Mythical Met Mistakes: Scott Kazmir

And, yeah, it was still a terrible trade in both process and result.

… from what I can gather … … … Scott Kazmirrrrr = Oliver Perez = Sandy Koufax …
And they Rays lied, cause they said they were going to send Carlos Zambrano, but they sent Victor Zambrano …

regardless of how Kazmir turned out, which has been better than Oliver Perez.

would have likely put us in the playoffs in 2007 and 2008. There is no arguing that he is injury prone. However since his arrival on the ML scene, he has posted a WAR over 5 once, over 3 twice, and over 2 twice. Victor Zambrano on the other hand pitched about a year worth of mediocre to bad baseball for the Mets before flaming out entirely and never making it back to the Majors. Fortunato spent the entire year after the trade on the DL with a herniated disc. How is this not an awful trade?

Others covered it in the above comments already.

Kazmir may not be the superace we all thought he could be (he still has time, however), but Kazmir has more accomplishments thus far than Victor Zambrano and Bartolome Fortunado had with us.

Why don’t we have him on our team? All he does is go out and get wins.

When in fact it is bunk. And definitely not The Bunk.

That indicates how dominant he was at his level. That doesn’t mean he’s a thrower

His 2007 season, of 5.3 WAR would’ve got us into the playoffs. If you replace Perez with Kazmir, the Mets still make the playoffs by 2 games. In 2008, Kazmir was .8 WAR ahead of Perez. That probably would’ve been enough to get the wild card. IN 2009, Kazmir was 3 WAR ahead of Perez, and this year in 2010, Perez is better than Kazmir, though it’s early to tell.

It just hasn’t reached Jeff Bagwell-for-Larry Andersen levels of the worst in the history of baseball because Kazmir might actually be cooked at this point. Still, he gave TB several very good seasons (including one in which they went to the World Series) and Zambrano gave us one medicore season.

It’s a bad, bad trade, but just not quite as bad as we might have once thought.

The thing about trades is that there is no single proper way to evaluate them. Evaluating them only after the fact ignores one very important aspect: opportunity costs. A prospect is an asset, something with a definite value. What made the trade so terrible was that the going rate for Victor Zambrano, a 30-year-old pitcher with terrible command and recent arm troubles, was nowhere near Scott Kazmir. It might have been Joselo Diaz and Bartolome Fortunato, the throw-ins included in the trade. To suggest that Zambrano and Kazmir were equivalent values at the time was simply laughable. If nothing else, the trade was a misappropriation of valuable organizational resources.

And of course, it’s ridiculous to suggest that Kazmir has been a bust as it is, even if he hasn’t been quite as good as people thought in 2003.

He’s got a career 3.90 FIP in the AL East (and not as a member of the Skanks or Sux, so he gets to regularly face both of them). That’s not exactly a bust…it’s actually exactly the opposite. Compare that to Victor Zambrano and his less than solid 4.95 career FIP (and he was over 5 when the Mets traded for him). It didn’t look good on paper at the time, and it really doesn’t look good now.

Secondly, I wouldn’t exactly call him injury prone. He’s had 3 seasons in his career where he missed any starts, and hasn’t made less than 24 since he was a full time big leaguer. He’s had a few injuries the last few season, but nothing serious and he’s still been very effective when he’s pitched (4.37 and 4.26 FIP’s).

I realize that he had a bad game the other night, but frankly that doesn’t make this argument any better than it was in 2004 (when it was still a weak argument). As has already been pointed out a few times, I’d stay away from using winzzz as the basis of your arguments in the future and actually look up some stats (which in this case all make your argument appear to be completely wrong)

I am so MAd! Kazmir… totAlly killed my FANTASY team this wEek1

Instead of nobody.

you say the trade was good because Niese is better and compare him to Perez. He was traded for Perez he wa straded for 2 guys who did nothing for us. Victor Zambrano was injured after only a few appearances for us and Fortunato I think was gone the next season. Kazmir is a better player than those 2, he could have brought back a better return for his trade.

Kazmir trade was one of the worst prospect trades of the Mets history, we got nothing for someone who was a top prospect. Perez, Niese and hampton have nothing to do with thetrade.