No, The Phillies Shouldn’t Even Consider Trading For Mike Trout

PHILADELPHIA, PA -- With the incipient decline of his Los Angeles Angels, his already legendary friendship with Eagles quarterback Carson Wentz, and his roots in the Philadelphia area, there has been no end to the speculation that Mike Trout could someday become a Phillie.

Analysts, however, have inexplicably confused this future possibility with a drive to trade for Trout, in the here and now.

Perhaps it comes from an unfamiliarity with the nuances of trading for superstars, and basic Phillies history.

In 2015, when the Phillies traded away Cole Hamels, one of baseball’s best starting pitchers, they received what anyone would consider a hefty prospect package from the Texas Rangers in return. Three of the players they received, Jorge Alfaro, Nick Williams, and Jake Thompson, were all consensus top-100 prospects in baseball at that time. And they also landed starting pitcher Jerad Eickhoff, who, thus far, has proven to be the most valuable of them all.

When the Yankees traded away high-powered reliever Aroldis Chapman last summer to the eventual world champion Cubs, he also commanded a high price: two top 100 prospects in Billy McKinney and Gleyber Torres, in addition to major league reliever Adam Warren and another minor leaguer, Rashad Crawford.

And how about when the rebuilding Brewers shipped All-Star catcher Jonathan Lucroy to the Rangers at the trade deadline last summer? They received two top 100 prospects in return, including five-tool outfielder Lewis Brinson and potential future ace Luis Ortiz.

Hamels, Chapman, and Lucroy are just three recent examples of some of the league’s best players and the high price they fetch from teams contending for a championship. All three are among the best in the league at their position - and Chapman is perhaps the best - so when it’s said that Trout is probably worth more than the three of them combined, the full meaning of that statement should be understood.

There is nothing that Trout can't do, and perhaps the main thing separating him from Babe Ruth is that the Angels don't have Trout pitch. He hits for power, he steals bases, he hits for a high average, he's a stellar defender, and he has a great arm. He's consistently been the best player in baseball for several years now, and shows no signs of slowing down.

But it’s not Trout’s greatness that is doubted by Philadelphia sports writers and radio hosts demanding a trade. Instead, they’re under the collective delusion that the Phillies - or just about any team, really - has the players that would make such a trade worthwhile for the Angels.

Even if the Angels valued Trout no more than the the Phillies valued Hamels, for example, that would mean the Phillies would be giving up something like J.P. Crawford, Mickey Moniak, Jorge Alfaro, Aaron Nola, and Zach Eflin. And Trout, a perennial All-Star at age 25, is worth much more than Hamels was two years ago. So those five players are just a start, really.

The Phillies could conceivably offer the upper tier of talent in their entire farm system, plus a few young position players, and the Angels still wouldn’t be getting a return even close to what Trout is worth, when you look at what other teams have received for their own superstars, who are but a shadow of the league's greatest player.

Perhaps even more importantly, even if the Angels made a mistake and accepted the Phillies farm system in return for Trout, it wouldn’t be the right move for the Phillies, either.

The Phillies have been consistently and painstakingly building a franchise of talent, with highly touted players at every level from the majors to single-A, in much the same way that the Cubs did for years leading up to their championship last fall. The Phillies aren’t trying to work their way back up to contention for just a year or two. They’re aiming to build a team that will contend every year for an extended period of time. Flushing away everything they’ve done in the past two years for Trout would be a huge mistake. As Stephen Silver at Comcast SportsNet noted, “a trade of all their prospects for Mike Trout right now wouldn't be a Matt Klentak move at all -- it would be a Ruben Amaro Jr. move.”

Teams that try to build a contender on the fly, via a series of rash trades, do not have history on their side. Look at the Oakland Athletics, and their miserable 2014 deal which accelerated the Cubs timeline: a few months of Jeff Samardzija and Jason Hammel for Addison Russell and Billy McKinney. The A’s lost those pitchers at the end of the year to free agency. The Cubs resigned Samardzija and called up Russell the next season, en route to winning 97 games. Or how about the Padres, who went whole hog to get players like Craig Kimbrel, James Shields, and Justin Upton, before floundering and ultimately dealing away all three.

Both the A’s and the Padres, recovering from their blunders, are now among the worst teams in baseball. Both lacked the strong core that teams like the Cubs, Red Sox, and Dodgers have this year. It’s the same kind of core that propelled the Phillies run from 2007-2011. And it’s precisely the core they’re trying to build right now.

But the biggest piece of flawed logic in this sudden scramble to trade for Trout is the fact that he will be a free agent in 2020. The Phillies will be one of the few teams with the financial might to court him then. And he’ll be attracted to Philadelphia for all the same reasons in three years that he would be today.

Until then, there will be no shortage of expensive superstars on which the Phillies should spend money, not players. The free agent class at the end of the 2018 season will be legendary, with other young franchise talents like Manny Machado, Bryce Harper, and Matt Harvey becoming available. Those players, and others, could help build something monumental in Philadelphia. But not if the foundation is wiped out in its nascent stage.

Image courtesy Keith Allison from Hanover, MD, USA, via Commons