Three-Team Trade Analysis - New Rules, New Champions, and a West Coast Murderers' Row

This past month, Steven Souza Jr., a veteran of six clubs and once a highly promising power-hitting outfielder, retired after parts of eight seasons in Major League baseball. While to most Souza is known for the great “What if?” that his career was, seeing the news reminded me of a curious fact about his career - he was involved in not one, but two consecutive three-team trades. While common in some other sports like basketball, these trades aren’t all that common in baseball, but I have always found them quite interesting. Beyond this, however, I had always felt like one team ended up better off than the other three in the deal, while one got the short end of the stick. So, this in mind, I figured to examine some of these deals and see if this was indeed the case. Let’s start off with the first Souza deal:

Rays get: Jake Bauers, Steven Souza Jr., Rene Rivera, Travis Ott, and Burch Smith
Nationals get: Trea Turner and Joe Ross
Padres get: Wil Myers, Will Middlebrooks, José Castillo, Gerardo Reyes
Red Sox get: Ryan Hanigan

Yes, actually this deal was something of a four-team deal, right away you can say Boston made out well here, as while Hanigan was fairly expensive for a backup catcher, he had a decent 2015 for the club, while Middlebrooks failed to rebound in San Diego and was let go og at the end of the season.

Turning to the three teams that were part of the original deal, however, the winner is even more clear - Washington. This deal is, of course, known nowadays as the Trea Turner deal, and the ripple effects of this deal were certainly massive thanks to Turner’s inclusion. The shortstop was ineligible to be traded in the offseason when this deal went through thanks to him not having spent the entire year since he was drafted with San Diego, meaning he was included in the deal as a player to be named. It was perhaps the worst-kept secret in baseball at the time that Turner was the PTBNL in this deal, and in 2015 the league closed this loophole via a collection of rule changes including one that made drafted players eligible to be traded following the World Series during the season in which they were selected. In the following seasons, several prospects changed hands thanks to this rule, the first of which being Logan Allen, a future Major Leaguer who was an 8th round pick of the Red Sox in 2015 and made his way to the Padres via the Craig Kimbrel deal. In fact, the Kimbrel deal is a testament to the change in philosophy that occurred in just one year within the Padres front office - one which returned the Padres to a state of rebuild that helped bring key contributors such as Fernando Tatis Jr. to the club, as well as helped the team amass top picks which they used on players such as MacKenzie Gore, C.J. Abrams, and Luis Campusano. Allen, for his part, was later dealt to Cleveland in another three team deal that netted the Padres Taylor Trammell, who was later dealt to Seattle in a lopsided deal that also saw the Mariners land future All-Star Ty France and fireballing reliever Andrés Muñoz. That didn’t work out too well for the Padres, but I think it is a curious thing to note nevertheless.

It is hard to analyze how the Turner deal in specific altered San Diego’s trajectory, though it’s not hard to argue that Myers’s injury hurt San Diego’s chances of contending in 2015, and with key prospects in Turner, Bauers, and Ross gone, as well as knowing that they had Myers for several more years, it made sense for San Diego to try and retool to at least recoup some of their prospect depth. This said, it could be argued that perhaps the fact that San Diego dealt away some elite prospect talent in an ill-advised attempt to rebuild, this trade perhaps set them on a path towards a more realistic attempt at a World Series in the 2020’s.
Now turning back to Washington, the club having won a World Series with both Turner and Ross in the fold at the time certainly helps validate their return, but Turner being a key contributor on the club, as well as over the length of his tenure, makes this a home run for them. Turner hit .300/.356/.486 over the length of his Nats tenure while also providing speed on the basepaths. The icing on the cake of the Turner acquisition is that he later was moved to the Dodgers with Max Scherzer in a package that netted Washington an elite young battery for their future in Josiah Gray and Keibert Ruiz. All in all, this deal turned out brilliantly for Washington. Washington also got Ross in the deal, and while he struggled with injuries during his tenure, he has still managed decent results over parts of six seasons with the club.

Now turning back to Souza, he is part of why this deal was good for Washington and not as much so for Tampa Bay. He did end up being a constant power threat over three seasons for Tampa, but the Rays would probably have been better off getting Turner instead. Beyond Souza, they got nothing from Smith before he was made a Rule Five pick by the Mets, and Bauers and Rivera both struggled in the Majors. However, Souza and Bauers were eventually dealt in their own three-team deals. The former deal was as follows:

Rays get: Nick Solak, Anthony Banda, Colin Poche, and Sam McWilliams
Diamondbacks get: Steven Souza Jr. and Taylor Widener
Yankees get: Brandon Drury

Already we see an aspect of delayed gratification from the original deal. Souza would end up being limited to just 72 contests with Arizona, while the club has seen Colin Poche blossom into a key piece of the club’s bullpen in 2022. Tampa also turned Solak into Pete Fairbanks, who has also been a contributor in the club’s bullpen. The deal looks like it was a small win for Arizona, who got some production out of Souza before his injury and still has Widener while not giving up a whole lot. The Yankees, meanwhile, probably got the short end of the stick here, even if Solak and Widener have not done a whole lot in the Majors. Drury looked like a big get at the time, but injury issues waylaid his career. However, they did eventually flip him in a deal that got them J.A. Happ, though it’s possible he could have been easily replaced in that deal.

In terms of the Bauers deal, it shook out as such:

Rays get: Yandy Díaz and Cole Sulser (-$5 million)
Indians get: Carlos Santana, Jake Bauers, and $6 million
Mariners get: Edwin Encarnacion, and 2019 Comp-B draft pick (#76) (Seattle selected Isaiah Campbell) (-$1 million)

It is actually hard to analyze this trade at this time due to it’s recency and the fact that a comp pick was involved (which affects how a team drafts, and of course you have to consider the drafted player’s performance), but we can reasonably analyze this deal from Tampa Bay’s perspective, as they weren’t involved in the pick transaction. Bauers did basically nothing for Cleveland and Sulser only threw 7.1 innings for Tampa Bay before being lost on waivers, making this deal look like the club getting Díaz for about $5 million (which they sent to Seattle). While Tampa Bay may be frugal, getting Díaz for just $5 million is a titanic steal. Díaz, for his part, is now in his fourth season in Tampa and is controllable through 2024. Having eventually gotten Díaz (a player who has fit the club’s contending window and payroll constraints well) out of the Turner deal certainly makes it look a lot better in hindsight, making it look like missing out on Turner wasn’t a horrible mistake after all for the Rays. In essence, Tampa’s total haul in the original deal, after payment of $5 million to Seattle, is as follows:

Rays get: Yandy Díaz, three seasons of Steven Souza Jr., Pete Fairbanks, Colin Poche, and some other odds and ends (games from Bauers, Sulser, and Banda, as well as Rule Five compensation from the Mets for Smith)

Postscript: In between having originally written this piece and its publishing, the effects of San Diego’s second reboot have continued to have profound impacts that bear mentioning. Beyond the curious fact that Brandon Drury, since having rejuvenated himself, has now found himself a member of the Padres, Padres president A. J. Preller has pulled off another shocker - the Juan Soto deal, a trade that may change the trajectory of both the Padres and the Nationals (once more finding themself getting some premier young talent from the Padres), as well as the landscape of baseball as a whole. Once again though, is San Diego in this position of they don’t fail so royally in 2015, or does Washington’s lack of a championship see Stephen Strasburg fail to land a massive new deal from Washington, one which has since complicated their financial picture and dissuaded Washington from making Soto a bigger deal? Who truly knows?