Edgar Renteria: Win-Win?

Spoiler:

October 29, 2007, 05:07 PM ET
Edgar Renteria: Win-Win?

by Nate Silver
And here I thought it was going to be a quiet day at the office.
It was barely two weeks ago when my offseason preview predicted that the Tigers were going to trade Jair Jurrjens for Edgar Renteria. Naturally, Renteria was a pretty likely candidate to get traded, with Yunel Escobar more than ready to take over the shortstop position (and Brent Lillibridge not far behind him), but it’s rare that you call out the exact two players involved in a deal.
I advocated that deal for the Tigers because I think that Jurrjens is a hair overrated. Both his scouting reports and his statistics indicate that he’s likely to top out as a #4 starter. He perhaps has more likelihood of achieving that status in Atlanta, which still has a knack for developing pitching talent, but I don’t know that the upside is higher than that. On the other hand, the Braves very much did need starting pitching talent and they very much didn’t need Edgar Renteria, so I thought that this was reasonable for their side as well. To my thinking, a Renteria-Jurrjens deal (with nobody else involved) would have been a clear win for the Tigers and at least a tolerable move for the Braves.
Of course, Jurrjens was not the only prospect involved in this deal, and he was probably not the best prospect involved in this deal. That distinction belongs to Gorkys Hernandez, the young center fielder that the Tigers just gave away. A year ago at this time, PECOTA considered Hernandez a sleeper and predicted that he’d achieve a .297/.323/.445 major league batting line by 2011, while contributing league average defense in center field. It valued him as roughly a $10 million/year player through his arbitration eligible-seasons, which implies perhaps $25m-$40m in surplus value. Hernandez had a season in line with PECOTA’s expectations, so those numbers should not change significantly when we re-run the forecasts in a couple of months.
Now, Renteria undoubtedly has some surplus value on his contract as well. Signed at $10 million for 2008 and to an $11 million team option for 2009, Renteria would probably cost somewhere between $15-$20 million per season if he was in the market for a new two-year deal today. He will also very probably be a Type A free agent when departs after 2009. Two years ago, I valued the Type A compensation picks at $12 million, and they are very probably worth a little more than that today given the inflation in the market. If we had to work all this up into some sort of balance sheet, it would probably look as follows:

Player.................................... Surplus Value
Hernandez............................... $25-$40 million
Jurrjens.................................. $10-$20 million
——————————————————————————
Braves Total......................... $35-$60 million

Player ................................Surplus Value
Renteria .............................$10-$20 million
Type A FA Compensation..... $15-$20 million
——————————————————————————
Tigers Total $25-$40 million

With Hernandez involved, this deal is unambiguously a win for the Braves, especially since they dealt from a position of strength into two positions of long-term need. And for the Tigers? A MORP-type analysis regards it as probably being a small loss, but MORP is not sensitive to the particular facts and circumstances surrounding a club. And in this case, those facts and circumstances all speak well of the deal from the Tigers’ point of view:

1. The Tigers are very much on the playoff bubble heading into next year, meaning that the marginal gains from acquiring veteran talent are relatively high.
2. Shortstop was very much a position of need, with Carlos Guillen’s move to 1B and a weak free agent group at the position.
3. The Tigers are also dealing from surplus, with both Curtis Granderson and Cameron Maybin looking very good long-term at the center field position. Although a lot of things could happen between now and July 2009 or April 2010 or whenever Hernandez was ready for a big league job, odds are that there was going to be a log jam of some kind.
4. Detroit is a market that appears to be quite sensitive to team quality, with attendance having ranged from 1.4 million all the way up to 3.0 million over the course of the past five years.

Win-win? Although I think the Tigers could have stood to pick up a B- or C-level prospect in his transaction, I’m ready to say its a win-win. And kudos to both Dave Dombrowski and Frank Wren for giving fans outside the Eastern Seaboard something to chew on.

If we win, it's a win-win. Or would it be a win win-win??