Placido Polanco is back.
The Phillies traded him to the Detroit Tigers on June 8, 2005, for Ugueth Urbina and Ramon Martinez. Polanco, who is hitting .343 this season, has been a huge part of the Tigers since.
The Phillies made the trade because Tim Worrell had checked out mentally and left his team in a lurch, and because Polanco had the most trade value and the Phillies had Chase Utley ready to play every day. I shake my head whenever I hear people say, "The Phillies should have traded David Bell instead." Duh. Of course they should have. But there's one small problem with that: Bell had absolutely no trade value while Polanco had enough to land the top relief pitcher on the market, plus a utility infielder. There's no question everybody with the Phillies would have preferred to trade Bell, but he had more than 1 1/2 years left on his four-year, $17 million contract and had been mostly injured and unproductive to that point.
No team wanted him.
But teams definitely wanted Polanco. And Polanco wanted out. He unexpectedly accepted salary arbitration in the off-season despite the fact the Phillies told him that he would not be the everyday second baseman. Fans even booed Polanco on Opening Day because he had complained so much in spring training about his situation and started over Utley.
Polanco hit .338 for the Tigers after the trade, who signed him to a four-year, $18.4 million extension. Urbina went 4-3 with a 4.13 ERA in 56 appearances for the Phillies. (Remove his first appearance in a victory over Texas and he had a 3.46 ERA.) Martinez hit .286 in 56 at-bats.
Make that trade again?
If I'm the Phillies, yes.
Here's why: the Phillies badly needed bullpen help and as everybody has seen this season, it's tough to win without quality pitching. Polanco wasn't going to be back after the season. He just wasn't. Bell wasn't going anywhere, either. (That's a different argument altogether, but that was the reality of the situation at the time and I'm basing my opinion on the fact the Phillies would not pay for two third basemen.) So the Phillies could have hung onto Polanco and been blasted for not improving the bullpen, or traded him and improved the bullpen. The Phillies took a shot at the postseason and finished one game out of the wild card. In my opinion, they never would have been that close had they not acquired Urbina.
The Polanco trade is ironic in a sense. First, because it proved to be the biggest trade in 2005 and Ed Wade got killed for not making big trades. Second, Phillies fans want Pat Gillick to make the big move to improve the bullpen, yet the Polanco for Urbina trade remains widely criticized.
Fire away.
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The latest Philliescast is up.
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I crunched some numbers yesterday and learned the reason why the Phillies have the best record in the National League (31-20) since April 20: hitting, hitting, hitting. But there is danger on the horizon. The Phillies have a 4.63 ERA in that span, which ranks 13th in the league.
Unless that improves, the pitching ultimately will cost them.
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Freddy Garcia will not have surgery. The Phillies think he could be back this season.
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Balls, Sticks and Stuff does a nice job following up yesterday's post with some interesting numbers. There's no question the Phillies aren't winning any pitching duels this season.
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Pitching match ups for the Tigers series:
Tonight at 7:05: RHP Jeremy Bonderman (6-0, 3.63 ERA) vs. RHP Jon Lieber (3-4, 3.72 ERA).
Tomorrow at 7:05 p.m.: LHP Andrew Miller (2-0, 3.18 ERA) vs. LHP Jamie Moyer (5-5, 4.55 ERA).
Sunday at 1:35 p.m.: RHP Justin Verlander (7-2, 2.79 ERA) vs. RHP Adam Eaton (7-4, 5.42 ERA).
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Talked with the 700 Level Sports Fantatics last night on Sports Radio 950. Listen here.
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Also from The Onion:
A fan on the street on the Phillies approaching their 10,000th loss: "Okay, how many games are there in a baseball season now?"
Comments (5)
The Phillies should have done anything and everything to keep Polanco. They should have paid him extra to play third and sat Bell. Polanco's been hitting almost .400 with RISP since 2005 and he's at .412 so far this year. That would make for quite a formidable lineup and would have given us the best infield in the majors this year.
Posted by Anonymous | June 15, 2007 10:59 AM
Posted on June 15, 2007 10:59
scoring is not the problem with this team. its the pitching. what we really should be lamenting is venezuelan law for making it illegal to pour gasoline on your workers and machete them. whats that all about. urbina would look nice in our bullpen right now, unfortunately he's in another kind of pen. the team could really use the pyro now more than polanco.
Posted by Mark | June 15, 2007 11:18 AM
Posted on June 15, 2007 11:18
okay, firing away...
i think the Polanco trade remains widely criticized because even though Wade made it in an obvious effort to appease the fanbase and push for the postseason, he essentially had to make the deal with the devil. and yes, i concede that comparing urbina to the devil is a bit strong, but you can't deny that urbina doesn't deserve to be in prison right now... the tigers knew he was a nutcase and that's why they were so eager to get rid of him. if Wade had pulled the trigger on the Polance deal for a somewhat more stable reliever- trading talent for at least mental stability, i don't think the deal would continue to live in it's present state of ignominy.
sometimes i swear the men in charge have absolutely no understanding of how to build a winner. it's not all about talent, it's the chemistry of a team that will carry them over the top. urbina didn't contribute to that chemistry on the phillies or the tigers, and probably not anywhere else till he got to cell block B...
Posted by Lea | June 15, 2007 11:31 AM
Posted on June 15, 2007 11:31
I see your point, Todd, but Lea has an equally good point: Polanco is the kind of player this team needed to keep and build around, and the Phillies either refused or were unable to see it. They opted to stick with David Bell, and the fact that he had no trade value isn't really a valid enough excuse for that. Wade stayed with Bell because he felt that Bell was some down-and-dirty player that would set a professional, hard-nosed example for the Phillies, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he had already acquired precisely this type of player in Polanco. If they had appreciated Polanco for what he was, he might not have been considered so unlikely to return once he hit free agency. Bell, meanwhile, not only turned out to be a bust talent-wise, but according to your counterpart Marcus Hayes, he was cited as being a negative influence on the club once he finally departed.
So yes, the Phils needed relief pitching, but check this out: Wade let Todd Jones walk away without so much as an effort to re-sign him after 2004; he went on to be a successful closer for Florida in '05. Wade's solution to fill in that gap in the bullpen? *Terry Adams*. And sure, that's hindsight, but I guess if you want to trace the evolution and circumstances of this trade, you'd have to conclude that it was a colossal series of blunders on Wade's part.
Posted by David | June 15, 2007 2:25 PM
Posted on June 15, 2007 14:25
Pretty much everyone here has missed the point.
Todd misses the point because the Phillies weren't required to trade for a relief pitcher. They had a choice: They could have had a decent third baseman and no relief pitcher. Or they could have had a decent relief pitcher and a worthless third baseman. They chose the second option. They chose wrong.
Of course, Urbina didn't pitch that great after the trade. But no one had any way of knowing that at the time. I don't blame Wade for that. But even if Urbina *had* pitched well after the trade, it *still* would have been the wrong decision.
A relief pitcher isn't inherently worth any more than a third baseman. Yes, their bullpen had problems that year. That's irrelevant. If they'd had a better third baseman, they would have scored more runs. So even if their bullpen would have cost them more games, they would have been leading in more games to begin with, and they would have come out even in the end. It only would have *seemed* like they were doing worse, because it's human nature to notice the games you lose from ahead more than you notice the games you win undramatically.
So, even in the short run, trading Polanco for Urbina didn't make the team any better. It just shuffled one of the team's strengths and one of the team's weaknesses. Meanwhile, in the long run, it was clearly foreseeable even at the time that it would make the team worse. Polanco was much younger than Urbina. And the Phillies had no one in the minors capable of replacing Polanco. They should have benched Bell and ate his salary, which was a "sunk cost". This should have been obvious to everyone even at the time.
Lea is wrong because Urbina's alleged attempted-murder incident happened *after* he left the Phillies. Nobody knew he was the devil before the trade. He'd had some legal run-ins before that, but nothing really terrible. It's silly to hold it against the Phillies for not being able to see into the future.
David is wrong because his post is divorced from reality. Wade was never particularly interested in "down and dirty" players. In fact, he was attacked up and down by the idiot Phillies fans all throughout his tenure in Philly for his *lack* of interest in such players. He rightly refused to trade Bobby Abreu for this reason. It was only after Pat Gillick became GM that the idiot fans got their way.
The reason why Wade made his mistake with the Polanco trade was that he overvalued the importance of the bullpen relative to the offense. It had nothing to do with the "down and dirty" stuff.
Posted by anon | June 17, 2007 1:55 AM
Posted on June 17, 2007 01:55