As you may have heard (either out in the mean streets of the World Wide Web, or even earlier today here at The Platoon Advantage), the Diamonbacks, Reds, and Indians made a sweet three-team deal. The major pieces are Shin-Soo Choo and Jason Donald heading to Cincinnati, prospect Didi Gregorious, reliever Tony Sipp, and huge bust first baseman Lars Anderson off to Arizona, while wunderkind Trevor Bauer is the main return for Cleveland.

The biggest surprise in this trade, if there was one, was that Bauer would travel from Arizona to Cleveland. Despite his name being bandied about in trade rumors (we'll get to this later), Bauer is a top pitching prospect. Usually that brings back quite a substantial return in a trade, like a Denard Span or a Carlos Beltran. What's the deal here?

Here's a quick primer on Trevor Bauer: Bauer was the No. 3 overall pick in the 2011 Rule 4 Draft out of UCLA. He was the No. 3 pick because he was a boss at UCLA, and in each minor-league stop in 2011 and 2012, he was appropriately boss-like. Bauer held a strikeout percentage of 28% or better at each stop in his minor-league trek, and by the time he was done with Triple-A in 2012, Bauer had reduced his most glaring weakness -- bases on balls -- down to a 10.1% walk rate. If you add all this up, factor in his age (he's going into his age-22 season), and divide that by his solid mechanics ... well, what you get is a top-flight pitching prospect. If Bauer isn't one of the top 20 pitching prospects in the game, he'd be awfully close.

So why would the Diamondbacks trade him for a shortstop who can't hit, a reliever who's no good, and a failed first base prospect?

I'm sure I won't be the only person writing this piece, and I may not be the only TPAer writing this piece, and I may not even be the only TPAer writing this piece for TPA, but here I go anyway: can we view the three-sided Shin-Soo Choo/Trevor Bauer trade in a way that makes it look not-ridiculous for Arizona?

Let's start with the facts:

Indians get: Bauer, Stubbs, Shaw, Albers. D-backs get: Gregorius, Sipp, Lars Anderson. Reds get: Choo, Donald. Whoa.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) December 12, 2012

Thanks, Jeff!

To be clear on who all of those players are:

Trevor Bauer is a very top pitching prospect who was taken third overall in the 2011 draft, then signed a major-league contract and made a brief but shitty debut this year, with 16 1/3 innings of six-plus ERA ball. Still, his strikeout rates in the minors have been off the chain and his walks, while certainly the weak point in his game, aren't "good lord he has no idea where the ball is going" bad.

Drew Stubbs is a 28-year-old center fielder who just suffered through a miserable, well-below-replacement-level season for the Reds. He had a very good year in 2010, fell off to below average in 2011, and then did what he did in 2012. He's now arbitration-eligible, though obviously his platform season being what it was means he can't demand very much.

Bryan Shaw is a 25-year-old reliever who was solid in 2011 but saw a rise in his walks and a fall in whiffs in 2012, dropping him to "not really rosterable" levels. He's still in the minimum-salary stage of things.

Matt Albers is a 30-year-old reliever whose sterling ERA masked enormous amounts of ball-in-play luck in 2012. He's a groundballer, arbitration-eligible, swings lefty for some reason (he throws right), and has accumulated 0.1 WARP in 442 1/3 big-league innings. HEY HEY HEY.

Didi Gregorius is a 23-year-old Dutch shortstop whose real name is apparently "Mariekson." He's actually from the Netherlands. "Dutch shortstop" isn't a type of thing I just made up for you right now. To the extent that numbers matter for a European minor-leaguer, his do not pop. Kevin Goldstein had him as a three-star prospect before 2012, though.

Tony Sipp is a 29-year-old lefty reliever with extreme flyball tendencies and remarkable BABIP-suppression. It's too early (220 1/3 innings in four years) to say that such suppression is a skill, but that's always the case with relievers. It should also be noted that he gives up quite a few homers, which suppresses BABIP artificially -- they're hard-hit balls that are not counted in either the numerator or denominator of BABIP. This is why Colin Wyers prefers BACON (batting average on contact). Sipp is arbitration-eligible for the first time.

Lars Anderson is a minor-league first baseman without enough power who is, at 25, already in his third organization. He knocked the shit out of the ball in a quarter-season at Portland in 2008 (.316/.438/.526, 163 PA) but has since pretty much only walked, keeping his OBP respectable and not impressing any other way.

Shin-Soo Choo is a right-fielder who will be playing center in Cincinnati in his age-30 season, his third arbitration year. He peaked in 2008 through 2010 (with his total value metrics in 2008 not being as impressive because he missed almost half the season with an elbow injury), had a bad and injury-ridden 2011, and came back with a very nice 2012 that didn't come particularly close to replicating the aforementioned peak. He can probably be an above-average hitter for center and a bad defender, assuming the position doesn't wear him down or flat-out injure him.

Jason Donald is 28, plays 2/3 of the positions (no right field, catcher, or first in 2012) and only has 603 career PA in three years to judge his hitting. If the .254 total TAv he's put up in that season-equivalent is representative of his true talent, then he'd be an average player as a starter and an above-average one as a reserve. He still makes the minimum salary.

Ok? So Arizona gave up an excellent pitching prospect and two fungible relievers to get a decent shortstop prospect, a reliever who might give up three homers per nine in the Arizona air, and a washout first baseman who certainly will not get past Paul Goldschmidt. Which means that what the deal really comes down to is Bauer for Gregorius, because the rest of the guys are just needle-nudgers, not needle-movers.

Which kinda makes things hard. I didn't realize earlier that the Diamondbacks really just got Gregorius back for Bauer. But let's do this anyway.

Trevor Bauer is less than one year younger than Gregorius, so this isn't a case where Gregorius is some ancient "prospect" who's like 26 and still not made it. He is young and has development and upside left, just as much as Bauer does.

As to the country of origin, which one might imagine could be an issue, yes, Bauer came up playing high school and travel ball in the baseball hotbed of southern California, dominated at UCLA, and was on the collegiate national team. He pitched in the College World Series. But Gregorius has been playing in the United States for five years now. He's got 1909 minor-league plate appearances, 428 games at shortstop. He's been working and holding his own against high-level competition, in other words.

This brings us to the only place where I think we can find a rationale for doing a deal like this. There have been whispers (or more?) that the Arizonans were unhappy with Bauer's intransigence on his warmup and workout routines. He's fanatical about his mechanics and pitching and somewhat legendary for his long-toss. And he does this on his last warmup pitch of an inning. I can't go so far as to say that Bauer might increase his likelihood of injury by doing things that the MLB mainstream frowns on, but we can ask whether his marriage to his own routine signals something about his inability or lack of desire to make adjustments. The very best 20-year-olds in the world get knocked around by the hitters at the top of the chain if they don't learn how to adjust to the gameplans and skills of major-league hitters. If the Diamondbacks asked Bauer to do X and Y and he balked, esp. if X and Y are not just warmup techniques but in fact approaches to pitching itself, well, you can see how a front office with probably 1000 years of baseball experience might think that Bauer's bust potential is righteously high such that they'd be willing to trade him for six years of a hopefully (maybe even probably?) league average shortstop even though everyone had visions of a sugarplum ace dancing in their heads during the 2011 draft.

So that's the argument. Is this a thing you buy?

Just as parents today must be careful not to coddle their children too much, baseball fans must avoid coveting their favorite prospects. This tendency to prospect overvaluation makes sense, though. After finally learning that signing pricey and mediocre free agents and ignoring the perfectly apt replacements in the minors was the wrong way to go about things, we all got wise, fans and professionals alike. Even casual baseball fans have started scouring top 30 prospect lists and joined keeper leagues. But we may have gone to far. After the Royals traded away their upper farm system to the Royals over the weekend, the online reaction was swift and fierce, like a Viking warrior's response to someone drinking his mead. Some were calling it the worst trade in modern memory and the mood was one of disbelief, not believing that the Royals could trade away so much future value without at least some heavy hypnotic suggestion from Andrew Friedman. And sure, maybe Dayton Moore is a fool or he was selfishly making a last gasp attempt at keeping his job, but on the other hand, the Royals have had one pitcher throw 200 innings over the last three years. So perhaps there was some sense to the deal, too. 

1. Daisuke Matsuzaka
2. Alex Gordon
3. Delmon Young
4. Phil Hughes
5. Homer Bailey
6. Cameron Maybin
7. Evan Longoria
8. Brandon Wood
9. Justin Upton
10. Andrew Miller

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I went on a cruise. I came back alive. Here, then, are five supposedly fun things baseball teams should never do again.

1. Sign Michael Young to a $16 million per year, five-year deal after his age-29 season that doesn't actually kick in until he's 32. It's supposedly fun because Young was a nice 3.5- to 4.5-win player from 2005 to 2008. He followed that up with solid years in 2009 and 2011 and a decent one, all things considered, in 2010, but he cratered to literally-less-than-worthless status last year and the Rangers have to be thankful that the Phillies were willing to take him off their hands.

Using the Baseball Prospectus version of WAR(P), Young has been worth 5.6 wins above replacement over the first four years of the extension, for which he's been paid $64 million. There is simply no dollars-per-win ratio that justifies that. Don't sign Michael Young to big deals.

2. Build a stadium with public money. Just stop.

3. Let your general manager get to the point where he feels like he has to make win-now moves with a team that had 72 victories the prior year. I'm not going to flat-out blast Dayton Moore for his trade of Wil Myers plus other goodies for James Shields and Wade Davis, mainly because Shields is really quite good and Davis can be useful, and Myers, good as he probably is, is no lock to be great. The move might even be defensible as a win-now move ... except that the Royals rotation is now Shields-Guthrie-Santana-Davis-Chen. That's Ervin Santana, who the Royals are basically praying bounces back from a horrendous 2012, and Bruce Chen, who the Royals are ... well, no, there's no point even praying.

Will the team be better in 2014 with Shields-Guthrie-Davis along with Felipe Paulino and Danny Duffy, both back at that point from surgery, with John Lamb and Chris Dwyer also possibilities? Sure. And isn't a farm system not only for bringing players up to the majors but also for trading to acquire major leaguers? Sure.

But does this seem like a move being made a year early? Yes. Even supposing that the Royals were a .500 team that got unlucky last year, they're still left trying to add six or eight or ten wins to that talent to make a playoff team. That's a lot to ask in one off-season.

Though note that you'll never catch me telling Dayton Moore to his face that I think this was a panicked win-now move to save his job. Hell no.

4. Try to take Sandy Rosario from the Red Sox. Sounds cool, right? He's got good stuff and if he pulls it together he could end up being a middle reliever of some utility. So the A's did just that, acquiring the reliever in a trade with the Red Sox for a player to be named later (who turned out to be Graham Godfrey, about whom don't get me started because it'll probably just get me in trouble with his fiancee on Twitter). A few days later, Oakland acquired Chris Resop in a trade. They needed to clear room on the 40-man for him and designated the most obvious choice for assignment: Sandy Rosario. Rosario was promptly claimed by the Red Sox.

The lesson: don't you dare touch Sandy Rosario. The Red Sox will extract a possibly useful relief pitcher from you for doing so and end up with Rosario back on their team anyway.

5. I'm cheating, but I wanted to get to five since that's what I promised above and I'd hate to disappoint you, so I'm going to do one that's not a team thing -- arguing your father's Hall of Fame case sounds like a great idea. You're educated, you're well on your way to a PhD, you can put words together to form a sentence ... and you can make jokes about "VORP, GORP, SCHLORP, and THUNDERCORK" that imply that you've never actually read a baseball article because if you had, you'd realize how hackneyed and ridiculous you sound.

Dale Murphy's kid isn't even making a stupid point (which basically is that Murphy's good character should count to boost him in just as much as someone's bad character should keep them out), but his entire lengthy argument is undermined because he felt the need to go for a cheap joke rather than simply saying "the stats, especially the advanced ones, don't stack my dad up with the very best who've ever played, but there's more to the Hall of Fame than playing record." See how easy that was?

In the middle of the Winter Meetings, Major League Baseball released their annual jobs report, proudly touting the league's year-in, year-out steady job rate for their highly skilled and athletic workforce. Said an unnamed baseball rep, "The league is happy to say that, despite upheaval and uncertainty in almost every other job market, Major League Baseball has seen no loss in on-field jobs since 1994. Every single 25 man active roster is at 100% capacity. We remain committed to hiring American and International ballplayers that make our brand of Sport like no other." 

Every year, one of my favorite parts of the Hot Stove season is watching the reports roll out on various "untouchable" players. Whether these are reports from industry sources, or even the GMs themselves, it's always entertaining to hear about how highly a team values one of their own players, especially when that kind of reasoning is patently ridiculous. 

In 2011, the Cubs' general manager at the time, Jim Hendry, famously said that Jeff Baker was untouchable. Uh-uh. You can't have him. I imagine conversations with Hendry went something like this: "So what you're saying is, even if we offered Mike Trout AND Jered Weaver, you still won't trade Jeff to us. Okay, fine."

(For what it is worth, Jeff Baker is currently an unsigned free agent, and has produced a line of .266/.316/.428 over his career. Jim Hendry is currently a special assistant to Brian Cashman, GM of a team without a third baseman. Expect Baker to be starting for the Yankees on Opening Day.)

Anyways, here are some of my favorites from this year, so far ... starting with the most recent impetus for this article. Footnotes at the bottom.

• Bobby Parnell ("virtually untouchable") *
• Billy Butler ("close to untouchable")
• Alcides Escobar AND Salvador Perez ("the only untouchable Royals") **
• Will Middlebrooks ("consider[ed] to be untouchable")
• Dylan Bundy ("likely more untouchable than any other prospect in baseball")
• Danny Hultzen AND Taijuan Walker ("likely untouchable") ***
• Mystery Phillies ("there are a few untouchables in the organization")
• Andrelton Simmons ("I don't think anyone is untouchable, but I think he would be...") ****
• Not Chris Tillman ("I wouldn't consider Tillman to be untouchable")

Please do us all a favor and report on any untouchables that might appear in your Twitter feeds or in any reports you read.

Footnotes:

* - I understand this to mean that he is currently trapped inside of the film Tron.

** - This is fun, considering Billy Butler, above, is also a Royal.

*** - Walker is also "virtually untouchable" which I think means he is riding light cycles with Parnell in Cyber-Venezuela or something.

**** - This is an actual quote from Frank Wren, and it makes me giggle.

Here is some news that, as an aside, doesn't make me entirely happy as an A's fan who enjoys his team winning and having easy teams to beat up on in the American League West. The news is that the Rangers have put Josh Hamilton contract talks on hold to pursue Zack Greinke. You can see why this would upset me.

But that's not what I'm here for. I have a whole A's blog to whine about the A's. What I'm here for is the weirdness of an entire front office apparently being unable to manage two different contract negotiations at once, and in particular being unable to so manage in a public fashion. Or semi-public, at least -- Jon Heyman wasn't able to put a name to his report that Hamilton was being backburnered, after all, but it's not crazy to imagine that teams frequently let information out for a reason. This isn't the Cold War, but there sure is a lot of money at stake, so spy-game measures are well justified.

The point is this: just how many intensive hours of negotiation are going on between Jon Daniels and Zack Greinke's agent that Daniels can't call up Hamilton's man and have a chat here and there? Are Daniels and Greinke locked in a hotel suite together in Nashville, not permitted to leave or make a phone call until a contract is signed or they reach an impasse? Will a Federal Mediator be necessary to resolve things between the parties?

And more semi-seriously: what's the purpose of letting this get out? If you're Greinke, don't you now have a tad bit more leverage over the Rangers? "I know I'm your number-one target. If you lose me, you have to go to Josh, and if you go to Josh, he'll know you lost out on me and have that leverage, and besides he'll be mad at you that you tossed him aside to negotiate with a pitcher." If you keep talks going with both players, you can give 'em the ol' one-two -- "Whoever accepts first gets to win a ring! And also have $150 million!" Or, hell, at least pretend that you're doing that. "We've made this offer to Josh Hamilton and if he takes it, we'll take him, but if you take this first, we take that off the table and you get our money," whether you've made that offer or not.

Or maybe you don't like lying because everyone in the game talks and you know Greinke will eventually chat with Hamilton and find out that Daniels duped you. So you don't say that Hamilton has an offer, but you just keep Greinke in the dark about what your backup plans are and are not.

Now, I'm me. You know me. I'm not the guy who rails at the front offices of baseball about how stupid they are and what are they doing and why would they ever do that and oh my god just hire me already I'll revolutionize this bullshit. No, these people are smart and experienced and adept at running franchises worth nine or ten figures while I'm sitting on my couch in my underpants. (I'm wearing pants and a shirt, actually, but I have underpants on underneath, so I'm not actually lying.)

So where does that leave us? Here: I doubt the Rangers are making blunders, but I'm not sure why they're doing things this way and I'd love to have some theories. I guess Occam's Razor would probably say that the leak wasn't part of some negotiating strategy. It was just a piece of information from some front office type to Heyman, a minor piece meant to appease him and keep him close or maybe even in direct trade for something else that Heyman knows. That only deals with the public aspect and doesn't address the question of why the team can't negotiate with both players at once, but it's something, at least. What else we got?

Source: Cubs have told Marmol he's trade candidate but they won't "give him away." #fujikawa

— Gordon Wittenmyer (@GDubCub) December 3, 2012

OK?

OK.

Upcoming tweets:

• Braves have told Tommy Hanson he's trade candidate but they won't "trade him to Seattle"

• Angels have told Albert Pujols he's first baseman but they won't "bat him eighth"

• Yankees have told Alex Rodriguez his contract is expensive boondoggle but they won't "be at all afraid of embarrassing him into retiring"

• Royals have told Ned Yost he's manager but they won't "ever give him a team good enough to win"

• MLB has told Jose Canseco he's never playing in the majors again but they won't "... no, just no"

• Lakers have told Kobe Bryant he's on team for life but they won't "ever win a championship again"

• NFL has told players they want 18-game season but they won't "do anything about their head injuries"

• RNC has told Mitt Romney he's not President but they won't "ever nominate him for anything ever again"

• Bill has told the Common Man he's terrible human but he won't "stop tweeting mean things about you"

• Jason has told cats they poop too much but he won't "get mad at them because they're just too cute"

If there's anything the last three weeks of baseball transactions have taught us (besides the fact that Jeffrey Loria is a big jerk), it's that a third baseman is a valuable commodity. Evan Longoria signed a big-time extension to remain a Ray until 2022, and then David Wright re-upped with the Mets until 2020. Longoria got $100 million for six years, while Wright pulled down $138 million for eight.

Following that, reports surfaced that Alex Rodriguez will miss four to six months with hip surgery, leaving the Yankees with a hole at third base until at least June. Even though Rodriguez's production has tailed off (did you hear anything about that during the playoffs?), he still leaves a substantial gap on the Bombers' roster.

So two elite third basemen were so valued by their teams, that they were willing to make decade-long commitments and nine-figure salaries to keep them despite all the risk that entails. And though A-Rod had wormed his way out of the hearts of Yankee fans, his loss made more than a few catch their breaths. Why is that? Is third base really such a valuable position?

I love Denard Span. I think he's one of the most underrated players in baseball, and one that was under team control for three more years at insanely low prices, even considering the first two would have been arbitration years ($4.75 million for 2013, $6.5 for 2014, and a no-brainer team option for $9 in 2015). 

I can't imagine why any team would want to trade Span, without being blown away. The Twins will not compete in 2013, and would not have competed with Span...but if there's any team with a front office that doesn't think they'll compete three seasons from now, that team needs a new front office. The team's presumptive replacement, Ben Revere, is passable but a huge downgrade, and I don't even know who might fill Revere's vacated corner slot. The deal cripples the formerly-averageish lineup in the short term, and they'll need one of their prospects (most likely Aaron Hicks or Oswaldo Arcia) to make it in a big way to keep it from hurting the lineup in the long term. I just can't track with any line of thinking that makes trading Span for less than most of some team's farm system makes any sense. 

For all that, when they finally did trade him yesterday for Nationals pitching prospect Alex Meyer -- a live arm yet to appear above high-A who may ultimately profile as a reliever -- I was okay with it. And it had nothing to do with Terry Ryan's justification (from the same article, "[w]e have some depth in the outfield here, so it just made sense," which isn't a lie in the sense that all three-dimensional objects have some depth). 

It's just that, frankly, I was expecting a lot worse.