The 2016 deadline trade of Aroldis Chapman is considered by many to be one of the most lopsided overpays in history. But was it?

In this latest installment of our series on historic trades, we explore what they might have looked like using the model we have today.

Note: Since this site (and our model) didn’t exist when these trades occurred, we may not have access to all the data we currently use, so some of the inputs are not as accurate as they would be today. But let’s try it anyway, just for fun.

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On July 25, 2016, the New York Yankees traded closer Aroldis Chapman to the Chicago Cubs  for three prospects – 2B/SS Gleyber Torres, OF Billy McKinney, and OF Rashad Crawford – and reliever Adam Warren. It was considered a mind-blowing haul for New York.

At the time, the Cubs had a formidable team, and were going all-in to win their first World Series since 1908. Acquiring Chapman was the cherry on top, the late-inning arm they needed to ensure playoff victories.

The Yankees, meanwhile, had no need for Chapman that year once they realized they didn’t quite have all the pieces to contend. Although they’ve never had a rebuilding year, this one came close – they finished in 4th place (albeit with a winning record of 84-78) – so they wisely took the opportunity to sell short-term assets like Chapman to acquire longer-term pieces like Torres. And, as if to have their cake and eat it too, they turned around and re-signed Chapman to a long-term contract in the following offseason, to the delight of Yankee fans.

In July, then, the Yankees were sellers and the Cubs were clear buyers.

So what would our numbers show if we’d had the model then? How lopsided was it?

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Imagine it’s July, 2016, and we’re looking ahead.

Aroldis Chapman is, arguably, the most dominant reliever in baseball. And he’s not only elite, he’s consistently elite. That’s a rare combination. He would be well on his way to producing 2.7 fWAR in 2016, after putting up 2.5 in 2015 and 2.8 in 2014, the latter two seasons with the Reds. And he’s still in his prime, at age 28.

Further, his peripherals back it up. He’s sporting a ridiculous .220 xwOBA (average for a reliever is about .300). His WPA (Win Probability Added, a key stat for relievers) is on its way to 2.96, after two consecutive years of 2.53. His K%-BB% is 32.4, also extraordinary. There’s just no weakness here – everywhere you look it’s dominance.

On the downside, he’s a rental. The Cubs would be getting him for only two months, plus whatever he delivers in the playoffs. And he’s not super cheap, as he’s making $11.3M on his contract. Then again, the Cubs would only be paying a third of that.

So given all that, let’s take a look at what our model would show:

Name	Years	AFV	Salary	Surplus	Low	Median	High
Chapman	0.3	24.3	3.7	20.6	18.5	22.6	26.7

On the field, he’s worth over $24.3M for those last two months of the regular season, plus October. To be transparent, we’ve included the extra month of field time in our AFV calculation because, for anyone trading for a guy like this, using him in October was the whole idea – to win in the playoffs all the way through the World Series. 

And teams don’t have to pay players in the postseason (they get a bonus from the league instead), so it’s essentially a free month of service from the team’s perspective (assuming they make it a whole month). Therefore, the salary number doesn’t change (the team just needs to pay him for his last two months).

We’ve included a small market premium here as well, skewing his range up a bit to reflect the fact that there would likely be a bidding war for him. We’ve never seen a rental reliever’s numbers this high, but it tracks. Any team trading for Chapman in late 2016 would have to give up at least $22.6M in value.

The Yankees’ return

So let’s see what the Yankees would get back, starting with veteran reliever Adam Warren:

Name	Years	AFV	Salary	Surplus	Low	Median	High
Warren	2.3	0.4	0.6	-0.2	-0.4	-0.2	0

Warren is the same age (28) as Chapman, but nowhere near the same caliber of pitcher. He’s a middling middle reliever, who, at the time of the trade, is struggling, on his way to putting up -0.5 fWAR, a below-average xwOBA, negative WPA, a 5.12 FIP, and a whopping 14.5% HR/FB rate. Opposing hitters are pounding him. He did have a couple of good years before this, which saves his bacon here, but he’s in this deal mostly as just a guy to backfill a bullpen slot.

The prospect piece of the package is where it’s at, and within that, Gleyber Torres is the prize. The valuation estimates at this time for the three minor-leaguers in the deal are (in $Ms; we’ve also adjusted all numbers to 2016-era dollars):

Torres	53.2
McKinney	1.8
Crawford	0.2
Total	55.2

Torres is on his way to being a Top 5 prospect in baseball in the following offseason, per Baseball America and MLB Pipeline; prior to the 2016 season he was ranked No. 41 and No. 28, respectively, by those outlets, so we’ve split the difference here between those values. Fangraphs would also go on to rate him a 60 FV the following offseason, but he was a bit lower than that coming into 2016 (as a 50+, in their old system). So we’ve split the difference there as well. In any case, we feel confident that his value at this time is around this low-50s number.

McKinney is a former first-rounder who hasn’t put it together (and never really would), so his stock has fallen. Crawford is athletic, but hasn’t hit. He’s a flyer.

So these numbers confirm that it’s an overpay by the Cubs: 

Cubs get:		Yankees get:
Chapman	22.6	Torres	53.2
		McKinney	1.8
		Crawford	0.2
		Warren	-0.2
Total	22.6	Total	55.0

On paper, by including Torres, the Cubs overpaid by more than double what Chapman was worth. They gave up an excess $32.4M in value to win the bid, albeit for the most dominant closer in the game at the time. Crazy, right?

So how did each team fare with their new players after that? Let’s take a look.

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We know that, with Chapman’s help, the Cubs did indeed go all the way, and won the World Series in 2016 – their first in 108 years. That is impossible to quantify. They bet big, and they won big. Pretty sure Theo Epstein has no regrets.

And how did the Yankees do on their side?

Gleyber Torres, fWAR and value produced (in $Ms, per Fangraphs), plus current projected value:

Torres	fWAR	Value	Salary	Surplus value
2018	2.4	19.3	.545	18.8
2019	3.6	28.5	.605	27.9
2020*	0.4	3.4	.625	2.8
2021	1.2	9.3	4.0	5.3
2022-2024^	6.6	52.8	28.0	24.8
Total	14.3	113.3	33.8	79.5

*2020 salary numbers are adjusted down for the shortened season.

^Projection based on our model, including the remainder of 2022 plus the two subsequent years of control.

Through 2021, Torres has produced $54.7M in surplus value – pretty close to his original prospect estimate. But he’s expected to produce an additional $24.8M for his three final years of control, bringing his total surplus to $79.5M.

To be fair, that’s not the same as his theoretical trade value. That’s because, defensively, Torres has been moved off of shortstop (it became clear last year that he just couldn’t handle the demands of the position), and is a 2B only at this point. That has much less market value. In our model, we’ve accordingly applied a 30% discount to his field value going forward.

Adjusting for that gives us the following:

Gleyber Torres, market value-adjusted:

Torres	fWAR	Value	Salary	Surplus value
2018	2.4	19.3	.545	18.8
2019	3.6	28.5	.605	27.9
2020*	0.4	3.4	.625	2.8
2021	1.2	9.3	4.0	5.3
2022-2024^	6.6	37.0	28.0	9.0
Total	14.3	97.5	33.8	63.7

As a 2B-only from here on (and one that isn’t even playing every day), Torres’ surplus value is eroding. Still, that doesn’t change the fact that, even with that adjustment, Torres is on track to produce $63.7M in total surplus value – a bit more than his prospect estimate of $53.2M at the time of the trade. So, yeah, that one has worked out.

And the other pieces?

Nothing much to see here, folks. 

Adam Warren at least had a bounceback year for the Yankees in 2017, which means they did net some value out of him:

Adam Warren	fWAR	Value	Salary	Surplus Value
2017	1.2	9.4	2.29	7.1
2018	0.2	1.9	3.315	-1.4
Total	3.6	29.1	22.0	5.7

Warren was traded to the Mariners on July 30, 2018 for international bonus slot rights. So the Yankees actually netted some value out of the remainder of his last control year, although for our purposes here we’ll call it a wash, as there isn’t much quantifiable value in those rights.

The larger point is that he was moderately value-positive for them in 2017, which is gravy on top of the main return of Torres.

McKinney has produced a grand total of -0.8 fWAR for his career, for various teams, and has been DFA’d multiple times. However, to the Yankees’ credit, they did manage to recoup some value out of him while he still had some, by trading him (along with Brandon Drury) to Toronto for pitcher J.A. Happ at the 2018 deadline. 

How much was that? Not much. Using some back-of-the-envelope math, Happ was a 35-year-old in the midst of a 3-WAR season, so let’s say he was expected to produce 1 WAR for the remainder of that year. But being 35, he had some injury risk and aging-curve-based performance risk, which means we need to adjust expectations down to the equivalent of about 0.6 fWAR, which means that piece of his season was worth about $4.8M. Pro-rating his $13M down, he was owed $4.3M. So he had a surplus of $0.5M, represented by McKinney and Drury combined. Let’s say McKinney was worth $0.3M of that and call it a day.

Crawford, meanwhile, was a bust. 

Summary

Now let’s look at the big picture. For the purposes of this exercise, we are going to assume the Cubs got at least their money’s worth, as parsing out the exact value of their side from the date of the transaction is complicated, and frankly unnecessary, since we all know what happened.

Cubs got:

Player	Expected surplus value	Actual surplus value delivered/ expected	Gap
Chapman	22.6	22.6	0

Yankees got:

Player	Expected surplus value	Actual surplus value delivered/ expected	Gap
Torres	53.2	63.7	10.5
Warren	-0.2	5.7	5.9
McKinney	1.8	0.3	-1.5
Crawford	0.2	0	-0.2
Total	55.0	69.7	14.7

So, on a surplus value basis, it’s not close. The Yankees gave up $22.6M in value, and got back $69.7M, for a total profit of $45.1M. That’s not a surprise, considering the trade is still viewed today as a major overpay by Chicago.

Key takeaways

You don’t see trades like this very often. The closest one to this we saw was the 2021 deadline trade of Craig Kimbrel from the Cubs to the White Sox – wherein the Sox traded away a former top prospect, Nick Madrigal, and a reliever, Codi Heuer, in the hopes that Kimbrel (like Chapman before him) would put them over the top. It didn’t happen, but the intent was the same, and the degree of overpay was similar.

On paper, then, this one was a major outlier. If our model had been around then, it would have rejected it. But we also would shrug and acknowledge that, sometimes, outliers happen. 

For the Yankees, although Torres’ career has not panned out quite the way they had hoped, he still more or less delivered against reasonable expectations. With every top prospect valuation, there is wiggle room baked in, representing the spectrum of probabilities – on the high end the player becomes a superstar; on the low end, he’s a bust. Torres seems to have settled in the above-average range: he’s not a superstar, but he’s still a useful player.

To get six+ years of that for two months of a closer you don’t need? Any GM would take that to the bank. The fact that Brian Cashman then re-signed Chapman to a free agent deal in the ensuing offseason was further evidence of his poker-playing prowess.

And for the Cubs? They won their first World Series in 108 years, breaking a long curse, with Chapman’s help. You can’t put a price on that.