Only a few days after the regular season ended, I wrote my first draft of a very long discussion of the state of the Oakland Athletics for the 2005 season, intended for publication either in Benzene or Jim Burgess's Abyssinian Prince, the traditional repository for my A's ruminations. Since then, every couple of weeks I dig it out and rewrite large chunks of it -- filling in the details where I had only sketched notes before, and adding new thoughts that I had forgotten to include the first time. Each revision made the long piece even longer, leading me to wonder if it ballooned beyond the point of readability. Almost none of the revision was due to any new information, since there had been very little actual news out of the A's organization since the end of the season. (The only thing of significance was decisions on next year's coaching staff: Our 04 bench coach has been replaced by Seattle's 04 bench coach, and the rest of the staff stays the same).

This week brings the first real news for the new season -- an impending big trade -- so in light of that, I'm tossing aside the old treatise and staring from scratch with this as a starting point. As of this afternoon, the trade still isn't officially announced, and both GMs are declining to comment, but the news sources are unanimous that this not just idle speculation and the deal has been made, pending only the confirmation, in form of physical exams, that the players' healths really are what their employers say they are.

The short version is that Oakland will deal pitchers Mark Redman and Arthur Rhodes to the Pittsburgh Pirates in exchange for catcher Jason Kendall. On first glance this trade looks right in a lot of small ways and looks wrong in one very large way. That large way is that Jason Kendall comes with a huge salary locked into his contract, and the Athletics are notorious for avoiding overpaid players.

The Pirates have been trying to trade away Jason Kendall for years, not because he's a bad player but because in a fit of colossally bad judgment the team signed him to an enormous contract which is eating up about a third of the team's entire payroll. As Pittsburgh columnist Brian O'Neill put it, this contract has left Kendall "in the unique position of being both overpaid and underrated". Other teams have consistently rejected Pittsburgh's attempts to trade Kendall and his contract. Now Oakland's Billy Beane looks ready to be the first to break the trend and take him. Why?

One way to profit from trading is to recognize players who are either underrated or overrated and seek to trade the latter for the former. In such trades you hope to be the guy with better knowledge and information so that you come out ahead and the other guy comes out behind. But a player's value is not constant across all teams. For a wide variety of reasons, one team might have more use for a certain player than another team does. This is the basis for win-win trades, which is the other way to prift from trading. As in a trading game like Monopoly, I can come out ahead in win-lose trades only if the player I trade with is a sucker. If there are no suckers at the table, I come out ahead by performing numerous trades which benefit me and my trading partner over all the non-participants in the game.

One of the principles of Moneyball -- the one that is behind Beane's tendency to get involved in three-way trades where he acts as an arbitrageur -- is that a purpose of trading is move maximize players' values to their teams. That is, if player A on my team is valuable to me but would be even more valuable on your team, while player B on your team is valuable to you but would be even more valuable on my team, that is a natural trade. How good the actual players are is part of the equation, of course, but it isn't the basis of the trade. A player's value is reflected in his price, so unless you have unlimited payroll -- which not even the Yankees have -- it's not simply a matter of getting good players and giving away bad ones. What matters is that the total value of the players is greater in their new homes than in their old homes. That value differential is the profit from the trade, and the two traders devise terms to split that profit.

This principle applies even when the players have negative value. In terms of the net value of the player against his salary, in this particular trade two of the three players have net negative value. If the Pirates could trade Jason Kendall for absolutely nothing at all -- ie, he and his contract go away, and they get zero in return -- they would do that in a heartbeat. Kendall has three years remaining on his contract in which he is paid $10m in 05, $11m in 06, and $13m in 07. Kendall is a very good player, but he's not $10 million a year good. In addition to that, he has a no-trade clause in the contract, which makes him even less valuable since he's less fungible. (Kendall has reportedly agreed to waive the no-trade clause in order to go to Oakland, but he likely would not waive it for many other teams.)

The Athletics feel similarly about Arthur Rhodes. Rhodes was supposed to be Beane's latest magic trick in which he creates a star closer out of a decent but non-star reliever. This time the trick fizzled. Rhodes was terrible in 04. His contract is much smaller than Kendall's -- $3m each for the next two years -- but his value to the team as a player is practically nothing.

Whether Rhodes is completely washed up and is pure dead weight on any roster or if he just needs a change of scenery to revive his career is an open question, and any team that takes him on will be taking a calculated risk hoping for the latter. But that new start is far less likely to happen in Oakland, where he has failed and burned bridges, than in any other MLB city, so Rhodes' value is greater to any team prepared to take a chance on a questionable LH reliever than it is to Oakland. Thus Beane is motivated to trade Rhodes to anyone who will take him. Since Rhodes' value is still negative for any team, Beane has the same problem the Pittsburgh GM has with Kendall: a toxic contract which he must bribe some other team to take off his hands.

Beane doesn't particularly want an overpriced Kendall either, and even after the trade is done, he's still a negative value -- that is, Beane would still happily give away him and his contract in exchange for zero -- but on the whole, Kendall as a player is a better fit for Oakland's needs than it is for Pittsburgh's, so the negative is not as great here as it was there. Thus, as a result of the trade, both players' values increase from a large negative to a not quite as large negative.

In the unadjusted trade of players, Oakland is helping Pittsburgh more than vice versa, so the money details will reflect that. The exact terms are not announced yet, but the informed reports suggest that Oakland will pay Pittsburgh about $1m each in 05 and 06, while Pittsburgh will pay about $7m of Kendall's salary in 07, which is a net gain of about $5m for Oakland plus a jiggering of the money to best fit in with both teams' anticipated budgetary needs.

It also should be noted that the Oakland A's are better equipped financially to handle a large contract like Kendall's. A's fans like to think of their team as a low-budget team, but that's not quite true. In fact, on a ranking of teams by total payroll, Oakland is right smack in the middle. At roughly $60 million, the A's annual payroll is about half that of the top three teams (Yankees, Red Sox, Angels), but it's also about twice that of the bottom three teams, one of which is Pittsburgh.

The third player in the trade, Mark Redman, is Oakland's fifth best starting pitcher. The local fans tend to think of him as terrible, partly because Redman's freakishly skewed home-vs-away splits -- he played well on the road and was bad at home -- but even more because Oakland fans are just plain spoiled with regard to starting pitching. We've had so many great starters for so long that A's think any starter with an ERA above 4.5 is a dog.

In fact, Redman is a pretty decent LH starter who would be a fine addition to the middle of the rotation on most teams. At roughly $4.5m a year, he's paid about what he's worth. Beane picked him up last year because he thought it was a good buy, not because he was really looking for a pitcher. Sure, it's nice to have a good fifth guy on the staff, especially in case one of the other starters gets hurt, but the A's really aren't looking for starting pitching. In addition to the famous three, there are plenty more coming up through the minor leagues. In spite of the fact that Redman was signed for a three-year contract, I don't think Beane really expected to keep him for long. Part of the reason he was willing to sign him is that he knows there's always a market for a decent LH starter, and it would be easy enough to trade Redman when the time comes. (The fact that Redman's three-year contract was skewed to pay him less in the first year and more in the second and third also suggests Beane expected to trade him after the first year.)

I mentioned that Kendall is a pretty good fit with the A's. A bit more background is in order. The thing to know about the A's at the catcher position is that we've got a bumper crop of promising catchers in the minor leagues. There are at least three of them who look to do well in the major leagues, but all of them are about two years away from being ready. Since trading Ramon Hernandez at the end of the 03 season, the A's strategy has been to fill the spot with one veteran or another for a few years until one of the kids is ready. In 04, Damian Miller fit that bill. (Miller is a free agent now. He expressed some interest in continuing with Oakland, but the A's were slow in making an offer, so he explored the rest of the market. He is now reportedly on the verge of signing with Milwaukee.) In 05 and 06, Jason Kendall could do the same thing. As for 07, it's no coincidence that the presumptive deal has Pittsburgh paying most of Kendall's salary for that year. I think Beane expects to have a new young catcher by then, and he wants Kendall's contract for the final year to be tradable. If by summer of 06, Kendall is still playing well, I think they might trade him then to a playoff contender willing to pay the extra money to fill an immediate need (and I say that assuming that Oakland will itself be a playoff contender).

Kendall is an unusual catcher, as is suggested by the fact that he typicaly bats in the leadoff position. Unlike most catchers, he has excellent speed. He's about average as a defender and excellent as a hitter. He takes a lot of pitches and has a high batting average, but he doesn't have much power.

On-base percentage is not as underrated as it was when the Moneyball book came out, so the A's don't chase after OBP as much as they used to, but they still like a hitter who will take a lot of pitches. Hitting power may well be overrated now. The fans love a big slugger who hits it over the fence. Not that hitting HRs is a bad thing, but I think the sexiness of it makes it overvalued. Beane seems to be moving in the direction of players who hit well but not necessarily for power -- a direction which is contrary to the A's tradition, by the way. The acquisition of Kotsay last year was an example of this. Kendall is in the same mold. (In fact, the Kendall for Redman plus Rhodes trade is an awful lot like last year's Kotsay for Hernandez plus Long trade in terms of the logic of it. Come to think of it, Kotsay might reasonably be described as "overpaid and underrated", in which case it's not a "unique" position after all.)

The A's current backup catcher is Adam Melhuse, a converted infielder who is mediocre defensively but hits well off the bench. The conventional wisdom for the past year has been that the A's love Melhuse as a backup but don't see him as a starter at all and that Melhuse was perfectly happy with that. Now, immediately following reporting of the Kendall trade, Melhuse is saying he doesn't want to play behind Kendall and would prefer to be traded. The real story here, I think, is not that Melhuse expected to become the starter, but rather that if he's going to be a backup, he'd rather not be a backup in the AL behind a catcher whose history is that he starts nearly every game. Unless the A's can reassure Melhuse that they don't intend to start Kendall so regularly -- and I don't think they can because I don't think it's true -- I think Melhuse will be traded. The team does like him, but it's not a big deal to find another backup catcher, and the A's generally don't like to keep unhappy players in the clubhouse. If Melhuse really wants to go, he'll probably go with the team's blessing, probably in the form of some small-potatoes trade for another low-salary player who is a better fit for the A's.

Some of the columnists have suggested that the money the A's are sinking into Kendall suggests that the team is that much more likely to trade away one of the "Big Three" pitchers (ie, Hudson, Mulder, Zito) before the 05 season. I disagree. For starters, the money drain is not quite as big as it looks. Yes, the A's will pay $11m in 05 for Kendall, but they have unloaded $7.5 of salary obligations to Rhodes and Redman, both of whom will be replaced on the roster by players making considerably less. At the same time, Kendall is a worthy replacement for Miller, who made $3m in 04. Thus the net cost in payroll for 05 is only about $2m. (And that, in a nutshell, is why the deal makes sense.)

More generally, I just don't buy the logic that says one or more of the Big Three must be traded. Even among educated fans, there is a heated debate about this, but I'm solidly on the no-trade side of the issue. The first half of the opposing argument -- that we can't afford to keep them all once their contracts run out -- is absolutely true. Where the reasoning goes off track is in the assumption that we must therefore trade them now so that we at least get something for it instead of just losing them outright to free agency.

OK, suppose we trade Tim Hudson right now. His contract runs out at the end of the 05 season, at which point he becomes a free agent and the high-budget teams go into a bidding war to get him. If the team we trade him to is not one of those high-budget teams, they're looking at the exact same problem Oakland has right now: a lame-duck star who is going to be lost to free agency at the end of the year. That means we're really only talking about four or five teams as potential trade partners here: the ones which could make the trade and feel reasonably confident about re-signing him.

The other problem is: what do we expect to get in return? Even for just the one year, Hudson is a hot commodity. He is a star player at a reasonable price. None of the Big Three is cheap -- for 05, Hudson and Mulder will make $6m and Zito will make $5.5m -- but any one of them could expect to get almost twice as much on the open market. In exchange for that, what could we expect to get? What is this "something" that the advocates of trade think we're going to get? We don't need young prospects; Oakland's minor league system is still packed with young talent. Any established player of Hudson's caliber is going to come with a high price tag, which we can't really afford. Short of trading him for cash outright, I don't see what the A's would hope to gain other than a good player who is still on a contract that underpays him, and that's exactly what we have with each of the Big Three right now.

The point is that for one (Hudson) or two (Mulder and Zito) more years, we've got them locked in at a low price. We have a bargain deal, and the best thing to do with a bargain is to hang on to it for as long as it lasts. That's why we should keep all three of the Big Three for the duration of their contracts. Beyond that, maybe we take a shot at re-signing them, as we did for Chavez, but unless the A's have a horrible start and are out of contention by the trading deadline (which I consider very unlikely) there's nothing to be gained by trading any of them before his contract runs out.

I make this argument not just in advocacy but also in estimating what I think the GM is thinking. I'll be very surprised if any of the Big Three is traded. At the same time, I think it very likely that each of them in turn will not re-signed after the current contract runs out. Doing the math, that adds up to a distinct possibility that we won't keep any of them, a pretty good chance that we'll keep just one, and not much chance that we'll keep two or three.

Meanwhile, more starting pitchers are coming up through the system. Rich Harden, who came to the big leagues in the middle of 03, did well in 04. (Indeed, at the end of the season, he was arguably the best starter on the team.) Next in line is Joe Blanton, who made a brief appearance in Oakland near the end of the 04 season. Many are speculating that Blanton will start the 05 season as the A's fifth starter, but I don't think so. As a general rule, if the A's see a starter as having a future with the team, they're careful to keep him on regular work and not bring him up too early. In the first half of the season, there are enough off days that four of the starters can be kept in a regular pattern at the cost of sticking the fifth starter with a screwy schedule. In 04, the A's attempted to keep all five starters as regular as possible, but it didn't work so well. I think in 05 the A's will revert to their usual pattern. The fifth starter will be some veteran long-man type who is flexible enough to put up with the irregular role. Then some time around July, that guy gets phased out and the new guy -- in this case, Blanton -- is brought up from AAA right when the team is getting sluggish and is ready for a boost. Bringing up the young star pitchers in mid-season is an Oakland tradition. That's how it was with Harden in 03, Zito in 00, and Hudson in 99.

Getting back to the payroll question, I do think that the money put into Kendall means that the team is planning to unload some payroll elsewhere. I just don't think it will be one of the starting pitchers. Some possibilities are Dotel, Durazo, Hatteberg, Byrnes, Bradford and Rincon. There's a story behind each of these, and all are in the mammoth post I've eschewed. Even this one is getting long now, though still not nearly as long as the other.

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