Phillies: This Struggling Player is a Top-Ranked Trade Piece

The Philadelphia Phillies have quite a few struggling players and not a lot going on in the farm system, which makes their trade deadline moves all the more unpredictable.

Will Dave Dombrowski trade someone from the big-league squad, or bundle some unexpected prospects? Maybe both, maybe neither! It’s all very hectic.

But perhaps the most unexpected trade deadline news so far is that Aaron Nola is one of the fifty MLB players who made FanGraphs’ annual Trade Value rankings.

For over a decade, FanGraphs has been ranking “the top 50 players in baseball by their value in a potential trade,” and this year, the starter is the only Phillies player on the list.

According to the rankings’ intro sheet, the factors that determine said rankings are as follows:

"“We considered a broad spectrum of inputs: estimates of current value, projections of future value, age, contract status, positional scarcity, and pretty much any other data we could get our hands on were all considered.The central question we considered boils down to this: how much value could a team expect to get in trade for each player on the list?” – Ben Clemens and Kevin Goldstein, FanGraphs"

The 28-year-old Nola is in his seventh season in the bigs, and it’s not going well at all. Over 19 starts, he has a 4.64 ERA across 1.06 2/3 innings, second-most on the staff. His strikeout numbers (131) are strong, but his 24 walks rank fourth on the squad.

Nola has given up the most runs (both earned and unearned) on the team, and he’s one of three pitchers in the rotation who has allowed 15 or more home runs – he leads with 17. He also has hit more batters than any Phillies pitcher and is the only one with a balk. In short, Nola needs to step up.

Ironically, today is the anniversary of his major-league debut in 2015. He threw six innings of one-run ball with six strikeouts against the Tampa Bay Rays.

FanGraphs also included an ‘Honorable Mentions’ section for players who might have made the list otherwise if not precluded by a big contract, impending free agency, injuries, or various aspects of team control. The ‘Stars with Big Contracts’ section was littered with Phillies: Zack Wheeler, J.T. Realmuto, and Bryce Harper comprised nearly half of the roster.

Should the Phillies trade Aaron Nola?

FanGraphs isn’t saying that these teams should trade these specific players, rather estimating that these are the players who would garner the highest return based on their value.

With Nola, I’m inclined to agree. He’s certainly underperforming this season, but he’s both young enough and seasoned enough to improve. Aside from 2021 and 2016, his ERA has been under 3.87 every season. He’d thrown 200+ innings in back-to-back seasons before the shortened 2020 season.

Nola isn’t doing well, but he’s not one of the pitchers the Phillies should be trying to unload. Vince Velasquez, maybe, but not Nola. He could be an ace again, and the Phillies would be crazy to ship him off when they’re already in need of pitching as it is.