Whitelaw: Did The Rays “Lose” By Trading Jake Cronenworth?

On December 6th 2019, the Tampa Bay Rays traded OF Tommy Pham and minor league INF Jake Cronenworth to the San Diego Padres for OF Hunter Renfroe, minor league INF Xavier Edwards, and a PTBNL (minor league INF Estaban Quiroz – who was later traded for INF/OF Harold Ramirez). Trades like this with multiple players and moving parts can be tough to evaluate because the metaphorical trade tree has many branches with roots extending all the way back to when the Rays drafted Jeremy Hellickson back in the 4th round of the 2005 draft.

I want to zoom-in on one specific part of this trade – the Rays moving Jake Cronenworth a few months before he established himself as a quality major league infielder. Did the Rays make a mistake in letting him go?

The Context

Coming off his 2019 breakout season where he put up a 147 wRC+ across 406 PA in AAA, Cronenworth raised his stock tremendously and made himself one of the more valuable Rule 5 eligible players on the market. He was never going to displace Brandon Lowe on the big league roster (Lowe has very easily been a top 15 hitter in the AL his entire career, even with his injury troubles in 2022), Yandy Diaz had just posted the best ISO of his career and looked to be heading for a role as the every day 3B option (which he has since fulfilled), Willy Adames was the current face of the franchise (with generational phenom Wander Franco putting up video game numbers in the minor leagues as a teenager), and Ji-Man Choi had just finished his first full season in Tampa and quickly became a fan favorite (his 134 wRC+ against RHP in 2019 made him one of the premier LH 1B in the league). So where was Cronenworth supposed to play?

With all the main guys on the infield firmly established in their positions and roles, that left one spot Cronenworth could fit – the LH utility role occupied by Joey Wendle. This was the situation for the Rays: trade Wendle at a low point and have the rising rookie Cronenworth take his place, OR sell high on Cronenworth to avoid losing him in the Rule 5 Draft for virtually nothing and hope for a Wendle rebound.

The Immediate Aftermath

The following seasons with Wendle as the LH utility bench guy went pretty well, so it’s not like losing Cronenworth hurt the team overall. The Rays finished with the best record in the AL and went to the World Series in 2020. Then, in 2021, the Rays once again earned the best record in the AL and reached the 100 win mark for the first time in franchise history. Wendle helped the Rays continue to meet their goal of making the playoffs and get as many bites at the apple as possible.

The Padres also made the playoffs in 2020 with Cronenworth bursting onto the scene and becoming one of the top rookies in the NL. Cronenworth was voted to the All-Star Game in 2021, but the Padres missed out on the playoffs. So, acquiring Cronenworth helped the Padres continue to compete in a difficult yet top heavy NL West.

The First Myth: The Rays didn’t evaluate Cronenworth properly and should have been able to see him becoming a good ML player as soon as he got the opportunity.

Cronenworth had been a well-rounded, solid hitter his entire minor league career even before his breakout in 2019. In 407 games from 2015 through 2018, he slashed .272/.363/.367 with a 117 wRC+. Good, but nothing too wild, so when he had a better 2019, it was taken by the Rays with a reasonable amount of skepticism. 

Based on his track record and tools at the time, Cronenworth was never expected to have enough power to be a big contributor on a ML roster. His versatility, glove, and contact ability gave him a relatively safe floor as a bench utility infielder (for what it’s worth, that’s the role Rays would have deployed him in), but nobody expected him to be a big league 2nd baseman who could fill in at SS and 1B when needed. The Rays simply decided to sell high on a player who they would’ve lost anyways in the Rule 5 Draft and that player ended up over performing for his first few seasons in a full-time role.

There is no crystal ball teams can use to predict which players will magically develop power they never had before. If there was a crystal ball, the Padres would be asking to borrow it right now; Cronenworth is beginning to decline already while showing some red flags (check out the rolling averages on some of his quality of contact metrics… yikes) despite entering his prime, and the Padres would probably like to know if they should ship him off somewhere now before he loses too much value. If he performs poorly in 2023, will the same people who claim to know more than MLB front offices about player evaluation say that the Padres didn’t evaluate Cronenworth properly?

The Second Myth: Even if the Rays weren’t wrong for trading Cronenworth and it wasn’t a total fleece, he was still much better than Wendle.

The Rays took a calculated and relatively safe risk in keeping Wendle over Cronenworth. In 2022, Rays’ fans saw what happens when you rely on rookies and young players too much. There is inherent value in keeping veterans with high floors even if they are coming off poor seasons (like Wendle in 2019). 

The numbers say most rookies aren’t good, so if you’re faced with putting a veteran or rookie in a certain role, the veteran is usually the better choice – especially if you’re looking to win now. If your style is to tank, fielding rookies is a great idea.

The Numbers

In order to limit the affect of survivorship bias while still using a meaningful sample size, I looked at all rookie seasons for position players with at least 100 PA in a year since 2021. The average fWAR/100 PA for those 199 rookie seasons was 0.17 while the average fWAR/100 PA for the 730 non-rookie seasons under the same parameters was 0.28 – that’s a 65% increase. Additionally, 33% of rookie seasons over the past two years had an fWAR less than or equal to zero compared to just 25% of non-rookie seasons.

The Comparison

So now we know trusting a rookie to perform right away is a significant risk. However, thanks to hindsight, we know Cronenworth wasn’t just your average rookie. Was he that much better than Wendle from 2020 through 2021? We’ll take a quick look at offense and base running, defense, and two different kinds of WAR before we jump to any conclusions.

Offense and Base Running

Cronenworth is better than Wendle at the plate without a doubt, but Wendle’s ability to take an extra 90 feet whenever possible helps keep the overall production close when looking at wRC+.

We’ll compare their offensive numbers below; with their splits vs RHP in parentheses:

Statistic	Cronenworth	Wendle
wRC+	119 (127)	109 (118)
wOBA	.344 (.358)	.322 (.336)
xwOBA	.355 (.373)	.291 (.300)
BB/K	0.6 (0.7)	0.3 (0.2)
BsR/100 PA	0.13	0.18

Defense

Wendle came out on top here quite easily as he is a much stronger defender at the middle infield positions. The only edge Cronenworth has on him here is that he can play 1B (although I’m sure Wendle would try if asked):

Position	Cronenworth	Wendle
1B	1.36 DRS/100 innings, 1.36 OAA/100 innings	NA
2B	0.46 DRS/100 innings, 0.27 OAA/100 innings	1.51 DRS/100 innings, 1.89 OAA/100 innings
SS	-1.07 DRS/100 innings, 0.0 OAA/100 innings	1.45 DRS/100 innings,  1.09 OAA/100 innings
3B	NA	0.43 DRS/100 innings, 0.22 OAA/100 innings

fWAR and bWAR

Lastly, when looking at fWAR Cronenworth maintained a very solid 0.68 fWAR/100 PA during that time while Wendle kept pace with his 0.60 fWAR.

Cronenworth had a 0.77 bWAR/100 PA while Wendle had a 0.76 bWAR/100 PA. Slight edge to Cronenworth overall, but virtually even according to Baseball Reference.

If we extrapolate each version of WAR to a 500 PA pace, Cronenworth would have a 3.4 fWAR and a 3.9 bWAR. Wendle would have a 3.0 fWAR and a 3.8 bWAR. Is a few tenths of a win above replacement worth the inherent (and often detrimental) risk of trying to rely on a rookie? The answer to that question is obvious.

The Conclusion

While we won’t know who “won” the trade for 5-6 years (and maybe even more) depending on what happens with Santiago Suarez and Marcus Johnson, it’s fair to say that both teams benefited from the initial trade. It’s not the fleece for either team that some fans aggressively want it to be.

The Rays did not make a mistake in shipping Cronenworth off to San Diego; the role he would’ve played in was fantastically filled by Wendle. Erik Neander and the front office staff were faced with the decision to employ Wendle or Cronenworth as their LH utility bench guy and made a good, safe decision – although they wouldn’t have been wrong if they opted for Cronenworth over Wendle because both are really good major league players.