Jason Heyward-Shelby Miller Trade Highlights Busy Baseball Monday
By Mike Cardillo
Holy baseball! Monday morning delivered a flurry of significant action on the Hot Stove front, warranting an emergency edition of the column formerly known as Yardwork.
Item No. 1: Braves trade Jason Heyward and Jordan Walden to the Cardinals for Shelby Miller and Tyrell Jenkins.
My initial knee-jerk reaction is this could end up falling under the auspices of a “good baseball trade.” The primaries here are Heyward, 25, and Miller, 24. Walden is a solid enough above average bullpen arm and figure once he goes to St. Louis the Cardinals pitching voodoo will turn him into a lights out, 2015 version of Todd Worrell, maybe. Jenkins, 22, is a highly-touted prospect and — timing alert — the St. Louis Dispatch wrote a feature about him pitching in the Arizona Fall League on Sunday, go figure. Jenkins at one point was a possible Robert Griffin III replacement at Baylor, for whatever that factoid is worth.
Although Heyward’s raw counting numbers, don’t blow you away, his career slash of .262/.351/.429 is solid. He’s been a positive WAR player, averaging 4.9 in his five seasons thanks in no small part to his defense in the outfield. Long story short, Heyward is among the most difficult players to accurately judge in the sport.
Heyward is a free agent following the 2015 season. The trade shows that Atlanta didn’t think it could re-sign Heyward and Justin Upton going forward (Upton could be dealt, too). How much Heyward is worth on the open market is impossible to say before seeing what he does for the Cardinals in 2015. Whatever deal Heyward inks will be based as much on potential as actual production. That said, Heyward should get every opportunity to thrive if he bats No. 2 in the St. Louis lineup between Matt Carpenter and Matt Holliday.
Today’s trade makes it fairly clear that the Braves are about ready to start over. Atlanta fired general manager Frank Wren in October and probably looked at the landscape in the National League East and saw the Nationals and improving Mets (don’t laugh) and Marlins (again, don’t laugh) and figured it’s probably a smarter move to rebuild and get the team ready for contention when it moves to its new Cobb County stadium in 2017. (Evan Gattis in the outfield could be fun.)
Miller’s reputation in baseball is strong, thanks to his third place finish in the 2013 NL Rookie of the Year voting when he posted a 3.06 ERA. This past season he wasn’t as great, finishing with a 3.74 ERA along with a drop from 8.8 Ks/9 to 6.2.
If nothing else Miller and Jenkins are two promising arms under long-term team control to help Atlanta rebuild.
Item No. 2: Russell Martin signs five-year/$82 million deal with Blue Jays:
Imagine how much poutine $82 million buys you, eh?
Five years and $82 million are eye-popping figures for a 31-year-old catcher, a catcher who’s never hit more than 21 home runs in a season. Martin did put up an excellent offensive season with Pittsburgh this year, posting a .290/.402./.430 line. The key here is on-base percentage. .402 represents the highest of Martin’s nine-year career. His lifetime on-base average is .354. If he’s able to get on base and hit behind Jose Reyes, leaving more RBI spots for Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion, maybe it proves to be a good move.
Toronto did trade Adam Lind earlier in the offseason, so it doesn’t have a ready-made DH on the roster. You have to wonder where else on the diamond Martin will play, if not catcher when he gets older? Is his bat powerful enough to stash at DH? He’s never played a game at first base and only 13 at third in his career.
Call this a splurge by the Blue Jays on a Canadian player. Toronto was reportedly the other suitor for Victor Martinez before he re-signed with the Detroit. Signing Martin is a helpful move, for certain, but not exactly one that by itself ends the Jay’s playoff drought dating back to 1993.
Item No. 3: Giancarlo Stanton’s 13-year/$320 million mega-deal confirmed.
It’s not everyday that a player signing a deal (potentially) worth up to $320 million is overshadowed, but that’s the case with Giancarlo Stanton and the Marlins on Monday. We already knew most of the details last week. The only aspect of the deal worth noting today is that Stanton, now 25, has an as-of-yet undefined opt out around the age of 30.
The Stanton deal continues the trend of teams re-signing their own players before they hit the open market. Somewhere someone instead Nationals HQ is probably hard at work coming up with a $500 million deal to entice Bryce Harper.
This has been an emergency edition of Yardwork, I think.