He'll make ~$3MM in arbitration this season, and doesn't have a place to play full time in Seattle.  Perhaps a Saunders/Pillar platoon situation?  Mayberry fits in there as well.  Could do worse.

Now, that post was made under the guise of Melky signing elsewhere, and the Jays needing to go out and figure something else out to fill the roster.  I don't necessarily think that the Saunders deal precludes the Jays from bringing Melky back, but it doesn't not mean that either.  If the Jays want to hand the reigns over to Dalton Pompey, it's easy enough to stick Saunders in LF as the lefty half of a platoon-- Saunders has a career .279 obp against lefties, though his 2014 numbers, albeit powered by a .372 babip, look quite a bit nicer.

That probably leaves Kevin Pillar as the other half, which seems totally reasonable given Pillar's ability vs. lefty pitching and pretty good defense.  Pillar and Saunders can both handle CF as well , just in case something goes wrong with the Pompey experiment.

Of course, the offseason isn't over yet, either.  Let's say Melky re-signs and is the everyday left fielder.  Again, a Saunders-Pillar platoon doesn't (and shouldn't!) preclude a Melky deal.  It certainly opens a door for another trade there somewhere.  Whether that means that the Jays flip Saunders, or have some kind of combination of part-timing/benching/optioning he, Pompey and Pillar, I have no idea.  This offseason has been fucking nuts so far though, and we're not even at the winter meetings, which is where shit usually goes down.

As for Happ... well, I'd rather have Saunders for $3MM than Happ for $6.7MM.  And the Mariners don't even need a back-end starter!  Not yet, anyway.  Maybe they're looking to acquire an impact bat, and use Taijuan Walker to get it.  Much like the Donaldson trade, this trade makes a lot more immediate sense for the Blue Jays than it does for the other guys, so there is probably another shoe to fall here.  I doubt the M's acquired a $7MM pitcher just to throw him in at #6 or 7 on their rotation depth chart.

This trade certainly did make me think, though.  One of my favorite things to do in my spare time is to look and see where players come from, so to speak.  Not in the literal sense.  I don't really care that Happ was born in a city called Peru.  I'm more interested in how he became a Blue Jay, and what he cost, in terms of money or prospects or players.

Happ was acquired from Houston a few years back in that giant clustercock of a trade that saw 10 players exchange hands.  The Jays sent Ben Francisco, Francisco Cordero and a couple of minor leaguers to Houston for Happ, Brandon Lyon, and David Carpenter.

Carpenter was mostly useless to the Jays, in that he provided a few innings of mop-up before being the throw-in that allowed the John Farrell trade to happen.  Of course, that turned in to the Jays giving away Yan Gomes and, to a lesser extent, Mike Aviles for Esmil Rogers, who was also given away.  Which actually, when you think about it, uhh... Aviles and Rogers would both be at least kind of useful, at least at the present moment.

Anyway, Lyon was also mostly useless, in that he was only around for the last couple months in a mostly lost season, and then left, never to be seen or heard from again.  This trade may as well have been a bunch of prospects and two shitty contracts for Happ.  This is my long-winded way of saying "Hey guys, let's look at the trade where we gave up a bunch of practically free, controllable-for-years prospects in exchange for 2.5 years of JA Happ."  For simplicity's sake, we'll look at the money involved on the major league side (i.e. Lyon/Carpenter/Happ vs. Francisco/Cordero), and then the prospecty stuff.  Let's just say that it was halfway through the season, for the sake of dividing salaries in 2.

As far as I can tell, Happ ($2.35MM), Carpenter ($500k) and Lyon ($5.5MM) made $8.35MM between them, of which the Jays paid half. so ~4.2MM.  Cordero ($4.5MM) and Francisco (~$1.5MM) basically means that the Jays took on an extra $2.2MM in salary and gave up a bunch of low-level prospects in order to get a guy who could throw major league pitches for a team who was using Joel Carreno and the bad Jesse Chavez and Chad Jenkins and SIXTEEN STARTS FROM CARLOS VILLANUEVA.  So yeah, kind of need a guy to start and maybe serve as depth for the next year.  Borrow from the distant future to help the present and near future.

Rather than going incredibly in-depth and pretending to know what I'm talking about when it comes to prospects that I've never seen and don't know pitch velocities, etc...  let's just say that none of them have shown up on the MLB top-20 prospects list for the Astros.  Now, we should probably remember that the Astros have a really deep system, even after graduating a bunch of guys to the bigs in the last few years.  That's what sucking and rebuilding for like seven years will do.  Still, I remember when the Jays had a top-3 farm system and don't exactly remember hearing a whole lot about the guys outside their top-20 (to be fair, though, top-20 spots tend to go to guys fresh out of the draft, not guys who have been toiling in the minors for a few years).

Carlos Perez has since been traded to the Angels, and is probably going to fight for a backup catcher role, now that Hank Conger has been traded.  Everybody else appears to be either some degree of distance away from contributing to the big league roster if they ever do, or getting old for prospects.  To wit:

• Joe Musgrove is 22 and finished a season of A- ball, though he put up reasonable numbers.
• David Rollins will be 25 in a few weeks, and has had a pair of trips through AA with reasonable, but uninspiring numbers.
• Asher Wojiwhatever will be 26 in a few weeks and took a step back in performance in his second trip through AAA this year (in the PCL, mind you, which has some silly offensive numbers).
• Kevin Comer is still hanging out in A ball and is pitching out of the bullpen, giving up a lot of hits.

So yeah, the Jays pretty well took $2.2MM and an expensive-for-his-skillset, 31 year old, arguably at the peak of his value, and turned him in to an outfielder who fills a need that they can control for two years.  That's not exactly a fair exercise to conduct when it comes to prospects, but whatever.  I think the Astros were looking for a pile of guys, hoping to have one of them hit it big, rather than finding one single prospect who had a lot of upside.  Two years forward, the Jays still weren't going to get a good prospect for Happ.

Not to mention the Canada.  Pretty fun deal for the Jays all around.