The Dodgers Won the Dee Gordon Trade

Dee Gordon‘s Unpredictable, Unsustainable Breakout Gives Dodgers the Edge in December deal.

Former Dodgers top prospect and second baseman Dee Gordon recently won the NL Gold Glove and Silver Slugger Award at 2b as well as the National League batting title with the Miami Marlins (Congrats Dee!) after hitting .333/.359/.418. This sparked a series of headlines that suggested that the Dodgers are coming to regret the trade that sent Gordon, Dan Haren and Miguel Rojas in exchange for Enrique Hernandez, Chris Hatcher, Austin Barnes and Andrew Heaney (for the purpose of this post we will include Howie Kendrick instead of Heaney as they were almost immediately swapped) back in December last year. This was understandably followed by plenty of frustration amongst Dodgers fans. However, don’t let the fancy awards and media attention fool you, the Dodgers won this trade.

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Firstly, lets start by examining the trade at the time it was made as neither front office had the power of hindsight. At the time Dee Gordon was an average player. He had just posted a -5 DRS at 2b and a 101 wRC+ despite leading the league in stolen bases (off the back of 58 wRC+ in 2012 and 73 in 2013). For those of you unfamiliar with those statistics DRS measures the number of runs saved by a position player, whilst wRC+ refers to weighted runs created, where 100 is equal to the league average. So as you can see in 2014, Gordon was league average with the bat and a poor defender.

If we look at more traditional statistics, Gordon hit .289/.326/.378 in 2014 with 64 stolen bases. On face value these look pretty solid but when you look a little deeper a very different story emerges. The solid 2014 season came off the back of a 2013 season in which he hit .234/.314/.298 and that line regresses even further if you look back to 2012. If you look even deeper, Gordon’s solid 2014 was fueled by a 54 point jump in his batting average on balls in play (.292 to .346). If you were to look at those numbers at the time of the trade, it would seem clear that this kind of performance was rather unsustainable. So to sum up Dee Gordon at the time of the trade, he was a below average second baseman, who was coming off one average year fueled, by an unsustainable jump in BABIP.

Meanwhile, Dan Haren was a 34 yr old veteran starter who was owed $10M and had seen his fastball velocity drop into the mid-80’s. His 4.02 ERA in 2014 was 15% worse than league average and other performance indicators offered him no relief.

Miguel Rojas was/is a glove only middle infielder.

At the same time, Howie Kendrick, was coming off a season in which he posted a wRC+ of 115 and a DRS of 7 – 14 points better than Gordon offensively and 19 points better defensively. These numbers were right in line with his career numbers. He also provided a bat that could hit in the middle of the lineup following the departures of Matt Kemp and Hanley Ramirez. While Chris Hatcher had proven himself to be a solid, hard throwing set-up man (a dire need for LA) and Austin Barnes walked straight into #11 on the Dodgers prospect rankings. Enrique Hernandez was a versatile yet unranked prospect.

At this point I think it’s fair to say ‘Advantage Dodgers’.

If we leap forward 12 months, I don’t think a lot has changed. Let’s start by looking at 2015 Gordon the same way we did above. In 2015, Gordon, despite his stellar batting average and stolen base total was still just a moderately above average hitter with a wRC+ of 113. He did however take a big jump in his defense posting a +13 DRS. Those two numbers put Gordon in the ‘very above average’ category. Again however, I caution readers from reading too much into the surface numbers. When you look even closer it becomes clear that these numbers were once again fueled by an unsustainable BABIP, this time a ridiculous .383 (a sustainable BABIP is believed to be around the .300 mark, this is likely a little higher for Gordon because of his speed). Because of this Steamer projects Gordon’s wRC+ to drop all the way back to 90 in 2016 (again a below average player). Gordon also walked just 3.8% of the time in 2015 which is simply not enough for a lead off hitter (in comparison, Pederson walked 15.7% of the time). This meant that Gordon’s OBP was just 13 points higher than Pederson’s.

In contrast, Howie Kendrick had a rather down year by his standards. He posted an average 109 wRC+ and a poor -15 DRS. The latter (like Gordon’s sudden defensive spike) was foreseen by few. Kendrick did battle hamstring problems most of the year so it will be interesting to see if he is able to rebound next year (albeit with another team).

Enrique Hernandez however, was a very different story. After earning a bench job in late April, Hernandez went on to post a32 wRC+ and 1 DRS. He also posted positive DRS scores at all 3 outfield positions as well as SS, while playing a solid 2b and 3b.

Chris Hatcher struggled in the first half but after spending time in the minors to work on his pitch selection Hatcher rebounded to post a 1.31 ERA with 26 strikeouts in 20.2 IP and provided much needed 8th inning relief. The Dodgers are in the market for an 8th inning guy which will push Hatcher down to the 7th making those numbers even better (relative to the situation). Barnes was also good, enjoying plenty of success in AAA earning himself a September call up and appears to have the chance to be an everyday player.

The final and perhaps most important point refers to exactly what lead to Gordon’s sudden improvement in 2015.

"“Credit for Gordon’s miraculous one-year metamorphosis is due to Marlins infield guru Perry Hill, who began working extensively with Gordon as soon as he came to Miami”. – Nick Moyle"

That is to say that Gordon’s improvement at 2b was primarily due to the work of the Marlins infield coach. The improvement at the plate can also be explained, in part, by the cavernous dimensions of his new home ballpark, which help is high contact-low power profile play up. What this means is that had the Dodgers kept Gordon that off-season, they would have almost certainly not received the same player that the Marlins did and probably not even close.

I should mention that the point of this post was not to bash Dee Gordon (he is clearly a talented player) nor the fans who disliked this trade but rather to dispel the misleading narrative that this trade would haunt the Dodgers front office and to highlight that its important to not take things at face value.

The Dodgers won this trade but thanks to the improvements made by the Marlins coaching staff, so did Miami.

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