TheRinger article on trading for prospects

[Hallas]

https://www.theringer.com/mlb/2018/12/10/18133919/baseball-trades-prospect-rankings-top-50-busts

 

There's a couple things here:

• Obviously the 2018 O's should be trading anything and everything, which they did.
• I've always felt that the O's had the right idea trading prospects for deadline talent in 2012-2016.
• The O's either did a bad job in terms of getting real value back for their talent, or their player development sucks so bad that a change of scenery was beneficial for a large number of players traded.
• The desire for publications to downgrade a prospect because they were traded to the Orioles isn't just limited to the Orioles because they're bad; many publications at least consider this, regardless of what team they end up on.

If your team is close, I increasingly believe that you should follow the Duquette strategy of trying to reload every year.  The payoff for trying to develop your own talent, combined with your ability to game the system due to the the information mismatch that exists between your own prospects and other team's prospects, makes this a winning proposition IF you can identify tradeable talent.  Of course, this strategy is predicated on having a real player development pipeline, which is Elias's primary job.  Given that, you can largely reload for MLB caliber talent based on the quality of your prospects and make out ahead once your initial pipeline starts producing MLB results.

[weams]

Good share. Thanks. 

[atomic]

The one thing this article fails to take as a possibility is that the teams that are acquiring the prospect might prefer the players that go on to be successful but the teams that have them aren't willing to give them up.  Perhaps the rankings are just not that good. 

[Hallas]

2 minutes ago, atomic said:

The one thing this article fails to take as a possibility is that the teams that are acquiring the prospect might prefer the players that go on to be successful but the teams that have them aren't willing to give them up.  Perhaps the rankings are just not that good. 

Sure, but the teams are still pulling the trigger on the trades, which would imply that they're at least semi satisfied with their return.  And the article does address the general shift toward acquiring and keeping prospects, almost to the point where trading for MLB talent may be the better call.