Dave Dombrowski has a history of making — and winning — bold trades
COMMENTARYWhen the Red Sox hired Dave Dombrowski as their president of baseball operations in August 2015, they gave control of an organization with one of the best collections of young talent in the game to an executive with a reputation for trading young talent in pursuit of short-term success. That approach was not without its benefits. In his nearly 14 seasons as general manager of the Detroit Tigers, Dombrowski helped deliver two pennants (2006 and 2012) and four consecutive American League Central titles (2011 through 2014). However, prior to his final season with the team, Baseball America ranked the Tigers’ minor league talent dead last among the 30 major league organizations, noting that Dombrowski had traded seven of the organization’s top 10 prospects in the previous 12 months alone. That last item might sound familiar to Red Sox fans. With the acquisitions of Chris Sale and Tyler Thornburg on Tuesday, Dombrowski, in a single day, traded away four of Boston’s top seven prospects according to the list released by Baseball Prospectus last Friday. Prior to that, he had dealt the team’s No. 2 prospect from a year ago in July’s Drew Pomeranz trade, and the No. 3 prospect from BP’s 2015 Red Sox list, plus another prospect who made both BA and BP’s league-wide top-60 this February, in the acquisition of closer Craig Kimbrel. That’s seven prospects who likely would have made this year’s organizational top 10 traded in a 13-month span.Baseball America ranked the Red Sox among the top six organizations in baseball in terms of minor league talent every year from 2013 to 2016, but it seems safe to say that streak is now over. That alone is not a reason to criticize Dombrowski, however. To begin with, Dombrowski didn’t trade any of the young talent from Boston’s major league roster. Still in place are AL MVP runner-up Mookie Betts (entering his age-24 season), All-Star shortstop Xander Bogaerts (also 24), centerfielder Jackie Bradley Jr. (27 in April), 22-year-old left fielder Andrew Benintendi, a strong Rookie of the Year candidate for 2017, and emerging lefty starter Eduardo Rodriguez (24 in April).Then there’s the quality of the players Dombrowski has acquired. As much as he gave up for Chris Sale, it’s hard to complain about adding a 28-year-old ace who has been the best pitcher in the American League over the last five years and comes with three years remaining on a very team-friendly contract. Pomeranz was disappointing down the stretch last year, but he was an All-Star in the first half and I, for one, believe that he can return to that level for Boston in 2017 and 2018, his last two arbitration years. I’m less sanguine about Kimbrel, but he was the best closer in baseball in the first half of the decade, won’t turn 30 until late May 2018, and is under contract for two more seasons at a price (just over $13 million per season) well below what this offseason’s market is delivering to high-end closers such as Mark Melancon ($15.5 million per year from the Giants) and Aroldis Chapman (a record-setting $17.2 million per year from the rival Yankees).Also in Dombrowski’s favor is his track record in trades. Curious about the reality behind Dombrowski’s reputation for mortgaging the Tigers’ farm, I crunched the numbers on the most significant trades of his 14-year tenure in Detroit. What I found was that his reputation is more a matter of perception than fact, and that Dombrowski’s worst trades may have been the result of the Tigers’ increasing desperation to stay relevant in his final seasons in Detroit.The first notable thing about Dombrowski’s trade history with the Tigers is that, when he went big, he almost always came out ahead. His victories, in chronological order, include July 2002’s three-way deal that sent Jeff Weaver to the Yankees and brought in a young Jeremy Bonderman and Carlos Peña from the A’s, the January 2004 deal that brought Carlos Guillen to Detroit for Ramon Santiago (the latter of whom re-signed with the Tigers as a free agent two years later), his swap of three pitching prospects who never panned out for a 38-year-old Gary Sheffield in November 2006, the eight-player trade that sent top prospects Cameron Maybin and Andrew Miller to the Marlins for Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis in December 2007, the three-way trade that sent Curtis Granderson to the Yankees and Edwin Jackson to the Diamondbacks netting Max Scherzer and Austin Jackson in December 2009, the acquisition of Jhonny Peralta for pitching prospect Giovanny Soto at the 2010 non-waiver deadline, the six-player deal that netted Doug Fister at the following year’s deadline, the acquisition of Anibal Sanchez and Omar Infante for three minor leaguers including former first-round pick Jacob Turner at the 2012 deadline, the Prince Fielder/Ian Kinsler swap in November 2013, and the pair of trades that turned Rick Porcello’s walk year into two-thirds of a season of Yoenis Cespedes and 2016 AL Rookie of the Year Michael Fulmer.Dombrowski’s losses have been comparatively small in scale. Early in his Tigers tenure he prematurely discarded righty reliever Jason Frasor, who had already had two Tommy John surgeries, outfielder Cody Ross, and future closer Jason Grilli, but all were future role players who took years to find their major league strides. More significantly, prior to acquiring Cabrera in the fall of 2007, Dombrowski traded pitching prospect Jair Jurrjens to Atlanta for shortstop Edgar Renteria’s walk year (which was lousy), and a young Omar Infante to the Cubs for what prove to be less than two months of outfielder Jacque Jones, who was released the following May. However, those were his only clear losses in his first decade on the job in Detroit. It could thus be argued that in his first 10 years as the Tigers’ general manager, the only genuine prospect Dombrowski might have regretted trading was Jurrjens, who was ranked 49th on Baseball America’s top-100 list the winter of the trade, finished third in the NL Rookie of the Year voting the following season and was an All-Star in 2011. However, Jurrjens arm gave out in 2012 and he was effectively finished as a major league pitcher by his age-27 season.Dombrowski’s final two years in Detroit yielded more mixed results, but some of that is due to the fact that the jury is still out on many of the young players he traded in that span. Consider, for example, the seven top-10 prospects he traded per the Baseball America note referenced at the top of this article. Among those seven are right-handed pitchers Jake Thompson, Jonathan Crawford and Corey Knebel and infield prospect Domingo Leyba. Of those four, only Thompson and Knebel, both of whom were dealt for Joakim Soria at the 2014 deadline, have reached the majors, and both have since been traded a second time and struggled in their major league opportunities in 2016.Still, there are a couple of clear losses there. The Tigers clearly lost the Devon Travis-for-Anthony Gose trade, with Travis looking like a future All-Star in Toronto and Gose having played his way off the Tigers’ major league roster. Still, Travis was blocked at second base by Ian Kinsler. Thus, Dombrowski’s sin was not trading Travis as much as it was failing to get a better return for him. Dombrowski also clearly blundered by sending young righty Robbie Ray and Leyba to the Diamondbacks in the three-team trade that left the Tigers with only Shane Greene. The irony there is that Ray’s emergence as a promising young starter makes Dombrowski’s previous deal, acquiring Ray and two others from the Nationals for Doug Fister in December 2013, look a lot better, but that is undermined by Dombrowski having dumped Ray for next to nothing in the now-28-year-old Greene, who spent most of 2016 in the Tigers’ bullpen. He also clearly lost the trade that sent power-hitting infielder Eugenio Suarez and Crawford to the Reds, though not as much because of their promise as because the player he got in return was righty Alfredo Simon coming of a clearly fluky performance in 2014.Meanwhile, it will be years before we know how much Dombrowski gave up when he dealt shortstop prospect Will Adames in the three-team trade that brought in David Price in July 2015. The accounting there is further complicated by the fact that Price in turn netted Daniel Norris and Matt Boyd, who combined to start 31 games for the Tigers in 2016. The possibility remains that Norris could have a better major league career than Adames.Still, from what we know thus far, Dombrowski’s victories at the trading block, and the Tigers’ victories on the field, far outweighed his losses. If anything, Dombrowski’s track record suggests that he both has an excellent sense of which prospect to trade when, and is correct in operating on the general assumption that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bushes, especially when that bird is a Condor.
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