Another look at the Rays-Twins trade

Joe Christensen of the Star Tribune had an article this weekend analyzing the offseason trade that brought Delmon Young and Brendan Harris to Minnesota and sent Matt Garza and Jason Bartlett to Tampa. On the surface, it looks like the Rays won the deal, two months into the season, with Tampa on top of the AL East and the Twins fluttering at the .500 mark.
While it’s a little bit of a disservice to judge the trade this early in the game, Christensen makes some good points. Garza is doing an excellent job with an ERA under 4 and Jason Bartlett has been excellent in the field and is coming around at the plate, batting .286 this month. For Minnesota, Delmon Young has been a disappointment in terms of his power numbers this season, and his average is off last years pace as well, something that could either be a sophomore slump or the Twins insistence that he change his approach at the plate. Offensively, Brenden Harris is more or less the same player Bartlett was, and less of a fielder. Strictly looking at this assessment, yes, the Rays got the better players. Naturally, this assessment is a little simplistic, as we are only two months into the season after it happened, and all the players involved, including a couple guys still in the minors, look to have long careers with their new teams.
If we’re going to look at the trade though, there is another element, short term, that we need to look at. What did the Twins and Rays do to fill the holes they opened up with their trade? Now, the swap of Bartlett for Harris is can be thrown out, since they were exchanged for each other. The two positions that need to be explored, then are in the Twins pitching staff and in right field for the Rays.
The Rays are pretty straight forward. The added Gabe Gross and Eric Hinske, who have had most of the action in right. Gross, aside from yesterday’s walk off winner, has been subpar, hitting .224 and only belting 3 home runs. Hinske, however, is slugging at .520 and has belted 10 homers, far surpassing anything Young has done at the plate this year. Combined, they have both been a substantial improvement over Young, had Young done the same things in Tampa as he is doing in Minnesota.
The Twins side of the deal is a little murkier, since it’s a rotation of 5. The Twins were also planning on losing two other starters this year, both higher in the rotation in Johan Santana and Carlos Silva. The Twins added Livan Hernandez as their new ace pitcher, and at the end of last season, Kevin Slowey was the higher rated of the two new prospects added to the Twins rotation at the beginning of the year, which means, effectively, Nick Blackburn was Garza’s replacement on the Twins’ roster. All of the statistics, except for wins, point to Blackburn being the better of the two pitchers this year. His ERA, ERA+, HR/inning pitched, walk to strikeout ratio, all that is in favor of Blackburn. Garza has wins, which are a reflection of the team improvement, and a slight edge in K/9 in his favor.
If we’re looking at the trade to see who won short term, it’s one thing to look at the players involved, but another to loook at the situations that were created. In this instance, even though, short term, it appears that Tampa were the winners in this trade, it’s hard to say that both teams weren’t improved with it.