Kansas city blues, part 2

[ieddyi]

Kansas City Blues, Part II
2005-03-15 22:33
by Mike Carminati

Other entries in the Trade Series:

Mike: I’ll Take Manhattan: Baseball’s Most Lopsided Trades: Parts I, I (revised), II

A Quick One (Happy Mike)

Lee Even Stevens: Parts I, II—The Sexy Version

Cain and A-Rod—A Bling-Bling Rivalry: Parts I, II

Kansas City Blues: Part I

Studes: The Best and Worst Teams of the Trade

Smoltz for Alexander

When we last left our heroes, the New York Yankees and Kansas City A's, I introduced the concept of Interstitial Trade Value. The idea was that the Yankees used the KC A's as a means to develop talent, as am affiliate club in the major leagues ostensibly competing directly with the Yankees for a championship. Interstitial Trade Value is a means to evaluate their incestuous interconnected trades in terms of what each team received in the interstices, the slices of time that each traded player performed for that team.

The only problem was that I hadn’t yet perform the data analysis to produce actual results. Well, that problem has been rectified. I now have a balance sheet of interstitial Win Shares and Win Shares Above Baseline (WSAB) for all 27 transactions between the two teams.

The first thing that struck me was that even though the Yankees "won" overall by about 71 Win Shares, but had an even larger edge in WSAB (79.32). That's something you don’t see in trade histories. A team just doesn’t get that much more WSAB, i.e. high-end talent, than Win Shares. Clearly, the Yankees were traded quantity for quality.

The Yankees really didn't outdo the A's in that many of the transactions (They both had advantages of at least 3 WSAB in three transactions and both "won" seven transactions in WSAB). They just clobbered them in the ones they did "win" though.

Here are their most lopsided trades (based on Interstitial WSAB):

#1:
Date: February 19, 1957
Trade: A's sent Bobby Shantz, Jack McMahan, Art Ditmar, Wayne Belardi, and two players to be named later (Clete Boyer, June 4, 1957 and Curt Roberts, April 4, 1957) to the Yankees Irv Noren, Milt Graff, Mickey McDermott, Tom Morgan, Rip Coleman, Billy Hunter, and for a player to be named later (Jack Urban, April 5, 1957).
Pre Career WS Diff: 110 (favoring KC)
Post Career WS Diff: 193 (NYY)
Pre Year WS Diff: 0
Post Year WS Diff: 4 (KC)
WSAB Pre Career Diff: 26 (KC)
WSAB Post Career Diff: 83 (NYY)
WSAB Pre Yr Diff: 0
WSAB Post Yr Diff: 6(NYY)
Int WS: 160 (NYY)
Int WSAB: 71 (NYY)

Bobby Shantz and Clete Boyer for not a whole lot. This one we know was a setup. Boyer was signed by the A's to a $40 K bonus in 1955 at the behest of the Yankees, the team later admitted. Note that the performance prior to the trade favors the A's and after favors the Yankees. This is the prototype: trade age and quantity for youth and quality.

#2:


http://mikesrants.baseballtoaster.co...es/157527.html