Did MLB’s Best Team Improve? A Look Back at the Trade Deadline

Analytics
Written By Will Harris

Andrew Benintendi has drawn my ire, but did Sunday’s homer change everything? (Jim McIsaac / Getty Images)

On August 2, the Yankees led the AL by three games and the AL East by 11 games with a 70-35 record. The team had cooled off from its historic start, but still posted one of the 12 best records through 105 games in franchise history. In the days leading up to the August 2 trade deadline, the Yankees acquired Frankie Montas, Lou Trivino, Scott Effross, Andrew Benintendi, and in a surprise move right at the buzzer, Harrison Bader. Today, the Yankees sit 3 games behind Houston (-6 game swing) and only eight games up in the division. Are the actions at the trade deadline to blame for this poor play? The Yankees are just 6-13 since deadline day (3-13 prior to their 3-game win streak against Toronto and the Mets), a pretty miserable mark, after all.

My answer: kind of.

Let’s take a look at the whole picture first.

Opportunity Cost

To get something, you have to give something up. The Yankees didn’t give up much MLB ready talent at the deadline, but the guys they let go are starting to sting.

The Yankees traded two major leaguers to acquire the players they acquired at the deadline, Jordan Montgomery and JP Sears. Montgomery has arguably been the best deadline acquisition by any team, posting a 0.35 ERA and 1.0 fWAR (third highest among pitchers with at least 10IP since Aug 6) in his first four starts with St. Louis. The Yankees, on the other hand, have seen Montas, Peralta, Taillon, Effross, Loaisiga, Chapman, Trivino, Luetge, Schmidt, Holmes, and Abreu combine for exactly 0.0 fWAR and three IL stints since Montgomery’s first start in St. Louis. Obviously this is what Michael Kay likes to call “the fallacy of the predetermined outcome,” but I find it hard to imagine that the Yankees could not have used Montgomery given that Yankees pitchers have five starts with four or more runs allowed since his departure, and he has allowed just one run as a Cardinal.

JP Sears has pitched to a 1.76 ERA and been worth 0.3 fWAR since joining Oakland in three starts. In other words, the combination of JP Sears and Jordan Montgomery has produced the same fWAR as Frankie Montas and Jameson Taillon since August 6. Kind of makes you think. We’ve given the pitchers a lot of credit recently because of how frequently the Yankees have lost low-scoring games during their slide, but this staff’s ERA is 4.06 (21st in MLB) since August 2, with Frankie Montas (7.32) and Jameson Taillon (5.32) not exactly shining over that period.

This will be my only mention of Joey Gallo’s 181 wRC+ in LA.

Strategy

The prior section rolls nicely into this one. The Yankees gave depth away, and that’s never a good strategy. Hayden Wesneski and Ken Waldichuk were two of their top pitching prospects (traded in the Effross and Montas deals respectively) and Jordan Montgomery and JP Sears were throwing productive innings at the Major League level. The Yankees dealt all of that depth away shortly after putting Luis Severino on the 60-day IL, which cemented Domingo German as a member of the rotation. German has been good (like really good) (like best fWAR on the Yankees since August 2 good) since joining the rotation, but there’s no argument that this was a good process. He had a 6.39 ERA and 7.30 FIP on the day that they essentially gave him a rotation spot, and his resurgence since then has been buoyed by his 2.94 FIP which masks his 4.21 xFIP. He’s not a good pitcher, and the Yankees better hope they can get a few more productive starts out of him before Severino comes back, because this won’t last.

Jameson Taillon, upon whom the Yankees put a ton of pressure by trading Montgomery and Sears, pitched to a 5.04 ERA in five starts from July 5 to July 28, and has not improved since then (now a 5.18 ERA since July 5). His incredible start to the season feels like a distant memory, and while there are some signs of life, I do not know if I expect a turnaround. His barrel rate allowed over his last nine starts is nearly double what it was in his first 15 (12.1% up from 6.1%), but this is countered by the fact that his fastball velocity is also up in his last nine starts, and the difference in xFIP across these two samples is only about 0.2. He might find it, but trading away every piece of pitching depth in the midst of his struggles was bad strategy.

I’m also no doctor, but I have to imagine trading for a guy who hasn’t played baseball since June 26 (looking at you, Harrison Bader) is not a great strategy, given that you were getting value out of the guy you traded for him. Ah, well.

With these items addressed, let’s break down the performance of some individual players since joining the Yankees.

Breakdowns

Frankie Montas is the elephant in the room, right?

Luis Castillo has pitched to a 3.16 ERA with the Mariners, including allowing just three runs over 14.2 innings against the Yankees since joining the M’s. Brian Cashman said the other day that the Yankees were not willing to meet Cincy’s asking price for Castillo, and that’s probably fine. Plenty of people, including Whipple, noted that it was not an unpopular opinion to believe Montas was the better of the two pitchers anyway.

Frankie Montas has been BAD as a Yankee, though. He started off with a catastrophe in St. Louis before redeeming himself a bit (though 5 IP with 4 K and 2 BB isn’t exactly incredible) in the IKF Game in Boston. The pendulum swung back to awful when he faced Toronto in the Bronx and allowed six runs in 6 IP, but he bounced back again with a strong start on Tuesday against the Mets, pitching into the sixth inning and recording six strikeouts.

We’ve seen far too much of… well… this.

This is not the pitcher the Yankees signed up to acquire. That guy pitched to a 1.96 ERA and 9.78 K/9 in his last five starts with Oakland before being traded. This guy has hardly been recognizable, and the Yankees need his start against the Mets on Tuesday to be an indication of a return to form. It’s hard to have many positive things to say about him here early.

I really like Scott Effross.

If you could place a bet on the Yankees acquiring a reliever I’ve never heard of at the deadline, it would hit almost every year.

Effross played much of the season as Old Friend David Robertson’s setup man in Chicago, and the Yankees were able to acquire him, and his five full seasons of team control, because the Cubs are truly awful. He hit the 15-day IL on August 22, which is a shame because I really liked what I was seeing from him. His 3.24 ERA is almost deceptively high, masking the fact that he’s only given up runs in one of his outings, and four of his eight appearances have been hitless. I wouldn’t mind him striking out some more guys, but I don’t have any trouble feeling confident in Effross as a high leverage piece in October and in years to come. As far as I’m concerned, this was the best deadline move the Yankees made.

Lou Trivino is a conundrum.

Oakland threw Trivino, once a very effective reliever (.6 fWAR in 2018 and 2021) into the Montas deal as part of their fire sale. Despite a terrific 12.66 K/9 and a 2.90 xFIP in Oakland this year, Trivino was having the worst season of his career. His 6.47 ERA was embarrassingly high, and his BABIP allowed was .451, an almost impossible figure to reach. Since joining the Yankees, though, things have changed. Trivino has allowed just two runs (one earned) in 9.0 IP, and though he’s striking out fewer batters (bad) and walking more of them (bad), his BABIP allowed has predictably regressed to .259. As a result he is allowing just over 15% of inherited runners to score, down from about 33% in Oakland) and has begun to move himself into the Circle of Trust.

I have to assume Lou Trivino doesn’t mind having a defense existing behind him, unlike the converted outfielders he had in Oakland.

Speaking of BABIP regression…

Anyone who follows us anywhere (Twitter, our podcast, etc.) knows that the Andrew Benintendi acquisition was a particularly contentious one for us. I’ll be honest, I’ve disliked Andrew Benintendi for a long time.

But my criticisms of him earlier this year and around the time he joined the Yankees were well founded.

And he isn’t vaccinated.

Every single tweet of mine hating on Benintendi was based on data. Every. Single. One. When Whipple tries to tell you that he was right about Benintendi and I was wrong, don’t believe him. Now, where would Whipple get the idea that he was right about Benintendi? He would get it from the fact that Benintendi has been good for a little while now.

Andrew Benintendi has played 25 games with the Yankees. Let’s see how they break down statistically.

Green/red highlights indicate improvement or regression compared to prior period.

Here are his complete stats as a Yankee for comparison.

Is anyone impressed with a 3.28 fWAR/650 pace from Andrew Benintendi? Especially when we consider he was on a 4.4 fWAR/650 pace from the beginning of the season until June 3, it’s kind of underwhelming. We can tack onto that that his wRC+ through his first 87 PA as a Yankee was an abysmal 79, and it’s only his recent string of slugging 1.100 across three consecutive multi-hit games that has saved him.

So what do we make of Andrew Benintendi? He won’t continue to post the .395 BABIP he has posted since August 7, regardless of his improved tendencies to pull and elevate the ball, so he needs to slug. With that said, his improved tendencies to pull and elevate the ball should support slugging, and are new (potentially indicative of a meaningfully changed approach). Should we be optimistic that he’s going to slug? Let’s see.

First data point: I don’t love that half of Andrew Benintendi’s extra base hits as a Yankee have come on balls with expected batting averages under .500, nor that 40% of them have come on balls with expected batting averages under .280.

Here are all of those hits.

If we assume that xBA is a good enough proxy for hit probability, the probability of all of those batted balls turning out to be hits (put aside extra base hits) is .14%. In other words, 9,986 out of 10,000 times, these balls would not all end up as hits. That suggests we won’t continue to see him slug like this.

Second data point: However, his other five XBH, many of which are his more recent XBH, have tended to be much more likely to be hits. Could this be a trend? Maybe!

This is likely a function of him hitting the ball higher lately and pulling it more, because as we all know, the only way to slug sustainably is to pull the ball in the air. If he does that, he’s gonna be fine (potentially, he’s still kind of a noodle).

Benintendi is a bit of a conundrum. He might be the 117 wRC+ the Yankees have gotten, but for much of his tenure so far, he wasn’t that. He might continue to slug, but some extraordinary batted ball luck is responsible for 50% of his extra base hits.

Also, he’s a bad defender. I’m sorry. The Gold Glove is not a meaningful award. Clint Frazier was a 2020 Gold Glove finalist.

The Yankees didn’t give up a lot for Benintendi, and if he can slug about .420 for them and be a 115-ish wRC+ bat down the stretch, he’ll be really valuable.

He’s not the 140 wRC+ or .320 batting average hitter a lot of fans thought they were getting, but that doesn’t mean he can’t be productive. I’ll be paying very close attention to him as the season goes on. I hope he carries his newfound enthusiasm for pulling fly balls all the way to the Canyon of Heroes in November.

This team is still very good, and shame on you if you gave up on them. Some of these acquisitions are already paying off, and there are good reasons to be confident that others will.

Let’s go Yankees.

Will Harris
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