Part 2

As promised, today I am returning to discuss the players received by the White Sox in last summer's trade with Seattle one year after the fact. For starters, Ben Davis seems to pretty clearly represent the most inconsequential player involved in the Sox-M's swap. Once regarded as a top catching prospect in San Diego's system, Davis' stock had dropped considerably by the time he was dealt to Seattle in 2002. This is however, not to say that Davis completely lacked value in his time with the Mariners. From his last season with the Padres in 2001 through 2004, Davis performed at a level similar to Miguel Olivo's previously discussed 2003 full season debut. Davis' performance was consistently above replacement level but with potential which dwindled each season and he eventually appeared best suited for a back up role. However, early last season, the Mariners came to the conclusion Davis was incapable of sticking with a Major League roster in any role, demoting him to AAA after a stretch of 33 horrific at bats to open the season. Davis remained at Tacoma until Kenny Williams freed him in the Garcia deal. With the Sox, Davis bounced back from his poor start and demotion to the minors but still continued the downward slide apparent ever since his final season with the Padres in '01 by putting up a homely .231/.276/.400 line. Still, while Davis clearly did not represent the everyday catcher some Sox fans naively described him as after a two week hot stretch in August, he was reasonably inexpensive and provided useful catching depth in light of Olivo's departure. The team stood to lose little from including Davis as part of the trade so with the exception of the highly unlikely event that he took the place of a player with legitimate potential or value, it is virtually impossible to condemn such a minor aspect of the deal. Ken Williams' decision to consider Davis for the club's starting catching vacancy and sign him to a million dollar deal this off season on the other hand represents a far less harmless move. However, that transaction occurred separate from the Garcia trade and Williams deserves quite a bit of slack for bravely reversing course and shipping Davis off to Charlotte in favor of A.J. Pierzynski and Chris Widger. All in all, aside from wasting a million dollars of payroll, acquiring Davis was harmful and in some ways resembles some of the low risk/high reward deals that have paid of for Williams in the past.

While I stated earlier that Jeremy Reed has always been the key to the trade for the Mariners, the same applies tenfold to Garcia's presence in the deal for the Sox since he is the only significant piece the team acquired in the move. I find it important to first state the obvious: Freddy Garcia was a far better pitcher than any other pitcher the White Sox could have reasonably managed to acquire last season and substantially improved the strength of the pitching staff. The key to examining the trade from the Sox end is answering the immensely difficult question of whether or not Garcia has improved the club enough to justify the young talent the organization relinquished.

One difficulty in weighing the costs and benefits of the Garcia trade for the White Sox is determining exactly how much of the value Garcia generates in a Sox uniform should be considered a direct result of the trade. While Freddy has no doubt been a major piece of this season's enormously successful 62-29 team, the White Sox traded Reed, Olivo, and Morse for Davis and Freddy Garcia at a point during which Garcia was signed only through the duration of the season. The three year $27 million extension the right hander reach with the team represents a separate transaction which followed weeks later. Considering the idea that the extension is in fact a separate move, a major point of contention is - had the trade never happened, could the three year deal with Garcia still have occurred a few months later in the off season? Since Garcia merely generated a very good but by no means all world 3.2 wins above replacement for a .500 team, if the Sox could have kept Reed, Olivo, and Morse to forego only the 16 relatively meaningless games Garcia started in 2004 and this season's 2005 first round draft pick, the trade clearly represents an unforgivable miscalculation (Some of you might want to stop me here and argue that at the time of the trade, the team had compiled a solid record and it appeared Frank Thomas and Magglio Ordonez would remain healthy throughout the duration of the season. In other words, by pointing out that Garcia's contributions were largely meaningless on a team that was out of contention late in the season, I am unreasonably relying on the hindsight required to foresee the team's collapse - which was highly unlikely at the instant the deal was consummated. The point is well taken, but I have to disagree. While clearly no one had the benefit of knowing when the trade was consummated that Thomas and Ordonez would be sidelined and the team would completely tank, a major contention contributing to my disagreement with the trade stated that the move was unwise because the team assumed too much risk by playing for one season when over a short period of time the unexpected can happen: teams can experience horrible luck and lose a ton of one run games, multiple players can slump terribly at the same time, and a team's best players can unpredictably go down with season ending injuries. While these factors will generally even out over several seasons if an organization fields a strong team each year, a team's luck can easily be incredibly good or bad over a half season. While I did not know the team would falter, the possibility of a scenario such as the one that ultimately occurred was a major reason I decried the trade from day one.). The difficulty with assuming that Garcia either could or could not have been signed to a similar contract in the off season is that either way, one is relying heavily on speculation. The Venezuelan presence in the Sox clubhouse and the fact that Garcia is married to Ozzie Guillen's niece certainly suggests that Garcia would have been more open to signing with the team in the off season than your average free agent. At the same time, Garcia's deal is for $9 million a season while Jaret Wright, Carl Pavano, and Pedro Martinez signed deals for $8, $10 , and $13 million respectively last winter. It is hard to say exactly what type of offers Garcia would have fielded in the open market (offers at least matching Pavano's $10 million per season seem likely), how much of a discount Garcia would've provided to play for a family member, and how willing the Sox would've been to pony up a few million more than they ultimately paid if that's what it took to get a deal done.

I promised three parts to this series of articles and due to the degree to which all aspects of the Garcia trade are intertwined it appears I spent the majority of the second part rambling on about the nuances of the deal I intended to discuss in part three. Somewhat disappointingly, one year later clear, concise answers regarding who won out are still not easy to come by. I attempted to avoid interjecting my opinion throughout both entries, although I'm not sure my efforts were successful. At this point I feel I owe the few readers I have left some definitive judgments even if some of these judgments are laced with subjectivity. With that said, here are the best conclusions I am personally capable of producing as far as an overarching evaluation of the trade: 1) It appears that despite my protestations from a year ago, the White Sox will not miss Miguel Olivo, substantially reducing the risk of the trade. 2) Despite a red hot debut, it still seems Michael Morse will develop into a solid major league starter at best. 3) Jeremy Reed is a solid major league starter at 23 with a chance to be a well above average starting center fielder for a long time, and he will not be arbitration eligible until after the 2007 season or eligible for free agency until after the 2010 season. 4) Freddy Garcia did not help the White Sox to reach the playoffs in 2004. 5) As tremendous and essential as Garcia has been in 2005, it would have most likely been worth parting with an extra one to two million dollars per season from 2005-2007 (I ultimately just can't see Garcia getting Pedro money last off season) or to settling for a different high caliber starter such as Matt Clement to keep Olivo, Morse, and most importantly Reed in a Sox uniform for a combined total of 14 seasons, 7 of which would have been practically free in terms of salary.

I guess what it comes down to is that my personal philosophy is not to part with players of Reed's caliber in "rent-a-player" deadline deals. While I mentioned earlier that the possibility of Thomas and Ordonez going down or other similar catastrophe must be considered over the course of 80+ games, that does not mean it was inevitable the Sox would tank. Garcia could have pitched the Sox to the playoffs under other circumstances and the handful of games he pitched in the playoffs could have been monumental for the organization. However, by the same token, Miguel Olivo could have continued to progress and become a perennial All-Star, Morse could hit 30 home runs as a short stop one season, and Reed might post a career average of .340. The greater the amount of time that passes after a trade occurs the more difficult it becomes to separate the odds of events occurring at the time from what actually took place in the aftermath of the deal. In the end, I believe what I believe about the trade but must admit that at some point the endless permutations one must consider to evaluate a move one year down the line, let alone six are enough to make anyone's head hurt. In my opinion, if you disagree you're not thinking hard enough.