(CBS) It’s no secret across baseball that the Yankees are leaning toward selling at the fast-approaching trade deadline and that they also are enamored with Cubs slugger Kyle Schwarber, who’s out for the season with a knee injury.
So naturally, speculation has ensued as to whether the Cubs — in need of bullpen help — would entertain the thought of parting with Schwarber to acquire lights-out lefty reliever Andrew Miller from the Yankees.
Yahoo Sports! MLB columnist Jef Passan posed that question to multiple executives across MLB for a piece he wrote, and the answer he got was a resounding no — if we’re speaking in only baseball terms. From an economic standpoint, there’s a different argument.
“From a baseball perspective, of course you don’t trade a potential 40-homer-a-year guy for two-and-a-half years of a one-inning relief pitcher,” Passan said during an interview on the Spiegel and Goff Show on Monday. “I don’t care if that relief pitcher is the best in baseball. You just don’t do that. It’s just not a smart thing to do, and the Cubs have proven as they’ve built this team that they do smart things.
“The one argument in favor of it though, the one thing that piqued my attention was when somebody told me the Cubs will be worth a billion dollars more if they win a World Series. Billion with a ‘B.’ And that’s the kind of thing that stands out to you, because right now the Cubs are worth $2.2 billion, according to Forbes. If they gain another billion dollars, they’re almost every bit as much as the New York Yankees.
“We are sometimes so myopic, we end up looking not just short-term gains but at just the baseball perspective. And we have to understand what happens on the field is these days is a microcosm of what’s happening off the field.
“All this is just part of a bigger business. And the business of baseball is a $10-billion-a-year industry.
“If the Chicago Cubs can get a bigger and bigger piece of that by trading one player for another player, in the baseball world, it seems like a monumental, nuclear deal,” Passan said. “But from a business perspective, if you can give up a guy who’s going to be worth — let’s say hypothetically, Kyle Schwarber up and through free agency is worth 20 wins total and a marginal win above replacement is $7 million, $7.5 million, we’re talking about Kyle Schwarber being worth $150 million. If you’re telling me you can trade $150 million to go out and potentially make a billion, you then start calculating like you do it in poker. What are the odds of this?
“There is zero baseball argument in favor of trading Kyle Schwarber for Andrew Miller. There is a marginal argument for trading Kyle Schwarber for Andrew Miller and Aroldis Chapman.”
