I traded Jarred Kelenic yesterday. I hadn’t been planning to, but when the offer hit my inbox I realized it was the cure for what ailed me. It was a moment of clarity in an unclear situation, and I am now at peace.
The deal came out of nowhere, and I would have never considered trading the consensus-ish No. 2 prospect in baseball, to improve my team, to be an option as of April, but the world still spins. In the meantime, I first traded some critical depth to acquire Wander Franco, and would do it again, but it left the cupboard a little bare. Second, Kelenic had a disastrous showing in Major League Baseball, and his perceived value has rightly taken a hit, no matter how young he is. I want to compete starting next year and I’m not sure that timeline fits Kelenic’s. All of that said, he’s a better option, in theory, that just about anybody else, even for next year. It’s just not the absolute certainty it was on April Fools Day.
By yesterday there was room to trade him, however small, even if I didn’t see it… and my team managed to thread through that small space pretty smoothly, all things considered. Playing the dynasty baseball market is about process over results during a rebuild, and while I am sick of rebuilding, it’s a “night is darkest before the dawn” scenario. I am very close to competing largely on the backs of several pitchers who are injured right now but expected to start next year and a few key offensive prospects who have debuted or are expected to in the near future.
To be fair, that describes Kelenic pretty well. I drafted him seventh overall three years ago and waited for his debut like:
And then all those MLB failures happened, and I got Franco, and I was stuck. I knew the only way out was a trade, so I tried to get one more offensive star by offering this, that and the other and got rejections across the board, some of which didn’t make any damn sense except for Bryan’s Law of Prospects, which is that the fewer of them you have, the more you’re likely to overvalue them out of a combination of novelty, pride and stubbornness. Everyone wants to run the One Red Paperclip gambit with their players, but just as often you’d be better off trading your star prospect for a whole bunch of paperclips, because your star prospect may not actually be any good. Which is what I feared might be happening here!
That’s not a thought I had about Kelenic before his 0-43 stretch, though I was trolled as he was promoted by Wack-sel Foley here that there was a chance he would bust, and I (defensively, for I really hadn’t considered it!) said it seemed very unlikely. Let me tell you something: 0-43 changes a person, as does the fact that whatever success Kelenic is having down in Tacoma is happening in the former Pacific Coast League, and therefore every game is 15-7 and hard to gauge relative to MLB environments. Kelenic’s power and speed are not at issue, but his contact skills may have limitations unbecoming a No. 1 prospect.
Which is fine for him! He’s 21. He will be an MLB regular, maybe even an MVP-level player. I thought Bryce Harper was a good comp before Kelenic debuted, and maybe he is, but Harper hit .270/.340/.477 in his age 19 season. They may both have 80-grade redass anger issues, but Harper is the one who has honed them to actually hit the baseball to this point. It’s a small sample size, but Kelenic’s debut meant that, for the first time since I drafted him, I wasn’t afraid to take an escape route when it was offered to me.
And there’s the key: It was offered to me. For every 15 offers you get and reject out of hand, there’s 1 that lands and you feel its value spread over you, like someone doing the fake egg break on your head. I had been trying to pry Vidal Brujan off another owner because of his speed and proximity to the majors, and the other owner wanted far more than I was willing to give for him. The talks died until yesterday, when I got a message that was unlike anything we’d discussed before: “Brujan + Dominguez + ? for Kelenic?”
For about a hundred reasons, this appealed to me. I’d get an everyday player to replace Kelenic’s presumed spot in my lineup for 2022 (Brujan), a player who could easily be No. 1 in a few years (Dominguez) and a player of my choosing (Peyton Burdick, who I flipped for Nick Madrigal). I could continue the churn with Dominguez and Burdick and have a player, in Brujan, whose all around talent and presumed multi-position eligibility will help me keep the roster tight and, in the event he and Franco become the next Kenny Lofton and Roberto Alomar, give me both halves of a potential dynamic equation.
Long story short: Change is good, the tree of liberty must be watered, 0-43 is insanely bad but probably not definitive, it is scary though, also bullying works and, most importantly, eventually if you have the top guys someone will come to you the bag. You must be patient. I hated it and I don’t have to do it any more, because I’m free. My prospects are not.