Tanner wrote:Looking at the Jays own example, as bad as those 2013 trades were, how many of those prospects panned out? Look at every prospect traded for Happ, and the ones traded to Miami, and the ones traded for Dickey, and Donaldson, and Tulo, etc. I did not agree with all of those moves, but really, other than Syndergaard, what the heck did the Jays miss out on?
Mets trade: d'Arnaud (4 WAR, 2+ years of team control remaining), Syndergaard (11 WAR, 4+ years of team control remaining)
Marlins trade: DeSclafani (5.2 WAR, 3+ years of team control remaining), Marisnick (3.9 WAR, 3+ years of team control remaining), Alvarez (4.2 WAR)
Tigers trade: Norris (2.6 WAR, 4+ years of team control remaining), Boyd (1.3 WAR, 5+ years of team control remaining)
Rockies trade: Hoffman (1.1 WAR, 5+ years of team control remaining)
That's 8 prospects with a total of 33.3 WAR for players that earned for the most part, the league minimum while accruing all of that value, and most of those guys still have many cheap years remaining, especially the 5 starting pitchers who have a combined total of 21 seasons of team control remaining. On the free agent market that would cost roughly $333M so far, but I imagine it'll surpass $500M of lost value if not much more by the time those guys reach free agency. So to answer your question of "what the heck did the Jays miss out on", the answer is:
a lot. It'd be a bigger task to go over all the guys we acquired for the prospects to see how their WAR compared to their salary but I imagine there wasn't much surplus value. The Oakland trade turned out extremely well but that was more just bizarre on behalf of Beane since Donaldson had 4 years of cheap-ish team control left, and wasn't a typical prospects-for-veteran(s) trade. But both prospects we gave up turned out as best as they could have hoped so far.