FanPost

The Fallacy of Improving Howard's Trade Value

There are a few popular schools of thought on the best way for the Phillies to handle Ryan Howard. The one that the Phillies themselves are said to be employing is that the more Howard plays, the more chances he has to improve his value in a trade. Most people who are in favor of Howard playing often cite this strategy, but its one that doesn't realistically have an endgame that helps the Phillies win baseball games in the future.

So lets not even focus on the extremely high percentage of situations where Howard doesn't play well enough to do any significant impact to his trade value...that's already been exhaustively done (rightfully so). Let's instead fast forward to a 2015 Trade Deadline where Ryan Howard has a 140 OPS+ and 25 HR. Awesome, right?! Well, not particularly...

2015 Ryan Howard hitting like 2009 Ryan Howard doesn't translate to 2015 Ryan Howard having 2009 Ryan Howard's value, who was given a $25M annual salary all the way through 2016. Nothing Howard can do will erase his age, his injury history, and his past performance - all of which are vital to another team's evaluation of trading for him. To even further stack the deck in the favor of the 'Play Howard' crowd, we'll use the assumption that $25M was fair value for Howard's performance when he inked his deal despite the numerous objections many have to that. You now need 2015 Ryan Howard to not only match 2009 Howard, but outperform him to overcome the recent negative history to be worth his contract.

And thats where we get to the crux of the issue. Howard can never achieve positive trade value, only minimize his negative value. Instead of receiving a minimal prospect and eating almost all of his contract, the Phillies through the above strategy are only looking to receive a minimal prospect while eating less money on his contract. And in an offseason where the team saved over $30M in payroll obligations from the previous year, which none of was used to acquire future talent, the success of this strategy resulting in the Phillies saving money does nothing to the benefit of the future on-field product.

It's no secret that Darin Ruf and any other Phillie has made a compelling case to be the 1B of the future, but in almost every other alternative, there is a glimmer of hope worth exploring. Trying to increase Ryan Howard's trade value? The only glimmer that exists is if you are worried about the owners' personal wealth.