{"id":2060,"date":"2011-07-30T12:10:01","date_gmt":"2011-07-30T16:10:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.broadstreetbelievers.com\/?p=2060"},"modified":"2011-07-30T12:10:01","modified_gmt":"2011-07-30T16:10:01","slug":"the-hunter-pence-trade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/?p=2060","title":{"rendered":"The Hunter Pence Trade"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"pence\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.houstonpress.com\/hairballs\/hunter-pence050511.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"479\" \/><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Phils&#39; New Right Fielder<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Ruben Amaro Jr. strikes again, acquiring an All-Star at the trade deadline for the third consecutive year.\u00a0 Of course, that doesn&#8217;t include the December 2009 trade that brought Roy Halladay to Philly.\u00a0 Some bullet-point reactions to the trade:<\/p>\n<p><strong>On Pence:<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Phillie fans should probably temper expectations for Pence to some degree.\u00a0 Yes, he&#8217;s a (fairly) young, 2-time All-Star that can do a ton of nice things.\u00a0 But he&#8217;s far from a superstar.<\/li>\n<li>In some ways, Pence can be compared to Jayson Werth, but with much less patience at the plate, worse defense, but more consistent as a hitter.<\/li>\n<li>An underrated plus for Pence: he has never been hurt.<\/li>\n<li>Another plus: his stats don&#8217;t blow you away, but he&#8217;s been incredibly consistent.\u00a0 He hit exactly 25 home runs each of the last three seasons.\u00a0 Though he&#8217;s well below that pace this year.<\/li>\n<li>In 658 plate appearances last year, he walked 41 times.\u00a0 He&#8217;s on a similar pace this year.\u00a0 That is a very low walk rate.<\/li>\n<li>His batting average on balls in play (BABIP) this year is .368, over 60 points higher than the last three years.\u00a0 That means his .308 average this year is a fluke that can be expected to drop significantly.<\/li>\n<li>He appears to be a guy that could&#8217;ve really used the Davey Lopes Base-Stealing School.\u00a0 He has good speed, but his stolen base percentage is just over 60% for his career.\u00a0 Though he is 7 for 8 so far this year.\u00a0 He stole a career-high 18 bags last year.<\/li>\n<li>He has been a significantly better hitter in his career at his home park in Houston, a hitter&#8217;s park on par with the Bank.\u00a0 So we can&#8217;t expect any CBP Bump in his production.<\/li>\n<li>While it&#8217;s true that the Phils will have Pence for less than market value over the next two seasons, he&#8217;ll be far from cheap.\u00a0 He could be expected to cost roughly $25 mil. over the two seasons.<\/li>\n<li>All that being said, there can&#8217;t be any doubt that Pence makes the Phillies a better team immediately.\u00a0 Charlie has already said he expects to bat him 5th, with Victorino moving back up to 2nd, which I think makes a ton of sense.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>On What They Traded:<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000;\">On the plus side: the two top prospects they surrendered are both in A-Ball, and so much can go wrong in the development of a player between A-Ball and the majors.<\/span><\/li>\n<li>As highly as Cosart is rated, he&#8217;s still considered high risk\/high reward.\u00a0 Seems like after the deal went down, some Phils people intimated they have concerns about his maturity.\u00a0 Maybe true, maybe just trying to justify moving him.<\/li>\n<li>Singleton is mostly seen as a &#8220;won&#8217;t-miss&#8221; ML bat, but he basically has no position and is 19-years-old.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>All in all, safe to say the Phils over-paid for what Pence is, though when you&#8217;re clearly in &#8220;win-now&#8221; mode, you often have to overpay.<\/li>\n<li>List of prospects the Phils have now moved since July of 2009: Kyle Drabek, Carlos Carrasco, J.A. Happ, Jared Cosart,\u00a0Michael Taylor, Jason Knapp, Jonathan Singleton,\u00a0Anthony Gose, Travis D&#8217;Arnaud, Lou Marson, and Jason Donald.\u00a0 Varying degrees of talent there, of course, but that&#8217;s a ton of young players to vacate from your organization over the span of just two calendar years.<\/li>\n<li>On the one hand, you have to give credit to the front office and scouts for continually stocking desired young talent.\u00a0 On the other hand, you have to wonder when the well runs dry.<\/li>\n<li>I suspect Domonic Brown was never put on the table and the Phillies never had any intention of trading him.\u00a0 I know his name was thrown around, but certainly a team like the Astros had something to gain by hinting that the Phillies were putting Brown out there.\u00a0 It could&#8217;ve forced the Braves to flinch and include one of their prospects that they didn&#8217;t want to lose.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Overall:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">I&#8217;m not sure if I would&#8217;ve made this trade or not.\u00a0 It&#8217;s not that I am super-high on Cosart and Singleton, but more that I have my doubts about Hunter Pence.\u00a0 I wonder, for example, if Cosart and Singleton could&#8217;ve been the centerpieces of a deal for a better\u00a0player than Pence in the coming offseason.\u00a0 Maybe a Matt Kemp?<\/span><\/p>\n<p>But, we can&#8217;t forget that the Phils are virtually all-in for a title THIS year.\u00a0 I can&#8217;t fault Amaro for his decision.\u00a0 I love the aggressiveness.\u00a0 The team has all the pieces to win it all.\u00a0 Though another bullpen arm wouldn&#8217;t hurt.\u00a0 Us Phillie fans are greedy all of a sudden, huh?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ruben Amaro Jr. strikes again, acquiring an All-Star at the trade deadline for the third consecutive year.\u00a0 Of course, that doesn&#8217;t include the December 2009 trade that brought Roy Halladay to Philly.\u00a0 Some bullet-point reactions to the trade: On Pence: &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/?p=2060\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[1223,1224,1225,16,395],"class_list":["post-2060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mlb","tag-hunter-pence","tag-jarred-cosart","tag-jonathan-singleton","tag-phillies","tag-ruben-amaro"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2060"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2060\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2985,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2060\/revisions\/2985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}