jreeves1263 said:

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cap-n-jack said:

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I was listening to the radio broadcast yesterday and they interviewed Jim Crane. He said they had several deals on their desk yesterday and approved at the GM level but they got killed by ownership of the trade partners. I don't know if that's been covered here but I thought it was interesting, they weren't just sitting on their hands.

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Is that like when the car salesman has to take your offer to the sales manager to get an approval? Then he goes and gets a drink of water and comes back and says "My manager said no".

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Quote:

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In 2015, the Astros went out at the deadline and made a splash. First, they acquired Scott Kazmir for prospects Jacob Nottingham and Daniel Mengden. Next, they made a far bigger splash, trading outfield prospects Domingo Santana and Brett Phillips and pitching prospects Josh Hader and Adrian Houser to the Brewers for Carlos Gomez and Mike Fiers.

That trade, of course, was a disaster. Santana is still just 24, but in the midst of a .285/.374/.494, 2.4-WAR season that would make him the 5th best player on the 2017 Astros. He is under team control through 2021. The 23-year old Phillips put up a .954 OPS in Triple-A this season, and was recently recalled to take over as Milwaukee's center fielder. He is under control through 2023. And Hader, ranked as a top-25 prospect before the season, has a 0.90 ERA in his first 20 innings for the Brewers, though with a walk rate that needs to come down. At worst, he's their Chris Devenski, and may be a starter long-term.

Gomez was as bad as you can possibly be, while Fiers has been a serviceable #4/#5 starter, sometimes better, sometimes worse. He was left out of the 2015 post-season rotation and is not projected to be in the 2017 version either.

But what were the reviews at the time?

Bleacher Report gave the Astros' a B+ for the Gomez deal, and an A for the Kazmir pickup. The Twitter fan reaction was overwhelmingly positive. And ESPN.com's Keith Law, normally a balanced thinker on such things, was unequivocally supportive.

If you go back through reviews from past deadlines, it becomes clear that the teams that make moves are almost always praised by reporters and fans. The Rangers were the darlings of the 2016 deadline, acquiring Jonathan Lucroy, Jeremy Jeffress and Carlos Beltran. Yesterday, they quietly gave away Lucroy and Jeffress in two separate trades, while Beltran was a playoff rental for a team that won zero playoff games.

There are dozens of such stories. Here's the 2014 deadline winners and losers, which praises the A's as winners for renting Jon Lester and Jeff Samardzija, and the Giants - just across the Bay - as losers for largely standing pat. Of course, the Giants won the World Series in 2014, and the A's got knocked out in the first round, watched Lester sign with the Cubs, and have been in a tailspin ever since. They'll be bad for close to a full *decade*, largely because they went all-in for a 2014 ring. Oops.

This is all a result of a cognitive bias that is central to human nature, known in economics as activity bias. Doing something is naturally considered superior to doing nothing. This is why shopping malls are so good at getting people to spend money. "If I loaded up the kids and spent three hours of my day, I have to have something to show for it", the thinking goes. This is related to sunk cost fallacy.

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