You will find copycats no matter where you look, right?
The whole TV world tries to create the next “Mad Men” period piece. You stumble by a salad joint about every two blocks in Manhattan. Join the crowd and get yourself a pair of Yeezy knockoff shoes.
The baseball world, itself as prone to copycatting as a junior prom, might have found itself a keeper. It is not so much a practice as a belief system, and it dominated this past week’s winter meetings.
More than ever in the free-agent era, arguably, teams behave aggressively on both sides of the spectrum. They’re becoming less hesitant to tear down their assets in return for young talent. And then, when they build up, they’re less anxious over trading away that cherished young talent — and spending money in addition to player resources — to attain the most important goal of all, a World Series title.
Consider the Cubs, the game’s most recent World Series champs, as the full-circle trendsetter, as they stockpiled youngsters, developed many for their own team and traded some — like shortstop Gleyber Torres to the Yankees for closer Aroldis Chapman — to fill critical needs. Their Windy City neighbors, the White Sox, dominated the meetings by lowering their wrecking ball with trades of ace Chris Sale to the Red Sox and outfielder Adam Eaton to the Nationals, getting back a total of seven players.
“There’s a number of teams over the past several years that have taken the approach of having a longer-term view and had to face some difficult times at the big league level,” White Sox general manager Rick Hahn said at the meetings’ conclusion. “I don’t think it necessarily impacts our decision to do such, but I do think it has a very real impact on our fans understanding what’s going on, having seen other clubs benefit from the fruits of that hard labor.
“So while I think the people within the game certainly understand when a process begins and where everyone hopes it can lead, now that we’ve seen such fine examples of it working well throughout the game, I think it makes it a little easier perhaps for fans to accept.”
Just look at the mostly positive reaction the Yankees received when they finally bit the bullet and traded away Carlos Beltran, Chapman (who just rejoined the team in free agency), Andrew Miller and Ivan Nova last July then Brian McCann last month.
The Mets’ fruits from trading R.A. Dickey in December 2012 have helped them reach two straight postseasons, and hope remains Zack Wheeler, whom the Mets acquired from the Giants in return for Beltran in July 2011, will contribute moving forward.
The middle — that 75-to-85 win territory, let’s call it — is nowhere to live. That is where the White Sox lived in 2015 and 2016 before chairman Jerry Reinsdorf finally signed off on the selloff. You don’t climb high enough to qualify for the postseason, and you don’t sink low enough to get yourself a good draft pick.
On the flip side, teams are going for it. In addition to the Cubs, Sawx and the Nationals, the latter two of whom each lost in their League Division Series, look at the Astros, who dealt two highly regarded minor league pitchers to the Yankees for McCann and want to swing another trade for a frontline starting pitcher after signing free agents Beltran, Charlie Morton and Josh Reddick. The Mets’ farm system has taken serious hits because of the deals they made this year and last for Jay Bruce, Yoenis Cespedes, Tyler Clippard, Kelly Johnson (twice) and others to advance to October ball.
“It’s always pretty much been a situation that, in my mind, if you’re going to get something, you have to give up something,” Red Sox president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski said Thursday. “I think what’s happened here is that there are some clubs that are in a spot where they’re going for it and trying to win. And there’s another area of clubs that are trying to rebuild. And so it’s sort of that nice combo of meeting of people doing that.
“If you don’t give up the players, somebody else is giving up the players, and you don’t get them. It looks like that’s what’s happening.”
Dombrowski, always one of the game’s most proactive opportunists, proved equally adept on the other side of the spectrum when his 2015 Tigers didn’t meet their expectations. His July 31 trade of Cespedes to the Mets brought back Michael Fulmer, who won 2016 American League Rookie of the Year honors, and Luis Cessa, whom Dombrowski’s successor Al Avila swapped to the Yankees for reliever Justin Wilson.
“You need to be in a position where you’re realistic with yourself,” Dombrowski said. “You need to be in a spot where you can realistically say, ‘This is where we are as an organization’ and make that evaluation.”
There will be failures, naturally, either in the initial evaluation or in the execution of the game plan. There already have been. The Padres’ go-for-it gambit two years ago — which imported Matt Kemp, Craig Kimbrel, Wil Myers, James Shields and Justin Upton — bombed. So did the Diamondbacks’ mammoth signing of Zack Greinke and trade for Shelby Miller last year. The Marlins’ inability to qualify for the playoffs since their 2003 championship can be tied into their inability to tear down or build up smoothly enough.
Yet this is the way to go. Too much positive evidence exists to ignore it. Can it be called “copycatting” if it’s merely plain old common sense?