It's an annual rite of summer. As the days get longer and the humidity increases, baseballs start flying out of the ballpark. General managers cross off the dates on their calendars, getting closer and closer to July 31st.
Then the phone rings.
"Hey, do you guys have any pitchers you want to unload?"
Though it has always been said that good pitching will beat good hitting, this has become particularly true in recent years. With pitching being watered down by expansion, the construction of particularly egregious ballparks that are barely big enough to qualify as bandboxes, and the juiced ball/juiced players of the 1990s and early 2000s, there isn't enough good pitching to go around. This leads to some desperate maneuvering by general managers, and turns the last two weeks in July into a ridiculously entertaining swap shop of aftermarket parts and cheap accessories.
This year has been no different. The rumor mills have been on full blast for weeks, and in any given newspaper in any major league city, names and numbers have been flying as quickly as the readers can open the pages. It must be tough for one of the players on the block, not knowing whether to pack a suitcase for a road trip, or a U-Haul for a potential move.
The most thrown about name this summer has been Florida Marlins pitcher A.J. Burnett, who will be a free agent this summer. Still in the race, the cash-strapped Marlins are hoping to get something a cheap piece for Burnett while still keeping their overall talent level high enough to compete in the wide-open NL East.
Wait a minute, the prize catch of the trading block is A.J. Burnett?
Currently sitting at 6-6 with a 3.68 earned run average on the year, Burnett is, for his career, a less than .500 pitcher. Entering this year, his career ERA was 3.83, which when compared to the adjusted league ERA with Pro Player (now Dolphins) Stadium as his home park, gave him an ERA+ of 109, which makes him approximately nine percent better than the average National League pitcher. For all of his "pure stuff" and all of the oohs and ahhs that his 99-mile per hour heater gets, Burnett has only averaged 7.9 strikeouts per nine innings.
Even worse, Burnett is an injury risk. Burnett has never once started 30 games in a season, starting 20 or more games only three times since his first appearance in a Marlins uniform in 1999. In 2002, the one year in which he had over 30 appearances (29 starts, two relief appearances), is also the one year that he threw over 200 innings.
Burnett isn't even an experienced postseason pitcher, something that is sometimes overvalued, but is still important in the stretch run. Burnett never pitched in a pennant race or the postseason, with Tommy John surgery limiting him to four early starts in 2003 before he missed the Marlins' entire World Series run.
None of this is meant to disparage A.J. Burnett. By all accounts a good teammate and a hard worker, Burnett is merely an example of trading deadline desperation run amuck. He's a nice pitcher, but too many GMs are being blinded by his talent and the thin talent pool out there.
The most heavily rumored trading partner for the Marlins at the time of this writing are the Baltimore Orioles, who are scrapping to keep up with the Red Sox and Yankees in the AL East. The Marlins are rumored to be asking for a bounty for Burnett. I can see how the conversations between Marlins General Manager Larry Beinfest and the Orioles' two-headed monster of Mike Flanagan and Jim Beattie might have gone:
Beinfest: Can you give us your starting left fielder (Larry Bigbie) and a fireballing setup man with closing experience (Jorge Julio), both of whom are entering what should be their career primes?
Flanagan and Beattie: Sure, that seems fair.Beinfest: Throw in your top-rating pitching prospect, who at age 20 already has been called up to the big leagues and didn't entirely embarrass himself (Hayden Penn).
Flanagan and Beattie: All right, that's a steep price, but a fair one.
Beinfest: Oh yeah, and while you're taking Burnett, can you take a 30-something-year-old infielder, who plays at the same position where you currently start an all-star (Mike Lowell)? He has a $21 million contract and has hit 11 home runs in a full season's worth of at-bats since the 2004 All-Star Break.
Flanagan and Beattie: Oh, come on, dude...
Scarily enough for Orioles fans, apparently the general manager duo was ready to pull the trigger on the trade until owner Peter Angelos stepped in and demanded the Marlins pay a significant portion of Lowell's contract. The Red Sox, White Sox, and others are rumored to be willing to step in if the Orioles can't get the deal done.
All of this for a pitcher with a sub-.500 career record, who you might only have as a rental for two and a half months?
The worst part is, this happens every year. Blinded by the calendar and the tightly-packed standings, general managers overpay for players who just aren't worth it. For every midseason deal that brings you someone like Rick Sutcliffe, who won the NL Cy Young after being traded from the Indians to the Cubs in June 1984, there is a trade for someone like Jeff Weaver, who folded in the spotlight of New York and a pennant race and was unceremoniously shipped out a year and a half later. That's not to mention the number of all-stars who get shipped around as prospects at the deadline, names such as Jeff Bagwell and John Smoltz, whose great careers simply obliterate any hindsight discussion of whether it was worth it.
But sometime before the end of the month, perhaps between the time this is written and now when you're reading it, a general manager will look at the standings and think his team still has a shot, and another general manager will agree to take on his future all-star. And so it goes, every summer.
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