Trade Tree: Érik Bédard

FOREWORD: Welcome to your first Mariner Trade Tree. To be included in every off-day newsletter, these brief segments will analyze and visualize various transactions the Ners have made, examining where the players we traded away are now, evaluating who we received in return, and (if those acquisitions were subsequently traded), figuring out who we ended up with after the dust settled. The Tree gives some perspective to the final, and often negative, result of past trades. They're depressing, they're interesting…like nearly every Mariner thing – they're depressively interesting.

The Érik Bédard Trade Tree

February 8, 2008: The Seattle Mariners, ignoring a guy named Félix Hernández, convinced themselves they needed a staff ace and acquired Érik Bédard (yes, those accents are correct) from the Baltimore Orioles. In exchange, they sent the Orioles five players: RHP Kam Mickolio, LHP Tony Butler, LHP George Sherrill, RHP Chris Tillman, and some outfielder named Adam Jones. The Orioles ended up trading Sherrill, (one All-Star game appearance later) to the Dodgers in exchange for RHP Steve Johnson and INF Josh Bell, and sent Mickolio (plus David Hernandez) to the Diamondbacks in exchange for corner infielder Mark Reynolds. They continue to reap the immense benefits of Jones and Tillman today. Meanwhile, Érik Bédard fizzled into injury-prone nothingness, and was eventually traded in 2011 to Boston for OF Chih Hsien-Chiang and OF Trayvon Robinson. Robinson was later flipped for IF Robert Andino from – you guessed it – the Baltimore Orioles.

The image below gives a visual idea of what happened in this worse-than-Craigslist catastrophe, complete with WAR totals for each player during their stint with the respective teams. The top row of each team's diagram shows the players who were initially involved in the 2008 trade, the bottom row shows the players who eventually were acquired, and the middle row those who were swapped in between (if applicable). A solid color border around a player’s picture means that they are still with that team, while a dashed border around a player means that they have left that team either via free agency, release, or trade. If a player was traded, the arrows indicate who was received in return.

Yes, we Ner fans all know that this trade was awful – but the big takeaway from this chart is that it's even worse than we remember. We did NOT exchange a stud centerfielder (Jones has appeared in 5 All-Star Games, been awarded 4 Gold Gloves, 1 Silver Slugger, and has a career .277 average), a future mid-rotation starter (Tillman is better than Carlos Silva, Wade Miley and Yovani Gallardo), a briefly above average reliever, and two pitching prospects for ace Érik Bédard. We DID trade all that for 46 starts from "ace" Érik Bédard, 2 seasons of Trayvon Robinson, and 1 season of Robert Andino. Not that any Ner fan will be surprised by the WAR totals, but with a WAR differential of -40.0 for the Mariners, this trade actually will go down as the worst in team history…worse than even the likes of Derek Lowe and Jason Varitek for Healthcliff Slocumb.

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