Carlos Beltran Trade Analysis

The Giants are making a big push, maybe not quite all in but they are doubling down on winning this season. They went out and got their guy Carlos Beltran. The bidding was tough and probably raised his price but the Giants decided in the end it was worth while and pulled the trigger.

In the deal the Giants sent pitcher and top prospect Zack Whe the other way and my first inclination is that this is a solid trade with the Giants slightly overpaying but lets take a deeper look on how this one grades out.

Beltran's value:

Beltran is having a bounce back season after missing a ton of time with injuries. He has a .289/ .391/ .513 line, it is good enough for number 10 in the NL with a wOBA of .392 which would make him the best hitter by wOBA in the Giants lineup. He has a very good walk rate ( 14.3%) and keeps the strikeouts at roughly the same level (14.6%).

Beltran was the best hitter available on the market and will slide in to the middle of the Giants order at either 3rd or 4th (probably 4th because he is a proven run producer!).

His defense was once elite in center field but with knee injuries he is now a corner guy hopefully sliding over to left filed with the Giants. He has rated as a neutral defender this season and I think that is pretty fair, in 2 months his defense isn't going to give him much value nor will it hurt him much. Let's call this a wash.

Taking all of this into account and I think you have a 5 to 6.5 win player. Over the remaining 55 games he will probably be worth about 1 to 2 wins and will be paid approximately $2 million by the Giants (the final numbers haven't been announced yet). That leaves a surplus value of about $5.5 million. There will also not be in chance of getting compensatory draft picks even though he would be a Type A free agent because of a clause that says he cannot offered arbitration after his contract is up.

All said the Giants will get about $5.5 million in surplus value in this deal.

What they gave up:

The Giants gave up their top rated prospect not named Brandon Belt. Zach Wheeler is a right handed starter currently in high A San Jose. He has a plus fast ball, a developing but likely plus curve ball and a change up that is still a project. He was there 6th round pick and has a high ceiling that the scouts really like.

He has put up excellent strikeout and ground ball numbers but is lacking in the command especially to left handed batters who have hit well against him this season.

Here is his career stat line:

Year	Age	Lev	W	L	ERA	GS	IP	H	ER	HR	BB	SO	HBP	WHIP	H/9	HR/9	BB/9	SO/9	SO/BB
2010	20	A	3	3	3.99	13	58.2	47	26	0	38	70	7	1.449	7.2	0.0	5.8	10.7	1.84
2011	21	A+	7	5	3.99	16	88.0	74	39	7	47	98	4	1.375	7.6	0.7	4.8	10.0	2.09
2 Seasons			10	8	3.99	29	146.2	121	65	7	85	168	11	1.405	7.4	0.4	5.2	10.3	1.98

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table
Generated 7/27/2011.

As a top 50 pitching prospect his worth would be approximated at around $15 million. I am inclined to push this number down because with the Giants brass willing to part with him he is less of a sure thing so lets call him a top 100 pitching prospect which has a surplus value of about $10 million.

Conclusion:

After running the numbers I am a little more disappointed on the trade than when I first started. Beltran is good but the Giants gave up something worth at least twice (maybe even three times!) what he was worth to get him. With the bidding war and the Giants desperation to get him that was bound to push up the price but the Giants gave up atleast $10 million in value and got $5.5 million in return, which isn't great.

What really kills me on this is that the Giants gave up the prospect but than still had to pick up $2 million in salary. In addition the fact that this is a pure rental with no chance of replenishing the farm system with compensatory picks also hurts.

I guess the Giants decided that going for it now was the best option, part of me wanted to not give away a chance at a longer term window of Championships for a 2 month rental but I understand that there are no guarantees that the Giants will keep getting the same performances from the young pitchers forever.

If this puts the Giants over the top to win a Championship I don't care all that much about what it cost to get here because a second Championship would be another huge cash cow for the team. The thing that scares me is that his wasn't a huge upgrade (by my earlier calculations this helps the Giants score an additional 0.15 runs a game or about 7 or 8 runs over the rest of the season) and this cost a lot.

I hope this is another "I am not an idiot moment" for Brian Sabean.

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More Jose Reyes Trade Thoughts

Last week, I wrote about the cost benefit analysis of the possible trade of Jose Reyes and my rough calculation was that Reyes is worth about $25 million to the Giants and the Giants top pitching prospect was worth about the same.

After I wrote that, Julian from Splashing Pumpkins left a link to some tools to help analyze trades and value of prospects. I wanted to try to use these tools to get a better idea of what this trade would mean for the Giants.

First up; what the Giants would get. Jose Reyes has already accumulated 2.9 WAR and the first go round I simply extrapolated that for the rest of the season. This probably overstated his value so this time I used the ZIPS rest of the season projections as the baseline for determining his rest of the season WAR.

This gave us a 3.9 WAR for a value of $18 million. The remainder on his contract is about $7.8 million and I assumed that he will be a Type A Free Agent so that is added in at the bottom as well. In addition, I also gave him a bonus for the bump in expected revenue for making the playoffs with him on the team.

Jose Reyes
Year	Sal (M)	WAR	Val (M)	Net (M)
2011	$7.8	3.9	$18.0	$10.2
FA Picks			$5.0
Playoff Revenue			$2.3
Total	$7.8	3.9	$25.2	$17.4

The final net value for Reyes ended up at $17.4 million for the rest of the season.

I did the something similar for Zach Wheeler but with a number of assumptions. First, I assumed that he would make the majors in 2013 and once he made the majors, he would have an expected WAR of 1.575. I came to that number by assuming the following probabilities for his future performance:

WAR	Probability	xWAR
0	0.25	0
5	0.0375	0.1875
4	0.075	0.3
3	0.1125	0.3375
2	0.225	0.45
1	0.3	0.3
		1.575

Then, I took this number and plugged it into the same calculator as the one used in the Reyes analysis. For his team controlled years, I put in a league minimum salary of $400k and estimated his arbitration salary at 40%, 60%, and 80% of FA value in their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd years, respectively.

After that, I also put everything into present value terms using a discount rate of 10%, which is seen in the column NPV.

Zach Wheeler
Year	Sal (M)	xWAR	Val (M)	Net (M)	NPV
2011	$0.0	0.0	$0.0	$0.0	$0.0
2012	$0.0	0.0	$0.0	$0.0	$0.0
2013	$0.4	1.6	$7.5	$7.1	$5.3
2014	$0.4	1.6	$7.5	$7.1	$4.9
2015	$0.4	1.6	$7.5	$7.1	$4.4
2016	$3.0	1.6	$7.5	$4.5	$2.5
2017	$4.5	1.6	$7.5	$3.0	$1.5
2018	$6.0	1.6	$7.6	$1.6	$0.8
FA Picks			$0.0
Total	$4.2	9.5	$45.0	$40.8	$19.4

With this tool, Wheeler's net present value to the Giants is $19.4 million, which is still $2 million more than what Reyes would be worth to the team.

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