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I like the Rays-Padres trade for both teams. It’s cool to see the Padres loading up to continue pushing the Dodgers. Once again, they dealt from depth and got a difference maker.
Blake Snell is very good and about $10-12M/yr under FA value for the next three years (if you comp him to Zack Wheeler, which holds up pretty well over the last five years performance and health-wise). He makes the Padres’ rotation a lot better.
The Rays (and other teams) operating in a state of perpetual payroll austerity is obviously a problem for the players. It creates a miserable fan-team relationship too, which might actually hurt the bottom line on some level.
If teams are less likely than ever to deal current and recent top prospects, the opportunity to acquire a group of young players you really like as an org is increasingly rare.
Within the self-imposed constraints of their operation, the trade is almost necessary for the Rays as a means to continue stockpiling underpaid players since the days of deals like this are numbered.
Maybe Patiño’s command continues to be a problem, Mejia shows us why he’s now a twice-traded former prospect, and the Rays miss Snell a lot in 2021. In that scenario, we don’t know for a few years if they made a good trade since we are left to wait it out with Wilcox and Hunt.
Either way, it’s a lot of ways to connect and come away with more in the long run even if it’s an immediate loss. It will be interesting to see where the Rays turn for innings this season. Maybe they take the plunge with James Paxton?
Snell has thrown about 30 more innings than Paxton over the last five years combined (counting Durham in 2016), which might tell us something else about why they were willing to trade Snell in the first place, and why they handled him the way they did over the years.
If they go this route, there is a decent chance that the Rays are a better team with Paxton, Patiño and Mejia in 2021 than they would have been simply keeping Snell. Perhaps my belief that Snell’s $13M is being reallocated to Paxton (or somebody else) is wishcasting though.
TL;DR Rays gonna Rays because they choose to Rays, and when it stops working (eventually it will) the team is going to sell for more than $1B regardless so scoop yourself some extra ice cream or do something that makes you happy.
