Where have all the starters gone? Revisiting the Edwin Jackson trade tree, and the state of modern baseball

Allow me to reintroduce myself. I’m Brad; nice to see you all! For many years, I had the privilege of writing for DRaysBay, but that privilege was paused in January 2018 when the Miami Marlins hired me to work in their analytics department. I have joined the Free Agent class this offseason, and the powers at DRaysBay have graciously invited me to once again explore the minutia of Tampa Bay baseball with you all. Thank you for reading! And I hope you enjoy.

Edwin Jackson as a Case Study

I may never forget Edwin Jackson’s 2007 season. It is seared in my memory. As a longsuffering Devil Rays fan, I felt like the team as a whole was so very near to turning a corner. And this young flamethrower, Edwin Jackson, seemed like a key piece to the puzzle. I remember following the ancient version of Gameday on MLB.com during his Spring Training outings, feeling real optimism that his transition to the rotation was going to be a good one.

Then he went on to lose his first 8 decisions over 13 games. This was back when I still cared a bit about W-L record for a pitcher, so this tragic start to the season was nothing short of a heartbreaking letdown. And as someone who watched each inning of those first 13 games, there simply wasn’t much redeeming about his work in those games (7.85 ERA and 5.56 FIP).

Photo by J. Meric/Getty Images

And then, thereabouts of his 14th game, something happened. I’m not being intentionally vague. I can’t remember exactly what happened, and since the MLB’s video archive that far back is a grim, barren landscape, I can’t research it effectively. But I believe he got hit in the face by an errant throw to the plate. I want to say there was blood involved. And Jackson, who had boxed when he was younger, seemed to access a different gear, throwing with a bit of fire in his gut. He completed 6 IP with just 2 ER to beat the Dodgers for his first win of the season, soaring up to a, well, a 1-8 record.

At least, that’s how I remember it. All the time between then and now has enabled me able to see Jackson, and his career, in a different, larger context. I recently dug into Jackson’s career and his no hitter against the Rays, and how both represent the changing MLB landscape in my latest YouTube video, which I’ll embed below.

But today, I’d like to dig into the ripple effects of Jackson’s time with the Rays — not just his trade tree, which is an important case study in itself, but also what his prototype symbolized, as well as the Rays’ willingness to move him before even his first season of arbitration.

The Trade Tree with a Hundred Branches

Back in 2018, our friend Adam Sanford dug into the initial Edwin Jackson trade tree. He made this handy graphic, which shows how, even 6 years ago, Edwin Jackson’s career left enormous ripples in its wake:

Adam Sanford

I’ve taken the liberty of highlighting the Rays-relevant names:

It is worth noting that while Willy Aybar and Jeff Ridgway are indeed on the tree, they connect to Danys Baez (who came to the Devil Rays via free agency, not a trade), so they are not connected in the terms we’re talking about today. (Aybar was indeed involved in a trade with Baez, but it was alongside Baez and it was after Baez was outside the org.)

The Rays-relevant tree has grown since then, so let’s see what it looks like now:

I want to instead focus on the high level pieces here, denoted by color in the chart above:

• Two relievers (blue) ->
• One starting pitcher (green) ->
• One position player (red) ->
• One reliever (blue) ->
• Two starting pitcher prospects (green) ->
• One position player minor leaguer

Did you know the Edwin Jackson, or rather Danys Baez / Lance Carter, trade tree is still alive?

The Red-Blue-Green Spiral

What makes this trade tree particularly interesting to me is the presence of both a pattern and a decay. We start with ostensibly decent relievers (both Baez and Carter were coming off what would unfortunately prove to be by far the best years of their respective careers), which then become an out-of-options, high-ceiling starting pitcher prospect.

That is such an anachronistic player, there really is not a modern equivalent of who Jackson was in 2007.

Photo by Jim McIsaac/Getty Images

In a modern player development pipeline, a player like Jackson — who was throwing hard, but learning how to pitch while trying to outrun the Rule 5 draft — would be placed almost immediately into relief. Pitching coaches would abandon the effort to teach him a third pitch, and see if they could unlock 100 mph in relief. And frankly, it is hard to argue with that approach. It is exactly what we did with RP Sean Reynolds when I was with the Marlins.

What did the Dodgers get out of trying to stick with Jackson as a starter? They burned through his options until he was not longer an asset a competitive team could handle, so they had to gamble on relievers instead. The odds are pretty good that they might have had a better reliever in Jackson than both Baez and Carter combined, but their decision to build him up as an SP ultimately cost them.

Shortly after Jackson began to find a groove, settling in as a volatile, but playable 5th starter type, the Rays began to get antsy, wondering who would be better to keep for the long term: Jackson or fellow 5th-starter prototype Andy Sonnanstine, given both were approaching the expensive years of their contract life cycle.

I was personally and tragically in the Sonnanstine camp, if I recall correctly. And while Jackson went on to have a solid career as an innings eating pitcher (with a No Hitter, too, albeit a bizarre one, highlighted in the video above, which was against the Rays in 2010), Sonnanstine peaked in 2008, struggling to recreate any semblance of success thereafter.

Getting back to that pattern, though, we see a drop off in quality and rarity with each successive trade after Jackson.

OF Matt Joyce compiles a useful 10-ish WAR with the Rays, and they arguably hang onto him too long (at least, if their objective is to win every trade, team record be damned), and he turns into a fairly replaceable short reliever in RHP Kevin Jepsen.

Jepsen looks sharp for a half season with Tampa Bay, and they turn Jepsen into a pair of low-level pitching prospects, both of whom were presently starters in the minors, though my guess that, internally, the org saw RHP Chih-Wei Hu as the higher ceiling pitcher (given he was performing well in High-A and appearing in some prospect lists as a possible MLB reliever).

Hu reached the majors and looked like a reasonable emergency multi-inning reliever, and that allowed the Rays to cash out one more time on the Jackson tree during the offseason. They got a position player, Gionti Turner, who had only compiled one minor league season, but looked decent (113 wRC+) in a 46-game Rookie Ball debut. In terms of risk profile though, 16-year-olds in the DSL carry larger error bars than a guy with Turner’s profile (17-year-old 26th Round Pick). So the fact he compiled some 36 PA in Triple-A this year is actually in the vicinity of a 90th percentile outcome.

Technically. I am referring to Turner here as a minor leaguer, not a prospect, because he appears through both his performance and playing time to be what the industry calls an Org player — almost zero likelihood of MLB impact, but important to fill out rosters and help minor league clubs satisfy the logistics of running competitive teams.

All this to say: Some times trades work great. Some times you trade for a fringy AAA player, and they turn into a regular platoon player on a competitive team (Joyce). Some times the high-risk upside minor league trades turn into legitimate prospects, sometimes they get derailed by injuries (Tapia) or performance (Hu and Turner).

But what is more stunning here to me is that the economy for starting pitching has changed so dramatically. Or, alternatively, the economy for relievers has changed too. Jackson was a legitimate upside play, and the Dodgers had put in the grunt work of getting him close to MLB ready and healthy. But the Rays snagged him for two relievers, the better of whom had merely a 97 FIP-.

Then, just a few years later, the Rays traded Jepsen — who had a 76 FIP- in the previous season and a 72 ERA- / 106 FIP- in the present season — for a pair of lottery ticket minor leaguers, only one of whom was a ranked prospect.

Conclusion: The Bronze Age Collapse

I love studying ancient history, and one of the most talked about points in Western History is the Bronze Age collapse. There was a fairly sophisticated, globally interconnected economy circa 1200 BC, and within 100 years, it was gone. But our piecing together of that history is very difficult — piecing together any history of chaos by its very nature is going to be difficult.

So we look at these clay fragment tablets, and we compare it against these pollen samples, and over here there’s a hieroglyph from around that time, and here’s a potsherd that’s out of place, and together, we can aggregate some theories as to how and why and what that collapse looked like. We are pretty confident it happened — though there’s some debate — but the biggest questions of why, how, and what form it took remain challenging.

Likewise, starting pitching is going away. We know this.

The Tigers reached the playoffs with a mostly-opener rotation. And if you look at the data, you’ll find the average number of innings per start are indeed collapsing.

The 2024 Detroit Tigers - again, who made the playoffs - got fewer IP out of the starters than the 2012 Colorado Rockies, who held a 5.81 ERA (117 ERA-) as a starting staff.

Looking at the current landscape of pitching talent, openers make sense. Short leashes for starters make sense. It makes sense to stop trading with the Pharaoh and visiting Crete. But how did we get here?

One potsherd we can put under the microscope is this trade tree, where relievers in the mid-2000s were both less effective and more valuable in the market. And within a few years, that market began to sew up. Nowadays SP Jack Flaherty, a career 94 FIP- pitcher (albeit in the midst of an excellent 85 FIP- season) on an expiring contract, is traded for two position player prospects (both Top 30 prospects). That’s 1 green for 2 reds.

Our old friend SP Alex Cobb, having missed the entire season with an injury, was traded for a low-level starting pitcher and a PTBNL — a green for green trade, where the MLB player was merely the hope of an extant player, exchanged for a performing Rookie-level starter.

Circling back to the Rays and Edwin Jackson, this leads me to suspect the pattern they have employed in the past — one where they develop excellent performance and flip it to find high-ceiling prospects — is in a state of decay.

Much like the Bronze Age collapse, which in fact was a slow-motion crash, could the secret to the Rays success be closing?

The industry has become, in a sense, watered down with former Rays executives, operating similarly to the Tampa Bay franchise, employing the same tricks and tactics to extract excellent performance from pitchers, looking to find trades to capitalize on the market while avoiding the bills of arbitration.

When Tampa Bay alone was doing this, the fields were bountiful, and the harvest was a unmatched run of success-despite-payroll. Now, we stare down a World Series matchup between the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers, with the deep-pocketed New York Mets only narrowly not there themselves.

Wealthy teams appear to be back on top. And the trade patterns that made the Rays successful and their opener / bullpen-heavy innovations might be partly to blame.