Trade Retrospective: Braves acquire Touki Toussaint and Bronson Arroyo from the Diamondbacks
For the fifth straight offseason, I am taking a look back on some of the biggest trades from years past. Check out all my previous entries at Beyond the Box Score here.
In June 2015, the Braves acquired Bronson Arroyo and prospect Touki Toussaint from the Diamondbacks in exchange for Phil Gosselin. The Braves also took on the remaining $10.1 million still guaranteed to Arroyo while he was recovering from Tommy John surgery.
In this trade retrospective series, trades will be evaluated based on what was known at the time. That is the only fair, logical way to evaluate trades and remove luck from the equation; we’re evaluating process over results. Having said that, we will still take a look at how the trade worked out for both parties.
The Deal
The Diamondbacks weren’t doing too badly at the time of the trade. They were just slightly below .500, four games back of the Dodgers, and in the Wild Card mix. However, despite all that, things weren’t looking too good in terms of making the playoffs. The division looked unlikely, and Wild Card slots looked very competitive, especially with how strong the NL Central was. The Braves weren’t in much better shape.
As for Arroyo, he was still recovering from Tommy John surgery he had the year before. It had been a year since he last pitched, and even if he did return, it was very unlikely that the Diamondbacks were going to pick up his 2016 option.
The funny thing about this trade is that it’s not really a baseball trade. It could’ve just as easily have happened had the Braves and Diamondbacks been contenders or had been tanking. It was all about money. The Diamondbacks parted with a guy who was, at worst, rated as a top-15 pick in his draft (even though he went 16th) and one of their top prospects, just to get Arroyo’s remaining guaranteed salary off their books. Had the Dbacks actually received real value back from the trade, that would have been one thing. But Gosselin was a back-up infielder that couldn’t play shortstop, which is a problem with roster spots increasingly valuing flexibility.
The Diamondbacks effectively sold Toussaint to the Braves, which is technically illegal but the teams disguised it by making sure to send a player from Atlanta to Arizona. I believe rookie Commissioner Rob Manfred would’ve been well within his rights to void the deal that the teams clearly intended to get around the rule that prohibits direct sales of players between teams. Unbelievably, the Dbacks pulled this crap after they had signed a $1.5 billion TV deal earlier that year!
I doubt that even those who are most critical of prospect huggers found much to defend from the Diamondback’s perspective. No reasonable person could peg Toussaint’s value at just $10 million. Literally any team, regardless of where they were in their competitive cycle, would pay $10 million for a mid-first round pick at the blink of an eye.
Let’s put it this way: Had Toussaint been granted free agent status instead of being traded, what do you think he would’ve commanded on the open market? Keep in mind that though he carried some reliever risk, scouts saw his upside as high as a number two starter. I’d speculate he’d get $40-50 million, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if ended up higher than that.
(Of course, that’s just a thought experiment. Even if a player is cut before he accrues six years of service time, he can’t get more money than a rookie deal allows.)
Generally, teams do try to be fair in trades and try to not pull a lopsided deal. If on squad develops a reputation as an organization that tries to take advantage of their trade partners, then nobody will trade with you. That being said, how do you not take advantage of front office types as incompetent as then Diamondbacks GM Dave Stewart and Chief Baseball Operator Tony La Russa? Thankfully for the Diamondbacks, despite the terrible process involved in executing this trade, the results haven’t come back to bite them.
The Results
Sadly, Toussaint has been a bust so far. He didn’t debut until 2018, and since then has only pitched a combined 95 innings, most of which have come from the bullpen. He currently has a career 6.54 RA9 and 14.3 BB%. Worse yet, he also tested positive for COVID-19 in July of last year, which could’ve affected his 2020 performance. He’s still just 24 years old, so hopefully he still has time to figure things out.
Arroyo never played a game for the Braves, partially because he wasn’t with the team for very long. The Braves traded him to the Dodgers as part of a big three-team deal at the trade deadline, but he never played for them either. The Dodgers declined his 2016 option as expected. He didn’t return to a big league mound until 2017, when his old team, the Reds, gave him a chance. It was disastrous, unfortunately, as Arroyo had a 7.48 RA9 over 14 starts. Arroyo announced his retirement at the end of the season.
Gosselin was actually outstanding for the Diamondbacks in 2015. He hit .303/.382/.545 for them, albeit in only 76 PA. He returned in 2016 and hit just .277/.324/.368 in 24 PA. The Dbacks parted ways with him that season, and he ended up bouncing around a lot, hitting a paltry .218/.278/.314 from 2017-2020. He is currently on a minor league deal with the Angels.
This is my fifth season doing this series, and this might be the most You Can’t Predict Baseball result I’ve come across. Toussaint has been worth -0.9 WAR so far. Gosselin was worth 1.1 WAR for the Diamondbacks! As I mentioned before, Toussaint still has time to turn things around, but it’s crazy that the results favor the Diamondbacks so far.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean that the Dbacks were right. It means that they got extraordinarily lucky. Furthermore, who knows what would’ve happened had they kept Toussaint. His development might’ve gone better in a different organization.
The biggest reason this trade happened was because the Diamondbacks were one of the last front offices to modernize, putting them at a huge disadvantage. You can wave La Russa’s rings and Hall of Fame plaque all you want if you’d like, but there’s no denying that neither of members of the D’backs braintrust at the time – LaRussa and Stewart – had any idea on how to properly value baseball players. Front offices are too smart to do something like that now. However, this was shockingly not even the worst trade this duo ever pulled off, and that one was with the same team, too!
-Luis Torres
