jerseyhoya wrote:I feel good about myself that I've taken MattS's haughty, dickish Cole evangelizing to a wider, dumber audience.
JerseyHoya FTW! Awesome! Dickish MattS is a great role to play. Enjoy doing so.
For example:
To those wanting to trade Cole Hamels for Roy Halladay, please just take five seconds to consider how dumb that would be. If Cole Hamels got Tommy John Surgery today, I would still not trade Hamels next three years for Halladay's next one year. I know that Halladay may re-sign with the Phillies, but that would be at his market rate. It's fun to have superstar players, but his six wins added would cost about 27 million (though I'm sure they would pay him less now and more later when he offered fewer wins). A win costs about $4.5MM. If you sign two three-win players, it costs you the same thing and gets you the same thing. Halladay would only provide the Phillies with the value added approximately equal to two draft picks. If the Phillies tried to undercut him, both the Phillies and Halladay would know that other teams would bid him up to that point a year later. The result would be that you are effectively trading for two draft picks plus Halladay's six wins in 2010 at the cost of getting about 3.5 wins out of spending the $15.75MM that Halladay is owed but doing this instead on relievers, a 3B, and bench guys.
Hamels will get paid about $27 million over the next three years and even the most ridiculously conservative estimate is that he would provide about 12 wins above replacement over that time and it should be closer to 15. Those $27 million spent on free agents would get you about 6 wins. You basically just subtracted Halladay at least. But you have to pay him anyway.
Unless you have ridiculously embarassing pictures of Halladay, you're just not going to get a deal for his future that will be a bargain. It will be a fair deal, approximately equal to the cost of signing two very good pitchers to the rotation. I can't see a way of measuring this that isn't going to cost the Phillies three wins and probably closer to six.
The goal is to be good now. Even if you think Cole Hamels is actually a league average pitcher, you don't trade him. You trade prospects and surplus. The Phillies have three all-star OF and two top 25 prospects in the OF. The Jays need OF. I'd love to sell high on Happ but that doesn't happen in real life unless you are trading with Riccardi and he's gone. Let's stop the madness. Even if you want to blame Cole for his BABIP, you cannot deny that pitchers who do have bad BABIP tend to improve it the following year. And even if Cole were an average pitcher for the next three years, you'd have to be an idiot to think that we should trade him.
The Jays shouldn't even want Cole Hamels. He's not cheap in 2011 and 2012, and they're not going to compete until at least 2011 if not 2012. They want young players. Reading this is making me stupider.
Also, if you still want this trade after considering the fact that Hamels 2010-2012 is worth more than Halladay's 2010 alone, I got a twenty dollar bill to trade you that will just three tens and three fives.
