(*) MASTER NOTES: Trusting the Process

Over the last few weeks, Ray Murphy has used the Master Notes space to discuss the lessons we might have learned from watching Billy Beane and other big-league GMs operate at the trade deadline.

I’d like to expand on Ray’s excellent observations by focusing on the need to trust your process.

All year long, the team I co-own in my AL-only home league has struggled. We had a bad auction, where we managed to leave the equivalent of $25 unspent, in the process not getting any of the offensive players we needed to complement our very solid pitching keepers, who included Max Scherzer and Chris Sale.

Sure enough, as a result we came into the trade deadline doing very well in pitching, leading ERA and WHIP, and we were mid-pack in wins. We are also doing decently in saves, having kept both Grant Balfour and Jake McGee. Between them, we have enough saves to be in the middle of the pack, partly because the category is oddly split on our league—the leaders have high totals because they have two or three closers and the laggards don’t have any.

In hitting, we were pretty sure of finishing at the bottom of all three counting categories, but near the top in batting average.

So as the deadline weekend rolled in, my partners and I planned our tactics. We agreed that we might as well trade away any offensive power or speed we had to acquire solid starters who might help us get wins (I know, I know) and firm up our ERA and WHIP. We also targeted a proven closer to move us two or three points in saves, where we were in a small bunch in the middle.

We made offers to several leading teams basically offering Dustin Pedroia and Austin Jackson for a decent starter plus a closer. Eventually we made such a deal, getting Jeff Samardzija and Joe Nathan.

We felt like this was our Billy Beane moment—he had traded offensive players Yoenis Céspedes and Addison Russell for pitchers; we had traded offensive players for pitchers. We had even acquired two of Beane’s new pitchers: Besides trading for Samardzija, we had FAABed Jason Hammel, confident in knowing they were in the rotation of the best team in the AL, if not all of baseball. And we had added the closer we needed.

Fast forward the two weeks since we made our deal on August 3. Beane’s A’s have been famously floundering, going 7-9 and falling from a game up on the Angels to a game and a half down.

Samardzija has had four starts for us. He’s 1-2 with a 5.48 ERA and a 1.49 WHIP. And Hammel is 1-1 in three starts, with a 3.60 ERA that isn’t so bad but a catastrophic 1.60 WHIP. Thank you, bizarrely high strand rate!

Nathan has had six appearances for us, earning a useful four saves but at the cost of a very unhelpful 4.26 ERA and a 2.52 WHIP. He’s almost lost his job to Joba Chamberlain, and caused his team to trade for a replacement.

As my Irish ancestors say, oy vey!

Our trade has cost us points in WHIP, and brought us back to the pack from what had been a reasonably comfortable lead in ERA. The two wins from Samardzija and Hammel haven’t helped in that category, and increasingly look like they won’t, as the category has spread out a little.

All of this could leave us shaken, and perhaps a little less willing to trade in future years. But we can’t let it.

One of the things you hear a lot in this game is that you have to try not to get hung up on a bad outcome, and that you have to “trust the process.” This trade has been pretty much a complete disaster for us, but only because the players acquired just didn’t pan out.

They still might, of course, although Hammel has been the subject of rumored demotion and will be passed over his next start due to off-days.

But even if Nathan, Samardzija and Hammel all continue to underperform, and this trade fails completely, if anyone asks me, “Would you do it again?”, my answer would be, “Heck, yes.”

The underlying plan was sound, and the players we acquired were as sound as we could get in the deal. As the old joke goes, the surgery was a complete success, except that the patient died.

I’ve been around this game long enough to know that stuff like this happens. We as owners tend to revel too much in successes caused by random variation, like grabbing Scott Kazmir for a few bucks and having him be a $25 pitcher. And we tend to beat ourselves up a little too much when perfectly justifiable decisions, like paying $20 for Justin Verlander, don’t happen to work.

So go ahead and be self-critical. But we have to be self-critical about bad things that happened because we made poor decisions, not because of good decisions that turned out poorly.

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