Trades often don't add up, but that won't stop teams from dealing

The Indians have a marketable player in defending Cy Young Award winner Cliff Lee. AP

Most baseball trades are ridiculous, the equivalent on one end of paying someone to take your money. The wonder is that so many teams make them.

Take the sad case of the Cleveland Indians, who have won more than they've lost just twice since 2001, mysteriously pulling the neat trick of drawing praise as a model franchise all the while. This year they're lousy again. Happily, they have two quite marketable players: Cliff Lee, the defending Cy Young Award winner who has run up a 2.66 ERA and averaged more than seven innings per start since the beginning of last season, and catcher Victor Martinez, who's hitting .362/.438/.564 on the year. Both are 30, both are signed to cheap contracts through next season and, together, they're worth something like a pair of decent minor leaguers. Maybe.

The problem is less the players than the money. As Dave Cameron shows here, teams paid about $4.5 million for an expected win on the free-agent market this past winter. This makes Lee and Martinez, who will, between them, earn about $26 million between now and the end of 2010, fantastic bargains. According to WAR, the metric underlying Cameron's research, the two have been worth 4.5 wins so far this year. Assume that they'll finish out the season as strong as they've started, but that next year they'll decline a bit, and you'll end up with a value of something like 16 wins for the two between now and the end of 2010. That's what a team that traded for them could optimistically expect, and it's worth nearly $50 million more than they're being paid.

By the same math, though, a random minor leaguer of the sort who might be part of a deal for two such players is far more valuable than you might think. An average player is worth two wins in a year. A prospect who struggles in his first two years, giving the team just one win in each, and then settles in at dead average for the next four before leaving the team as a free agent, will have been worth about $45 million -- and he'll likely have been paid somewhere between $15 and $20 million, given baseball's idiosyncratic pay scale. Two such players would thus be a reasonable return on Lee and Martinez.

Of course wins are worth more at some times than others, which is why if the Indians move these two they could command a premium in the deal. And real life is nowhere near so neat as these numbers. Factoring the odds that a prospect will give the team six years of more or less average play against those that he'll do nothing at all against the odds that the veteran for whom he's traded will just stop being good, while taking into account that one of them is a drunk and the other spends his spare time watching old Jerry Koosman game films, is complicated work.

Still, if you keep the basic math in mind, you'll see that most actual trades, let alone those that exist only in the minds of baseball writers, make absolutely no sense. If two legitimate stars at the tail end of their primes are in some real sense worth a couple of solid prospects and little more, what does that say about everyone else?

Even leaving money out of it, the summer trade is an especially sketchy idea for the simple reason that a lot of the season has passed by the time it's made. Say, for instance, that San Diego's Jake Peavy were to decide tomorrow that his love for the vibrant art scene in the Bridgeport and Pilsen neighborhoods of Chicago's South Side had overcome his reluctance to pitch in the American League, and that he would, therefore, accept the trade to the White Sox that he turned down last week. Leave aside the nearly $60 million that his new team would be liable for and just focus on the wins column.

Peavy, were he to pitch as well as he has so far, would be worth perhaps 3.5 wins more than the flotsam that Chicago has been running out in the back end of its rotation. Through 46 games the White Sox had played .457 baseball. All else being equal, then, Peavy -- a real live ace in his prime (he turns 28 this week) -- might take them from 74 wins to 78. There are circumstances where four wins count for a lot, to be sure. But just because a player is good doesn't mean a given team needs him.