Cold Takes: Win At Baseball By Losing Every Trade

There’s a board game that’s out of print now, called The Traders of Genoa, one of those German board games with a 12-page rulebook and a million little painted wooden cubes. Players take turns navigating the streets of a marketplace, employing various tradesmen to take cubes (black: pepper, brown: copper, turquoise: silk) and then convert those raw goods into finished products (points). It’s a pretty standard European resource management game; the winner is the one who best manages his “production line,” getting the goods they need and spending them as wisely as possible.

The trick in Genoa is that players don’t get to just choose what turn they’ll take: A single player moves a single marker a designated number of spaces across the board, stopping at various shops. He or she can only use one of the shops themselves on a turn, so the strategy is to take the marker to useful places, and then barter a fair trade with the other players to “use” those tradesmen to do their own business.

The game demands a significant amount of calculation, prediction and negotiation, which is why despite its strong reviews you don’t hear people bring it up these days, even among the board gaming set. It’s just hard to play. But the trading mechanic of Traders of Genoa is unique, and it creates an interesting philosophy for its genre: that cooperation can be valuable, even in a competitive game.

The key: When it’s your turn to move the marker, if you steer the marker to places that aren’t helpful for the other players, or demand too high a price for the opportunity, you’ll earn nothing from the other players. It’s counterintuitive, but this will actually give the remaining players, assuming they avoid such isolationist tendencies, a massive advantage over you. The player with the best chance of winning is often not the one who made “the best” trades, extracting the most out of their opponents, but by accruing value through sheer volume. For example, compare two strategies for trading, each resulting in the following point values as the result of their trades:

Player who seeks to win, succeeds half the time

Player who seeks to lose, succeeds every time

The takeaway: you don’t have to win every deal to get ahead. If you help the other team more than yourself, but both of you improve over the rest of the field, you can make good in the long run.

This completes our rather heavy-handed framing device for a discussion on trading in baseball. Last week, as a preventative to this week’s thesis, I examined whether there was any discernible friction involved in the average baseball trade, and found no evidence of it. The players a team trades for are (on average, at least) the players they get. And the week before, I commented on how (especially at this time of year) fans and analysts tend to fall into the trap of evaluating trades on a binary basis: Did the team gain or give up more talent? At most we only calculate based on present versus future value, often without having a clear idea of what we ourselves to be a fair exchange.

But there are so many imbalances in baseball, and they go so far beyond “will this team be better this year or three years from now.” Instinctively, we recognize this. Players can be blocked, or a developmental hole can lead to James Loney shirseys hanging in the team store. Certain teams can take advantage of player types based on the dimensions of their home stadium. Coaching staffs can have better success with a particular type of athlete, and development systems can struggle with certain players. Personalities could make exceptionally strong or poor fits for certain locker rooms. These are factors that go beyond a player’s wins above replacement, above his true talent, that make a player more valuable to one club than he might to another.

Teams know this, and they behave this way. Especially in the offseason, when rosters are taking shape, we see minor deals that are entirely helpful: the Padres obtaining an actual outfielder in Jon Jay while providing the Cardinals middle-infield insurance in Jedd Gyorko. Or the Brewers, giving Jean Segura a much-needed change of scenery and making room for their shortstop of the future, while obtaining useful players/future trade pieces in Aaron Hill and Chase Anderson. And yet our evaluation of trade “winners and losers” often stems on a direct assessment of who received more value out of a given trade, whether the prospects were too much or the market didn’t pan out the way our expectations were set.

Baseball is in many ways a comforting reflection of society: the peaceful nationalism, the vicarious excitement of representation, the absolute foundations of its morality. But in this particular example it fails us, or we fail it, in its establishment of a zero-sum universe. The lure is so strong. There must always be a winner, and a loser. This is true even in trades, even when we know better. We look at the Cespedes-Fulmer trade and understand, objectively, that the trade was good for both sides. But it’s nearly impossible to feel that way, to feel that win-win trades are even possible, because it’s hard to keep an eye on both worlds at once. In the distant past, the Jeff Bagwell and John Smoltz trades are considered disasters, because the stretch runs they bought have faded into history; the prospects purchased so dearly two weeks ago are far, far off, and so the buyers like the Rangers and Cubs are always praised in the afterglow of August 1.

This leads us to Mark Melancon, who was traded under the most inauspicious of circumstances: In the flaming wreckage of the Aroldis Chapman haul, at a point where the Pirates were within a dream of the Wild Card. It would have been unpopular for the Pirates to trade their excellent closer even in the best of times, and it proved far less when the receipt came in. But while Pittsburgh failed to attain the kind of value fans hoped they would get, to declare them losers of the trade is overly simplistic. The Pirates are better now than they were, by the standard of value they’ve chosen.

As Jeff Quinton wrote yesterday, the price for Chapman was so high in part because of the timing, with neither Melancon nor Will Smith yet on the market, and in part because the Cubs faced a bigger risk in not doing anything, in terms of potential blowback, than in doing the wrong thing. The Pirates could perhaps be blamed for taking too long to settle on their role in the market, waiting until the last minute to sell, thus driving up the Yankees’ leverage while cutting away at their own. It’s difficult to assess just how much the team should have predicted the possibility of the four-game losing streak that more than halved their playoff odds, right as the deadline hit.

It’s always so complicated to talk about trades, couched as they are in so many hypotheticals and alternate universes. Is 14 percent playoff odds an acceptable point to give up a season, or even a partial chance at that season? Was there a better deal to be had, a better time to act, a way to avoid what brought a team to that point? Once we have the hindsight to judge results, do we lose the perspective to judge the initial process? With all these variables it’s always safer to stand pat, to avoid coining a new Brock-for-Broglio, to dodge the jolly stampede of winning teams burning their path to the playoffs. But inaction is no way to build a championship team; ask the Rockies, who stood silent again as the teams around them built for today, or tomorrow, but at least built.

We have to be careful, however, in crowning our August 1st champions. We can’t just add up the changes in the playoff odds, or assign career WARs to 22-year-olds and count them. And most of all, we have to resist comparing a team’s trade directly to their partner, particularly when they’re after such different and often tangential goals. Sometimes, a trade is just good for everyone, except the 28 teams that didn’t profit from it.