And then, I'd been holding out hope for an off-season trade for Sale or Fernandez -- but it's possible that DD believes that neither the White Sox nor the Marlins are going to make that move. Maybe there is no "three prospects for Pedro" young ace trade to be made. And if that's also the case -- if Pomeranz is the best pitcher who's going to get traded between now and next April -- then overpaying for him starts to look not just defensible, but necessary.
People need to give up on these established ace on affordable/pre-FA contract dreams. Theo Epstein spent most of his tenure in Boston chasing Felix Hernandez. The Sox have been chasing Chris Sale for a few years now. Never did they ever get serious traction. Hell, supposedly Epstein basically offered Seattle free pick from the entire farm for Hernandez and still got rejected.
Teams simply do not trade cost controlled, in their prime, proven aces anymore. The Pedro deal came about because Pedro was entering his final season of team control and Montreal lacked the ability to pay him a contract commensurate with what the FA market was about to offer. They were facing a move him or lose him scenario. Now with the size of the shared revenue pot, the various luxury tax wealth redistribution systems, the size of the national TV deal payouts for each team, and the runaway success of MLB.TV and the spun off subsidiary that handles everything from NHL streaming to HBO Now there isn't a club in baseball who can't afford to lock down their ace if they're so inclined. Which they are, unanimously.
You can't trade for cost controlled aces anymore. The only ways to acquire an ace are:
1. Pay them market rate for what is likely the back half of their career, like the Sox have done with Price.
2. Develop them from your farm system, ground up, the very reason we were all so high on Espinoza. The boom/bust potential of an 18 year old pitcher doesn't earn the value we all held for Espinoza. That value was born out of scarcity of peak pay out, not the likelihood of any real ML payout at all.
3. Acquire them just as they're breaking out/about to break out. We all were thinking this might have happened last season with EdRo prior to his injury. Theo pulled such a move when he acquired Arrieta and finished off the development needed for him to explode into what he is now. Dombrowski pulled this off several years ago when he traded for Max Scherzer. He is hoping to have done so now acquiring Pomeranz just as he's having a very strong first half with the new cutter.
I think people in SD right now, following Margot's and particularly Allen's success, are really buying into the hype about the Sox farm system.
The success of the traded prospects needs to be looked at with some perspective. Margot is posting a .760 OPS in the PCL with a .320 BABIP. The most offensively juiced circuit in pro ball with moderately high BABIP luck and he's doing OK. Not great, OK. And he still gets caught stealing at basically the fringe for viability (24 SBs, 8 CS, most metrics I've seen reference a 3/4ths success rate as the starting point to add value). That's against AAA catchers, so likely higher than he can post in the majors.
Margot will probably be a solid every day CF but his ceiling isn't Andrew McCutcheon. More like Dexter Fowler, Mark Kotsay, or Coco Crisp with a floor of a non-25 man roster guy if he takes much of a step back in his ability to hit ML pitching. Not a guy you play over Betts, Bradley, or Benintendi.
Asuaje is one of those super utility types the Sox have had so much recent success turning out (Holt, Marco Hernandez for two others). But Asuaje is also benefiting greatly form hitting in the PCL with a .365 BABIP. He ran high BABIPs in the low minors but crashed back down to earth in a full season of AA ball last year. Again, his numbers deserve skepticism and in no way indicate that he's going to be more than what he's always projected as, a utility infielder which the Sox are absolutely stocked on already.
Allen is a nice young arm to be sure, but it's not like he's throwing a sub 2 ERA in high A or K's 12 per 9 or something. He was a lottery ticket and if he turns into anything it'll likely be in large part to how he's developed with the Padres.
Good pieces, but not a stud in the bunch. The best chance for that was Guerra, who is already crashing to earth. Being half a season of ball into such a trade and already looking to have sold high on a major part of the package is a good sign for Dombrowski making the right assessments last winter.
The one that bothers me most is the innings. He's being acquired to help take this team to compete for a championship, but that is a huge jump in innings for him to do this. Huge.
The second one is, we have a very limited track record of him being any good. Being good and durable is a big leap of faith.
Clearly scouting of him this year is more important than the stats, especially if he's changed his repertoire, but I think there are plenty of reasons for concern.
Is there really any hard evidence to substantiate that concern though?
There has been real analysis to show that a gradual ramp-up of innings through the late teens and early 20's is the best approach, but Pomeranz is 27 years old. He's a full grown man with five years of ML level conditioning and development under his belt. Not a ton of players make the move from reliever to starter but the anecdotal examples aren't full of horror stories that I can find. Derek Lowe, Ryan Dempster, and Kenny Rogers have been mentioned in this thread but others who saw similar mid-20's spikes in their innings pitched were Johan Santana, CJ Wilson, and David Wells. All saw jumps from the mid to high double digits one season to nearly 200 IP the next and pitched successfully to high innings counts for several years afterwards.
Even Chris Sale has done this, but at a far younger age, when at 22 he threw 71 innings of relief and then at 23 threw 192 innings as a starter. That was probably too young to ramp up a guy's IPs like that but he's done just fine.
Monitoring IPs as part of player development makes sense, but once a guy is in his mid 20's and on an ML roster he's facing an equally substantial workload. They require different skills to be sure, which is why some guys are great relievers but horrible starters, or vice versa, but if it was simply a matter of innings pitched wouldn't teams have relievers throwing 150-200 IPs a year as opposed to something below half of that total? The guys who have all the best info on this (ML front offices) have repeatedly moved mid-20's relievers to starting roles and basically let them eat all the innings they could pitch themselves into. Almost no one brings up 20 year olds and let them throw 200+ innings anymore however. They've learned something but it isn't simply that dramatic upticks in IPs = bad.
