Originally Posted on the Previous Iteration of Baseball.FYI by Daniel R. Epstein, @depstein1983
Yes, the Rockies had to trade Nolan Arenado. This was the only sensible move remaining, but not because of some “financial flexibility” fairytale or Gamestop-like up-and-down rebuild cycle garbage. It’s the culminating move of a colossally inept franchise that whiffs on every team-building opportunity like a ground ball hit slightly to the left of Daniel Murphy. In a bombed-out cathedral, you may as well bust the lone remaining stained glass window.
Arenado was already gone long before the trade. No one would willingly stay where they “feel disrespected,” especially with a contractual opt-out following the 2021 season. With one foot out the door already, the club might as well get something in return. Of course, forking over $50 million to the Cardinals in the deal and only acquiring, as per ESPN’s Kiley McDaniel, “a grab bag of 40 (future value grade, on the 20-80 scale) type prospects,” is a masterpiece of fetid incompetence, the likes of which only one GM is capable— the same GM who made his superstar feel so disrespected in the first place.
Privilege
Rockies GM Jeff Bridich once said he was above media criticism because “99 percent of them, they’ve never even led anything in their lives.” Worth noting that 99 percent of them have also never enraged a star player and then paid $50 million for the pleasure of trading him away.— Marc Carig (@MarcCarig) January 30, 2021
The failure of privilege is the privilege to fail, and no one in MLB embodies both privilege and failure more than Jeff Bridich. He was born to lead— not like Jeanne d’Arc, but like King George III or some other accident of birth with an entire Cerro Rico’s worth of silver in his mouth. He was born in Whitefish Bay, recently ranked the “richest of Wisconsin towns,” His father played baseball at Harvard University and coached his high school baseball team. Naturally, the path was paved for him to follow in Daddy’s footsteps; lo and behold, he caught and played the outfield for the Harvard Crimson.
Upon graduating in 2000, Bridich commenced an MLB internship, presumably unpaid. You see, when you’re a Harvard legacy from Whitefish Bay, you can afford to work for free for as long as it takes to get your foot in the door. Four years later, he was running the Arizona Fall League, then joined the Rockies in a high level role in December 2004, where he has failed upwardly ever since. It’s the exact type of backstory that sends MLB’s pheromones into overdrive. As ESPN’s Joon Lee wrote this past June:
BUT THE RISE OF ANALYTICS ALSO HAS RESULTED IN ANOTHER MASSIVE SHIFT: AN INFLUX OF WHITE, MALE GRADUATES OF IVY LEAGUE SCHOOLS AND OTHER PRESTIGIOUS UNIVERSITIES INTO TEAMS’ FRONT OFFICES. IN A DATA ANALYSIS CONDUCTED BY ESPN, THE PERCENTAGE OF IVY LEAGUE GRADUATES HOLDING AN ORGANIZATION’S TOP BASEBALL OPERATIONS DECISION-MAKING POSITION — WHICH, DEPENDING ON THE CLUB, COULD BE ITS PRESIDENT, VICE PRESIDENT OR GENERAL MANAGER — HAS RISEN FROM JUST 3% IN 2001 TO 43% TODAY; WHILE THE PERCENTAGE OF GRADUATES FROM U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT’S LIST OF THE TOP 25 COLLEGES — BOTH UNIVERSITIES AND LIBERAL ARTS SCHOOLS — HOLDING THE SAME POSITIONS HAS RISEN FROM 24% TO 67%.
By open-mouth kissing the Ivy League, MLB subsumes its biases and elitism. Legacy admissions, such as that of Bridich, perpetuate a cycle of wealthy, white overrepresentation; Harvard accepts legacies at a rate of 33 percent compared to just six percent for non-legacy applicants. By throwing jobs at Ivy graduates and fast tracking them into upper level positions, MLB perpetuates systemic racism and classism. They exacerbate this by making unpaid internships practically mandatory for entry into the industry. Even if you’re qualified, creative, intelligent, and educated, you have no future in MLB if you can’t afford to work for free in your early 20s.
The young Bridiches of the world aren’t inherently better than other job seekers— they just benefit from a pass to the front of the line. Sometimes this works! Yale alumnus Theo Epstein (no relation to the author) ended championship droughts at both Fenway and Wrigley. But when Bridich gets to make blatant mistakes repeatedly— many of which are first-guessed by most thinking observers— and keep his job, it underscores that people from more diverse backgrounds will never receive that opportunity in the first place— let alone the blessing to fail over and over. The apparently untouchable nature of his position, no matter how badly he ruins every aspect of the franchise, led Arenado to conclude he had no future in Colorado.
Failure
Prior to the 2016 season, a year into Bridich’s tenure as GM, Baseball Prospectus rated the Rockies farm system the third-best in MLB. Arenado was on the precipice of leading the NL in home runs, RBI, and total bases for the second straight season and collecting his fourth Gold Glove in four years. Second baseman DJ LeMahieu was about to lead the NL with a .348 batting average, and rookie shortstop Trevor Story was primed to belt 27 home runs in 97 games. Stars Charlie Blackmon and Carlos González roamed the outfield. Such were the boons Bridich inherited— and squandered.
The lofty farm system ranking was buoyed by seven prospects listed among Baseball Prospectus’ Top 101:
20. Brendan Rodgers, SS
24. Jeff Hoffman, RHP
31. David Dahl, OF
33. Jon Gray, RHP
36. Ryan McMahon, 3B
42. Raimel Tapia, OF
101. Forrest Wall, 2B
Gray has worked out pretty well— a disastrous 2020 notwithstanding, during which he lost two ticks of velocity and failed to induce swings-and-misses— accumulating 10.7 WAR in his career (Baseball-Reference version). The other six prospects have combined for a Blutarsky— 0.0 WAR. Rodgers, the third overall pick in the 2015 draft, has dealt with injuries but was ranked on every top prospect list each year from 2015-2020. He has failed to seize the second base job, batting .196 with no home runs in 102 plate appearances.
Hoffman was also a high draft pick but compiled a 6.40 ERA over parts of five seasons. He was traded to the Reds in an exchange of lost causes this past November. Dahl was an All-Star in 2019 but has largely struggled to stay on the field and was non-tendered this offseason. McMahon will take over third base for Arenado going forward, but his .740 OPS is 18 percent lower than expected from a league-average player. Tapia finally achieved the high batting average and on-base percentage in 2020 that he long tantalized, but with nonexistent power and poor defense, the bar for contact is above the level he can sustain. Wall was traded to Toronto in 2018, has yet to reach the major leagues, and became a minor league free agent this winter.
All prospects have a high bust rate— including the best ones— and to be fair, the tenth-best player in the system that year was Story, who is a legitimate superstar. No one could expect all seven of these blue-chippers to reach their ceilings, but getting just one mid-rotation starter out of the bunch is unacceptable. Here are the players just one spot behind each of the top six Rockies guys on the 2016 Top 101 list:
21. Blake Snell, LHP
25. Nick Williams, OF
32. Sean Newcomb, LHP
34. Jake Thompson, RHP
37. Ozzie Albies, SS
43. Aaron Blair, RHP
There are a few busts in this similarly ranked sampling, of course, but there’s also a Cy Young winner (Snell), one of the best second basemen in MLB (Albies), and a solid pitcher comparable to Gray (Newcomb). Prospect development is like blowing glass— sometimes you get a beautiful vase, and other times it shatters. Bridich’s studio is littered with shards.
Reaping and sowing from the farm system is only one aspect of a GM’s job. Acquiring veterans is just as important. Bridich has signed eight free agents since 2016 for at least $10 million in guarantees, totalling $256.5 million altogether. Every single one of them has been an unmitigated disaster. Let’s start with the position players, which is a term we must use loosely in these cases. Gerardo Parra signed for three years, $27.5 million in 2016, then posted an 80 OPS+ during his stay in Colorado (20 percent below league average).
Ian Desmond put pen to paper the following winter for five years, $80 million. Through the first three years of that deal, he achieved merely a .313 on-base percentage whilst struggling to find a defensive home. After opting out of the 2020 season, he returns for the final year of the contract in 2021. Daniel Murphy was the “answer” to the first base question lingering since Todd Helton retired, signing for two years, $24 million in 2019. He put up subpar numbers in the first year of the deal, then absolutely cratered in 2020, announcing his retirement hours before the Arenado trade news broke.
If you think those three-position player singings were bad, wait until you see the drudging death march of relievers! First up was Jason Motte in 2016, who was released a year into his two-year, $10 million pact. The next winter hauled in lefty specialist Mike Dunn for three years, $19 million, during which he recorded ERAs of 4.47, 9.00, and 7.13. The 2018 troika of Wade Davis (three years, $52 million), Jake McGee, (three years, $27 million), and Bryan Shaw (also three years, $27 million) was a Monty Brewster-level masterstroke of misspent money. Their ERAs over the lives of those contracts were 6.49, 4.80, and 5.61, with Shaw getting cut before the final year of the deal.
Notice anything missing? Bridich has failed to sign a noteworthy free-agent starting pitcher over the entirety of his tenure as GM. Since 2015, Rockies starters have a 4.91 ERA— third-worst in MLB. Given his track record with relievers and position players, perhaps this was just further disaster avoidance. Nevertheless, he has neglected this glaring need year after year.
This brings us back to Nolan Arenado. Along with Todd Helton, he is one of the top two homegrown players in Colorado history, enjoying a Hall of Fame carer arc thus far. Before the 2019 season, he signed a nine-year extension that should’ve kept him in purple and black through age 35. In these types of extensions, there is an implicit agreement between team and player that the front office will build around him. Unfortunately, there’s no way to codify that in written contractual language, and the Rockies pulled a bait-and-switch.
For the second consecutive winter, the team has declined to add a major league caliber player via trade or free agency. (Ownership deserves plenty of blame here too, but that’s a whole different saltshaker.) Baseball Prospectus now ranks their 2021 farm system 29th in the game. There appears little hope for the team to contend in the foreseeable future. If you were Arenado, armed with an opt-out, wouldn’t you demand a trade too?
In spite of the failed prospect pipeline and abominable free agency calamity, the Rockies made the playoffs not long ago. They played in October in both 2017 and 2018, though they failed to win a postseason game in either season. Since then, they’ve only subtracted from a team that finished 71-91 in 2019 and 26-34 last year, while the Dodgers and Padres further distanced themselves from the NL West pack. The Arenado trade is a full-on surrender to rebuilding (Story has to be next out the door, one would think).
For the time being, Rockies ownership appears content to let Bridich run that rebuild, having apparently demonstrated some yet unseen competency. More likely, they’re still enamored by his background and education, now bolstered by the inertia of experience. This is the privilege he enjoys— the chance to engineer compounding failures in every respect of his job while still somehow growing his résumé— but given all the resources at the team’s disposal in 2016, you can’t blame Arenado for imagining what a capable carpenter could have built.