Every Team’s Moneyball: Toronto Blue Jays: I Gotta Sell High, All The Time

Every day until Opening Day, Baseball Prospectus authors will preview two teams—one from the AL, one from the NL—identifying strategies those teams employ to gain an advantage. Today: the drafting philosophies of the Phillies and Blue Jays.

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TORONTO BLUE JAYS Team Audit | Player Cards | Depth Chart

PECOTA Team Projections
Record: 80-82
Runs Scored: 786
Runs Allowed: 796
AVG/OBP/SLG (TAv): .255/.329/.420 (.274)
Total WARP: 24.5 (1.4 pitching, 23.1 non-pitching, including 0.0 from pitchers)

When the Alex Anthopoulos era began in Toronto, the change of philosophy in the amateur draft was evident out of the gate. The Jays held seven of the first 80 picks in the 2010 draft—the first with Anthopoulos at the helm with his hand-picked director of amateur scouting Andrew Tinnish—and spent four of them on high school pitchers: Aaron Sanchez with the 34th overall pick, Noah Syndergaard with the 38th, Griffin Murphy with the 61st and Justin Nicolino with the 80th. By contrast, during J.P. Ricciardi’s tenure, Toronto had selected just four prep arms in the first 10 rounds of all eight drafts combined. Since 2010, the Blue Jays have taken 15 prep arms in the first two rounds of the draft; the most by any other team is six:

It’s not that the Blue Jays front office is going into draft day with a quota of high school pitchers to fill. But aggressively pursuing high-upside talent has been a point of emphasis for this regime even after Brian Parker replaced Tinnish as the director of amateur scouting in 2012 (Tinnish was promoted to assistant GM):

We’re looking for as much high ceiling talent as we can bring in. We’re looking for athletes who can impact the game both offensively and defensively and we’re looking for young arms that can pitch at the top of a rotation. In general terms, those are the kind guys we’re looking for and those are the kind of guys we’ve drafted over the last few years.

Maximizing talent at the top of recent drafts has come in all forms for Toronto. They’ve made calculated risks on signability, injuries, and profile concerns when drafting Jeff Hoffman (a potential first overall pick), D.J. Davis, Phil Bickford, Tyler Beede, Anthony Alford, Matt Smoral, Marcus Stroman, Daniel Norris, and Sean Reid-Foley, to name a few, but have opted for upside in all of these cases. The list goes on and several of these picks haven’t worked out for one reason or another, but such is the risk of investing in high-upside talent.

That also applies to the Latin America market, where the Jays have gone from essentially being non-players to one of the most aggressive spenders under Anthopoulos. Several signees have failed to develop but the Jays were rewarded with Franklin Barreto and a 2011 international class that features four prospects on this year’s Blue Jays top-ten list: Jairo Labourt, Roberto Osuna, Miguel Castro, and Alberto Tirado.

Anthopoulos’ emphasis on scouting and development has led to a horde of premium young talent entering the system during his tenure, but he’s also been savvy enough to recognize that the farm system is an asset through which he can upgrade the major-league roster. Trading prospects for established players isn’t a new strategy, but what stands out about Anthopoulos’ moves is that he’s sold high on several of his prospects before they’ve had the chance to sink or swim in the upper minors—specifically, Double-A or Triple-A, where success is more likely to translate to the majors.

Here are some of the notable trades from the Anthopoulos era that have involved trading away young talent for established major-league talent:

The levels of talent and upside traded away in these moves clearly vary, with the latter three deals significantly outweighing the first three in magnitude. But selling high on prospects with low-minors résumés like Barreto, Syndergaard, Nicolino, and Becerra stand out as the type of gambles that Anthopoulos has been willing to make to acquire major-league talent.

Lawrie and d’Arnaud were the centerpieces of their respective trades, but in both cases the Blue Jays were acquiring a cost-controlled player who had performed at a superstar level the year before. Anthopoulos may like a do-over on the Dickey deal, but at the time he was the best starting pitcher on the market and was owed just $9.5 million over the next two years. You rarely acquire players of that caliber without giving up at least one major-league-ready piece in return. Yet in both trades, the secondary player involved was a low-minors prospect with a high ceiling and a long way to go developmentally.

The trade with the Marlins obviously had a lot to do with picking up the contracts of the incoming players, but the fact remained that the two biggest prospects Anthopoulos parted with—Nicolino and Marisnick—had yet to prove themselves in the upper minors. Before Marisnick was traded, there were major concerns about whether he would be able to reach his offensive potential given his struggles in half a season at Double-A, but there was still enough to dream on that BP’s prospect team put a 60 OFP on him that offseason.

Even the smaller prospect-for-veteran moves the Jays have made involved parting with youngsters requiring significant development time before reaching the majors (with the exception of Collins).

The table below lists the minor leaguers traded away in these deals and the highest level they had reached at the time of the trade, with some notes and excerpts from the Transaction Analyses at the time. Not all of the guys traded away necessarily had the same high ceiling as a Syndergaard or Barreto but it’s clear that the trend has been to sell prospects that have long developmental journeys ahead of them (i.e. have yet to reach Double-A):

On the one hand, drafting high-ceiling talents and investing heavily internationally has rewarded Anthopoulos with a handful of players that are ready to make potential impacts on the big-league roster this season. Sanchez and Norris are expected to be in line for full-season debuts in the starting rotation and all signs are pointing to the club accelerating the timelines of Castro and Osuna to help stabilize an otherwise shaky bullpen.

However, this type of drafting and investment in Latin America has also provided Anthopoulos with the type of trade chips that other teams can dream on and often covet in prospect-for-veteran deals. It’s at least worth wondering whether the organization’s aggressive approach to the amateur markets has been made with some intent of using some of their high-ceiling prospects as trade chips to support the organization’s competitive window.

We’ve seen evidence that top-10 prospects who have been traded away over the past 25 years have fared worse than those who weren’t dealt, with the most reasonable explanation stemming from the information advantage front offices have about their own prospects compared to the rest of the league. If Toronto’s constant signing and selling of high-ceiling prospects is in fact a conscious effort, perhaps leveraging the information advantage is the driving motivation behind it.

The amount of information available on a high-school player or international player is limited relative to the type of polished college arm or hitter that the Blue Jays have avoided early in the draft. By investing heavily in these types of players the Blue Jays have not only acquired high-ceiling players but they’ve also acquired the right to access first-hand how they develop both on and off the field in those critical first years as professionals.

By hoarding so many high-ceiling prospects, it would follow that there would be a few that stick out internally as guys the organization feel less confident about relative to the industry consensus. This could have very well been the case when deciding whether to send Syndergaard or Sanchez to the Mets as the key secondary piece for Dickey.

Without access to Toronto’s internal rankings, this is speculation, and it’s impossible to know whether there is some conscious effort behind their constant draft-and-trade approach with high-ceiling prospects. It could be a mere coincidence, with Anthopoulos just taking advantage of the resources he’s accumulated on the farm. But at the very least, the pattern that has emerged over the past few years suggests that it could be a possibility.