Trading For Manny Machado Makes Little Sense For Phillies

PHILADELPHIA, PA — With Manny Machado and the Orioles in town this week, the trade deadline approaching, and the Phillies only getting hotter, the trade rumor mill has been on fire. The notion of the star infielder coming to Philadelphia via trade is, however, mostly smoke. As it should be.

Machado, a free agent at the end of this year, has been connected to the Phillies for years, as the front office knew him in Baltimore and Philly is one of the few places with the bankroll to afford his inevitably gargantuan forthcoming contract.

But with the Phillies now within a game of the Braves for first place, and firmly holding the second Wild Card slot by a game, the demand to trade for Machado now has grown louder and louder.

Let's forget about all of the most obvious arguments against this, arguments already repeated ad infinitum. Like how the team won't have to lose valuable prospects if they just wait two months to sign him. Or how trading for him now is no guarantee that he will sign here when the season is over. Or how it seems incredibly unlikely that he would sign an extension after being traded here and pass up a chance to test the free agent waters. All those points were salient on March 29 and they remain so on July 6. The Phillies 47-37 record doesn't change any of that.

Yet beyond the obvious, there are several other reasons a Machado trade would not "be bold" for the Phillies. It would be knee-jerk and foolish.

To begin with, a major prospect dump for a two month rental is something the 1993 Phillies, or the 2011 Phillies could justify doing, in probably their final or at least waning years of contention. The 2018 Phillies are at the very beginning of their run.

Secondly, Machado is hellbent on only playing shortstop, where he's actually not playing better than Scott Kingery this year. Using the most basic fielding metric - fielding percentage - Machado sits at .980, while Kingery is at .984. Kingery's made three - costly but also exaggerated - errors, while Machado's made seven. Machado is a two-time Gold Glove winner, but that's as a third baseman, where he doesn't want to play. Even if you want to argue against the stats and say Machado will adjust at short moving forward, it's pretty hard to say he's a defensive improvement over J.P. Crawford, who is borderline elite with the glove. The Phillies defensive issues have been much ballyhooed this year. And if you bring in Machado, where will Crawford, who improves the defense anywhere, play? Do you really bench both Franco and Kingery in order to play Crawford at third and Machado at short? And even if that's acceptable, if you're going to make a deal at the deadline, do you really want it to be one that doesn't improve a greater weakness? Is the improvement of an average part of the team (left infield offense) more important than complicating and possibly exacerbating an ongoing issue (left infield defense)?

Much more important, though, is that the left side of the infield is not the most glaring hole on the Phillies roster. That honor goes to the bullpen, where help can be purchased for a fraction of the prospect cost that someone like Machado or even Mike Moustakas or Josh Donaldson would demand. Sterling relievers like Kirby Yates and Brad Hand of the Padres, or Kyle Barraclough and Brad Ziegler of the Marlins, or Jeurys Familia of the Mets, or Zach Britton and Darren O'Day of the Orioles, could all be good package targets. Many of them would improve the team for multiple years, not just two months. These are the type of shrewd and calculated moves that Brian Cashman has made over the past several years to put the Yankees on top of the world right now.

And it's not even just about need, or about what's cheaper. If advancing in the playoffs is your goal, an elite bullpen is far more valuable than an upgrade on the left side of the infield. Three recent examples come to mind: the Cubs winning the World Series after acquiring Aroldis Chapman in July 2016, the Indians advancing to the World Series after getting Andrew Miller in 2016, and most pertinently, the underdog Yankees nearly beating the Astros in last year's ALCS after landing Tommy Kahnle and David Robertson. They might not have gotten out of the Wild Card game without those two.

Even the Astros, who won the World Series last year, couldn't have done it without the Justin Verlander acquisition, which allowed them to shift starters Lance McCullers and Charlie Morton to the bullpen. They were, arguably, the deciding factors in the World Series, pitching 6.1 innings of one run ball in Game 7 between them.

All this goes out the window, of course, if the Phillies can somehow land Machado this year without paying a high prospect cost. But given how many teams want him, it seems unlikely they could swing a deal without taking a major blow to their future.

Finally, another popular pro-Machado trade argument is that he is needed to make the team a World Series contender. Take another hard look at the National League standings. The Phillies are not merely competing in their division. They are only three games behind the Brewers, who they recently took a series from in Milwaukee, for the league lead. No team in the National League has done anything to suggest the Phillies can't beat them in a playoff series. The Phillies are already contenders to go to the World Series.

And that's with Franco and Kingery.

If you want the Phillies to "be bold," which has become manager Gabe Kapler's signature phrase, then they should behave like the World Series contender they already are. Before anything else, make the bullpen as elite as possible.

After all, the boldest move of all might be to have faith in the guys that have brought you this far already.

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