Santana and the Value of Young Talent

The New York Mets landed Johan Santana (assuming that they can work out a contract over the next several days). Given that I hoped for this outcome (see my post from 1/28), I am quite pleased. Yet, the deal that brings Santana to the Mets is quite stunning in one way: the Mets gave up very little to land the best left handed starting pitcher in the game. There can be little doubt that Minnesota Twins GM Bill Smith miscalculated, thinking that he could create a bidding war between the Red Sox, Yankees, and the Mets that would land the Twins top flight pitching prospects and everyday players. However, when the Sox and Yankees refused to put more on the table following the Winter Meetings, the market for Santana seemed to shrink rapidly to the point where the Mets were able to get Santana for fairly marginal prospects.

The Santana escapade seems to signal the rise of a new era in baseball operations, a paradigm shift, if you will: a reassessed value for prospects relative to proven talent. Once upon a time in baseball, you would hear the following (fairly convincing) argument: Unproven talent is unproven and you should trade unproven talent for proven talent when the opportunity presents itself. There were exceptions of course but teams with larger payrolls were willing to use their minor league talent to land major league talent and open up the checkbook to pay the salaries.

What the Red Sox and Yankees did (and they are by no means the first teams to do so) was show a willingness to stick with the possibility that the talent within their minor league systems will prove more valuable to the franchise than landing the likes of Johan Santana. Santana costs his sizable salary plus the cost of losing cost-controlled players (i.e. the developing talent controlled by a team for six years once placed on the MLB roster). Santana should prove extremely productive to the Mets but the question for teams like the Sox and Yankees was whether Santana's value outweighed the cost of losing the talent and financial advantage of players like Jacoby Ellsbury, Jon Lester, Phil Hughes, or Melky Cabrera. Such analysis is difficult at best but, much in the way baseball sees fewer and fewer ace pitchers hitting the free market, we may see fewer and fewer teams willing to swap highly regarded, young, affordable talent--even among the teams that can afford high priced talent--for more established big leaguers. This may be a story of economics; it may be a story of finding better means of predicting success for minor leaguers at the major league level; it may just be another "Moneyball" shift in the marketplace. But whatever the case, for tonight, I don't care. I'm buying an Ellsbury jersey.