It Happened: Sox Trade Benintendi
Benny goes to KC for Franchy Cordero, others
Man. This isn’t getting any more fun.
On Wednesday night, the Red Sox traded Andrew Benintendi to the Kansas City Royals as a part of a three team trade also involving the New York Mets. The Sox gave up Benintendi, their seventh overall pick in the 2015 draft and a key player during the team’s 2018 World Series-winning run, for 26-year-old outfielder Franchy Cordero and 22-year-old minor league starting pitcher Josh Winckowski. They will also receive three minor league players to be named later, two from Kansas City and one from the Mets. Boston will pay $2.8 million of Benintendi’s 2021 salary.
So. How was your evening?
It’s difficult to put this deal into the proper context because only two of the five players the Red Sox will receive are known. Typically teams have six months to name PTBNL’s and given COVID-19 and the expected late start to the season in the lower minor leagues, it could very well take that long. The point of all this waiting is to provide some time for Boston to scout players, something they couldn’t do last year with the cancellation of the minor league season. So while this is slightly frustrating for Red Sox fans hungry for information and maybe certain writers who want to present the fullest possible picture of an important trade, this delay is likely for the Red Sox benefit.
While the identities of the three future Red Sox are unknown, there is some informed speculation about them. According to the always connected Alex Speier at The Boston Globe,
The three players to be named are unlikely to rank among the top 10 Red Sox prospects or in the top 100 in the industry, according to a major league source, but are expected to be potential big leaguers who add depth to the farm system in need of replenishment.
That’s far from promising, but according to Ian Cundall of Sox Prospects,
So who knows? Let’s all do our best to brush past it for now and focus on what we know. We know Josh Winckowski, so discuss him first.
Winckowski was a 16th round pick of the Blue Jays in the 2016 draft out of high school. He came to the Mets organization from the Jays about two weeks ago in the Steven Matz trade. He’s a tall pitcher who throws hard, but only has two pitches currently, a fastball and a splitter. Here’s a quick scouting report from Ian Cundall.
It sounds like he has starter potential, but as Bloom said during his post-trade press conference, Winckowski should be able to make the majors in some role, which sounds a lot like they think he’s probably a reliever. But it also sounds like he’ll continue to get a chance to start in the minors, so we’ll see.
The main part of the deal (so far as we know) is Cordero, who comes with three years of team control, one more than Benintendi. He’s also played far fewer games, just 95, than Benny, who suited up for the Sox 485 times. Cordero is also cheaper than Benintendi, even with Boston picking up $2.8 million of Benny’s salary this year, Cordero’s $800,000 salary comes out to be $1.4 million less. Coincidentally, that’s about what the team just spent on Japanese reliever Hirokazu Sawamura (who you can read about here) who I definitely didn’t mention right here because I just wrote a piece about him at literally the exact time the Red Sox were dealing Benintendi.
That all said, I don’t think this trade was done because the Red Sox wanted to save $1.4 million, or because they just wanted to get rid of Andrew Benintendi. Put simply, the Red Sox must not have been expecting a return to form for Benintendi. There’s no other reason to trade him.
As I wrote here numerous times before, I’m expecting a much stronger year from Benintendi in 2021, as well. Throw another “we’ll see” on the pile.
As much as this trade was a condemnation of Benintendi, the Sox clearly do like Franchy Cordero, so let’s get into him. Cordero is an admittedly intriguing talent. He’s got prodigious power and good speed. His problems have been two-fold. First, injuries. He’s missed most of the last three seasons. Bone spurs caused him to miss much of 2018, then an elbow injury and a quad injury kept him out of the majority of the 2019 season. He had a hamate bone injury in 2020. None of those injuries were reoccurring injuries, but they were injuries and players that get hurt tend to get hurt again.
Lest you think he’s never been healthy, Cordero has played full seasons in the past, they just came in the minors. In 2017 with the Padres he played 93 games and hit .326/.369/.603 with 17 homers and, somehow, 18 triples (that is not a typo). Combine that with the 30 games he played for the Padres in San Diego that season and he stayed healthy enough to play in 123 games. The season previous to that he played in 137 games and the one before that (2015) he played in 126. He’s been healthy and played a good amount of baseball before, just not recently.
Cordero has struck out a lot, too, about 35 percent of the time so far in his brief major league career. He’s also been pretty awful against left-handed pitchers (he bats left-handed but throws right-handed) though like all samples compiled by Cordero in the majors, it’s a small one.
Those are the downsides, the reasons why he was available in this deal in the first place. There are reasons to be excited about Cordero though. Ben Pernick wrote a very interesting piece over at Pitchers List on Cordero and the statcast arguments for his viability. It’s worth reading in full, but it makes a couple points that are worth repeating here. First is that Cordero has managed to cut down on his strikeouts a lot. Take a look at what he’s done over his career.
You can see his K% went from 44.4 percent to 35 percent, 35 percent again (in just nine games) in 2019, and then last season he knocked it down to 9.5 percent. That’s a massive drop, and apparently he was doing a much better job of controlling the strike zone as well, swinging at strikes, hitting them hard (barreling pitches up), and not swinging at pitches outside the strike zone as much, all of which is impressive. Players who swing at strikes, hit them hard, and don’t swing much at balls, are typically very good, very productive hitters.
So how come he still hit pretty badly? According to Pernick, Cordero was the unluckiest player in baseball last season. That’s not hyperbole. On a list of players listed by luck, Cordero was last. If you adjusted for luck (and Pernick did), instead of a .211 batting average and a .447 slugging percentage, Cordero would’ve hit .343 with a .631 slugging percentage. Those are of course crazy impressive numbers, and in no way should that be the expectation going forward, but clearly the Red Sox see something in Cordero and my guess is it’s something like that.
Cordero likely slides into Benintendi’s vacated left field spot, though he can play some center field and some right field as well. The Red Sox likely feel freer to platoon Cordero than they would have Benintendi, so this likely means a much more fluid outfield situation featuring Cordero, Enrique Hernandez, Alex Verdugo, and Hunter Renfroe all rotating around as needed based on the opposing pitcher and other needs.
There’s also the possibility that this deal will cause the Red Sox to reengage with Jackie Bradley, Jr., and that could happen though considering what JBJ was reportedly asking for, I’m not sure it makes that much difference. I think the Red Sox would happily employ JBJ in 2021, the issue is whether to do that they have to employ him in 2024 and 2025 as well. So we’ll see if anything emerges on that front, but I don’t think this changes much.
That about covers the mechanics of the deal. The only thing left is to say good-bye. Losing players we’ve watched grow up in the organization, guys we’ve waited for and followed in the minors who came up and had success and were an important part of Red Sox history…
… is sad. It’s one thing to watch Craig Kimbrel, who had a very good season and an utterly amazing season in a Red Sox uniform, sign with another team. I’ll always look back fondly on Kimbrel’s time in Boston and be thankful for his successes, but he wasn’t one of those guys who we got to see grow up in front of us. Kimbrel was an already finished product when he showed up in Boston. Benintendi wasn’t. He was just a pup.
Benintendi was Boston’s seventh overall pick in the 2015 draft, and he blew though the minors like he was rushing to get out of a burning building. In 2017 he was the number one prospect in baseball according to MLB Pipeline and Baseball America. That was after he’d already put up a 118 OPS+ in 34 games with Boston as a 21-year-old at the end of the 2016 season. In 2017 he played 151 games for the Red Sox, hit 20 homers, and was roughly league average at the plate (which was admittedly slightly disappointing) despite being just 22. The 2018 season saw him take a step forward, posting a 123 OPS+ with good defense, and contributing as a starting left fielder on the 108-win World Series championship-winning Boston Red Sox.
But 2019 saw him regress in just about every facet. He slowed in the field, while at the plate his power and batting average both fell. Then in 2020 everything fell apart. He struggled badly for 14 games before missing the rest of the year with a rib injury.
It feels like that’s not what was supposed to happen. 2018 was supposed to be another stepping stone, a rung on the ladder to stardom for the sweet-swinging lefty left fielder. Benintendi was supposed to be an extension candidate, a long term answer in left field, a guy who brought both athleticism and surprising power to the plate and made Boston’s lineup that much better and that much longer. He was supposed to be the smile and the hair, another short incredibly good player in the mold of his teammates Dustin Pedroia and Mookie Betts. Instead, things didn’t turn out the way we thought, the way we hoped.
So here we are again, saying good-bye to another player we thought would be in Boston a lot longer. “We’ll always have 2018” wasn’t supposed to be something we said this often, and it wasn’t supposed to mean “We’ll only have 2018” either. The 2018 season was supposed to be a starting point. Sure, teams change, trades are made, but this was a homegrown and young bunch and there wasn’t any reason they couldn’t all stay together long term. There wasn’t any reason they couldn’t run it back again, and again, and again, dancing in the Fenway outfield forever.
Maybe in some Field of Dreams timeline in some far off universe that is what is happening, but not here, not in this one. Benintendi is a Royal. Welcome to Boston, Franchy. You can’t accuse life of being boring.
Hey you embedded my tweet! That was unexpected. Great analysis as always, Matt. Will miss Benny, but it feels like a fresh start will do him some good.
Excellent analysis. As you note, it comes down to how the Red Sox view Benintendi going forward. He always had a high floor, but his ceiling was an All-Star OF — maybe a CF — with a great hit tool, power, speed and patience. He doesn’t look like he’s going to become that player, and this is the kind of decision MLB talent evaluators get paid big bucks to make.