Why Phillies will probably watch another team trade for Manny Machado

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BALTIMORE — A year ago today, this was what the Phillies looked like. 

It's the second week of July and the Orioles' season has been over for months. They're 42 games under .500 after the Phillies took care of them, 5-4, in Thursday night's makeup game (see first take).

The 2017 Phillies weren't quite this bad, but a calendar year ago, they were 30 games under .500. During the first half last season, the Phils looked just as feeble on most nights as these O's.

Things have gotten so bad and so boring in Baltimore. Adam Jones' fourth-inning at-bat Thursday exemplified it. Facing Nick Pivetta, Jones saw three pitches, all curveballs, and flailed at the third for strike three. It was a bad at-bat that elicited almost no reaction from the mostly pro-Phillies crowd at Camden Yards. Even Jones himself couldn't muster much frustration from a "Who cares?" at-bat, trying to slam his bat against the ground but doing so weakly.

Chris Davis is hitting .156 with 113 strikeouts and barely even gets booed. O's fans have seen it too often this season to care much one way or the other.

This is what happens when a team attempts to play out the string with an aging core that hasn't clicked in three of the last four years.

In some ways, the Orioles' situation is similar to what went wrong with the Phillies after 2011. They held on too long, didn't trade their aging stars when their value was highest, whiffed on high draft picks, and as a result, the bottom was much deeper than most anticipated. There's going to be a whole lot of pain for the Orioles the next handful of years the way there was for the 2012-17 Phillies.

Except unlike those Phillies teams, the Orioles don't have a long-term asset with as much trade value as Cole Hamels. They haven't been able to make a Papelbon-for-Pivetta kind of deal or an under-the-radar trade like Roberto Hernandez for Victor Arano and Jesmuel Valentin. 

What to do with Machado
The Orioles should have traded Manny Machado a year ago, the same way the Phillies should have tried more aggressively to trade Cliff Lee 12-18 months earlier than they did. 

The O's chose instead to keep Machado because he's a perennial MVP candidate and they were coming off an 89-73 season. The organization talked itself into attempting one more run in 2017, the way the Phillies did in 2014 with the acquisitions of veterans like A.J. Burnett and Marlon Byrd.

Now, the O's find themselves in the predicament of having a rental superstar (Machado) they absolutely, positively need to get full value for in a trade. They have a player they know every contender would love to have but that no contender could feel great about swapping a group of top prospects for because of the contractual uncertainty.

Because of how much the Orioles have messed up this situation, they have to hold out until they can feel like they're "winning" a Machado trade.

Which gets me to this: I just don't see the Phillies acquiring Machado this month. There are too many other teams that make more sense for a midseason rental — the Brewers, Cardinals and Diamondbacks, for example. None of those teams will be able to afford Machado in free agency. But as a two-month rental? That has major appeal for a mid-market team in win-now mode, a la Milwaukee with CC Sabathia in 2008.

The Brewers, who have a real shot to win the NL Central and might need to make one more move to separate themselves from the Cubs to avoid the wild-card game, should overpay in a trade for Machado. The Phillies, contrarily, should not. They're not in win-now mode. They're not guaranteed a playoff spot even with Machado in August and September. 

For the Phillies, acquiring a different rental player like Adrian Beltre would be significantly cheaper and might be nearly as impactful over a two-month sample of games. 

For example, Maikel Franco just hit .318/.381/.523 over a six-week stretch, outhitting players like Aaron Judge and Freddie Freeman.

Over the course of multiple years, of course, the younger and more talented Machado would provide more value than a Beltre-type. But when you're talking about a sample of 60 games, a lot can happen. And trading for Machado probably doesn't give you much of, if any, advantage in re-signing him anyway (see story).

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