The Cheese Review

We started off the year with high hopes. *This* year we had the horses. It was all going to come together. Spring training is like that – it gets your hopes up. And then the season starts, and reality… well, you know what reality does.

Along the way we made a lot of decisions. This writing is an attempt to review those decisions with the idea of actually learning from them. I am critical of various organizations (ahem) when they are not able to do this – I should set a better example.

March 29: Traded Jean Segura and $250,000 to Old Detroit for Eddie Butler.  I knew at the time this was risky, but I figured that the risk was minimal. The trade was a disaster, of course, but it didn’t cost me a lot and Segura didn’t do much for Ron. The reason I mention it here is that Butler had three strikes against him that I need to remember: 1) he had great potential, but a lousy track record; 2) he was a Rocky, and there’s a well-known rule about drafting Rocky pitchers (don’t); and 3) he was a Wolverine. OD’s trades with the Cheese have never worked out well for the Cheese, and we need to remember that. It’s not just coincidence. Moral: Wolverines are known to be crafty.

Free Agent Draft: drafted Arquimedes Caminero. I drafted Caminero for two reasons. First, his spring training performance kept my rookie draft pitcher (Holdzkom) off the Pittsburgh MLB team. Second, I like his name – it has good metricity (I just invented that word!). ARK-ih-MEED-ees-CAM-in-ERR-oh. That’s a whole line of poetry right there! As you might already be thinking, these are not the best reasons to draft someone. His 2015 performance for the Cheese was meh. As a relief pitcher, he didn’t really do much for us. Moral: don’t draft relief pitchers unless you have a really good reason.

Drafted Andrew Miller, Corey Knebel, and Chasen Shreve. I can’t believe I drafted three more relief pitchers. This is stupid for two reasons: 1) they don’t contribute enough innings to help you much, and 2) their performance is almost entirely unpredictable. Of these three drafts, the only one that was even a little defensible was Andrew Miller. And I drafted him at the end of 2014. Moral: see Arquimedes Caminero. I repent me of relief pitchers.

May 7: Traded Jason Heyward to Flint Hill for Drew Hutchison. It’s a good thing we’re not doing awards this year, because this one would certainly win the prize for the most one-sided trade. With Heyward in the outfield, the Tornadoes finished well ahead of the Cheese this year. Hutchison was such a stinky cheese, he was demoted to the minors. It didn’t help. What can we learn from this? I don’t know. Heyward had been underperforming for years. Hutch had great forecasts last spring. Should we have foreseen these outcomes? No moral.

Rookie Draft: Arismendy Alcantara. I used my pre-emption on this guy, in the second round, and found out (immediately!) what a dumb move that was. I still thought you were all wrong: AA was gonna be a star! Well – I like my crow medium rare, please, with ketchup. Moral: save your pre-emption for somebody who is good.

Rookie Draft: Jorge Soler. I had to choose between Joc Pederson and this guy, and I went with Soler based on his MLB stats from 2014. Flint Hill got Pederson, and for the first half of the season it looked like I made the wrong choice. Now, Pederson’s not looking so good. But the story’s not over. Moral: be patient with first-rounders (see Bogaerts, Xander). We both made good picks, I think. No regrets.

March 29: Traded John Jaso for Ben Zobrist. July 29: Traded Ben Zobrist for Sean Manaea and Aaron Brooks. Zobrist was good, not great, for the Cheese (like most Cheese, he missed a lot of games due to injury) and he became expendable when we drafted Kris Bryant. Yes, we could have played both of them. But I got a good prospect pitcher on a rookie contract without having to compete for him. Moral: snag good prospects by trade whenever you can.

May Free Agent Draft: Kris Bryant. I’ve already told the story about how this happened. I went for Peshastin’s pump fake. Not my fault – I never had the body to play basketball. But how did it turn out? Bryant, of course, had a rookie-of-the-year caliber season and I really enjoyed having him on my team. But he cost the Cheese too much money, and when mid-season injuries decimated the team his performance was not enough to make up the difference. Even worse, the poverty-stricken Cheese were (in later drafts) unable to bid high enough for the players we needed, like Colabello and Correa. Moral: don’t spend all your money too early. Be like Haviland. Be like Pittsburgh. They save up for end-of-year bargains. Look where they finish!

August Free Agent Draft: retooling for next year. Not content with a mere lament, we shed a lot of whey and picked up some solid curds for a tasty Cheese future. Taking advantage of a couple of MLB trade deadline transactions, we got rid of Dan Haren, Chi Chi Gonzales, John Holdzkom, Yunel Escobar, Kevin Plawecki, and Ben Zobrist. The new Cheese – all future stars – are Dylan Bundy, Alex Cobb (returned from exile), and Jose Peraza. All cheap. We also picked up a couple of expensive veterans to fill in for injured Cheese: Gerardo Parra and Mike Leake. Neither one worked out very well. In both picks I suffered from “recency bias,” the tendency to value recent stats over long-term performance. Fortunately both of them were set to become free agents so I could drop them with little risk when the season ended. Moral: players tend to play about as well as they always have – so don’t be fooled by late hot streaks. There are exceptions (see Altuve, Jose).