Manny Parra made his first start today after a four-start stint in AAA where he did pretty darn well compared to his big league disaster. His peripherals aren’t quite there yet (19K, 13BB, 24 2/3 innings pitched), but he did a good job of keeping the ball in the park and on the ground. He’s appeared to regain at least some confidence and with the rotation in flux as it is it’s time to bring him back.

He decided to perform admirably, to the tune of 7 shutout innings. He hardly had any jams and used the sun to his advantage (Todd Coffey, however, did not). He threw a ton of strikes after complaining about not having the confidence to throw any of his pitches for strikes and got ahead of hitters better than I’ve seen him do all season long.

With him coming back and hopefully being a solid rotation piece, should the Brewers still trade for another starting pitcher to last them through the rest of the season?

I wrote on Monday about the current state of the pitching market and why it makes sense for the Brewers to just stand pat where they are, with regards to Doug Davis. Now, all of a sudden, J.P. Ricciardi says Roy Halladay is available for trade and all of a sudden everbody’s nuts for Halladay! FOX Sports’ own Boras-mouthpiece Ken Rosenthal said in his article that Halladay is ‘all but gone’ in Toronto. Whoo, how exciting! Maybe the Brewers will finally add that pitching piece they so desperately need.

But wait! There’s more. Here’s what Toronto’s GM Ricciardi had to say about Halladay just yesterday:

It would take a lot for us to part with him. We’ve gotten a lot of calls from teams but none of them are telling us at this point what they’re willing to give up. If you’re coming at us with a ‘B” list of young players, don’t bother. This is one of the five best players in baseball. It’s going to take a significant package of players for us to even listen. So as the teams call we’ll go through the ones we feel are the serious ones and then we’ll start scouting their farm systems to see if there’s anything we can do.”

“My gut feeling is no we won’t [make a deal] because there aren’t too many teams out there who are willing to give us the significant package of prospects we would need to make this go. Teams protect their prospects.

In other words Ricciardi said that a player even as good as Halladay is available but it’s going to take a mountain of candy to sweeten the deal enough for them. This suspiciously sounds like the media is trying to create a story out of nothing.

Of course now that Halladay’s been brought up, the media has successfully made something out of nothing. The internet is abuzz with Halladay rumors. The problem with all this new trade talking is that the media has successfully created a story when there might not be one. No more complaining about how much attention Brett Favre’s gotten!

Here is a pretty interesting article about Halladay’s current trade value with what he should get on the market. Here’s some of the more important points:

First off, let’s look at Halladay’s win values over the years. Since 2002, he’s been worth about 46 wins in 1,585 innings, or right around an average of six wins per year. He’s on pace for about a seven win season this year, and he shows no signs of slowing down. Going forward, ZIPS projects a 3.21 FIP and 106 innings in his remaining 15 starts this year, which would be worth another 3.5 wins. Halladay is a +6 to +7 win pitcher, easily the best in baseball.

The market value for wins took a tumble on the low end last year, but at the high end, teams were still willing to pay around $5 million per win for premium free agents. Based on that, we’d say that Halladay’s fair market value is something like $30 to $35 million per season. However, those $5 million per win contracts were all long term deals, which carry extra risk to the organization and therefore pull down the annual average value that teams are willing to pay. With only a 15 month commitment, the long term risk with Halladay is substantially lower, and teams should (and will) pay a premium for that risk avoidance.

…

But, you can’t forget about the fact that he’s very likely to be a Type A free agent at the end of 2010, and the acquiring team would be able to recoup two quality draft choices if they didn’t re-sign him as a free agent. Thanks to some good work by Victor Wang, we can see that the value of Halladay’s Type A status is around $8 million or so.

$52 million for Halladay’s performance + $8 million for the draft picks = $60 million in total value. He will be paid $22 million over that time frame, so 60-22 = $38 million.

To acquire the Jays ace, teams should be expected to surrender something like $40 million in value.

What does $40 million in value look like? Something like three terrific prospects who are not that far from the majors. No one’s giving up players from the Matt Wieters/David Price mold, but it’s going to take several players from that second prospect tier, the top 25-50 type guys.

So in order to obtain Halladay the Brewers would be looking at shipping away J.J. Hardy or Alcides Escobar, Lorenzo Cain, and Bret Lawrie, at the very least. Does that sound worth it to you?

I’m not the biggest fan of disarming the entire farm system to set the franchise back multiple years just to gain an extra win or two for 2009. The really nice thing about last year’s C.C. Sabathia trade was that it didn’t handicap the franchise for the upcoming years; Matt LaPorta was blocked and the other prospects involved weren’t exactly the major-league-ready types. If the Brewers were to give up $40 million for Roy Halladay…that would destroy the franchise. $40 million is almost half of the Brewers’ current salary.

It would be different if Halladay was sour grapes about his time in Toronto and the Blue Jays were looking to get what they could for him. However it sounds like Halladay is happy in Toronto and Ricciardi is just as happy keeping him there. In other words, he’s not going to take pennis on the dollar for Halladay. $40 million in talent seems about right.

It just doesn’t make sense to trade away the farm system — or anyone, for that matter — with the rotation the Brewers have at the beginning of the year. Parra’s only slightly broken (and hopefully is back for good) and when Bush comes back the rotation will be back to where it was at the beginning of the year and in May when the Brewers were the best team in the major leagues. Overpaying for Halladay or Javier Vazquez isn’t going to be the answer. It’s just not going to be worth it.

So Derek Jeter has been a better shortstop in 2009 than Jason Bartlett. Instead, teams who have large markets can just vote up their players to see them.

There’s not really anything wrong with that, but just plan on taking any posts that are really bitter about Gallardo and Hoffman with a giant grain of salt. Besides, there’s something more important and relevant to the Brewers than the All-Star game anyways.

Ryan Braun said after yesterday’s loss to the Cubs that “We’re at the point right now where it would be important for us to go out there and acquire somebody.” Obviously he was implying that the starting pitching is trash right now, it’s no fun to be losing by 100 runs after the third inning, and Doug Melvin needs to make a trade soon.

The trade market though seems to be limited to Javier Vazquez and Doug Davis because so many teams are still in it and the teams that aren’t don’t have the parts the Brewers need. All this has been said before, but the fact that so many teams are looking to buy the parts they need makes the market essentially “who will pay the most to get the spare parts they need.” I fear, along with quite a few other people, that so many buyers in a market with so little to sell will result in someone overpaying for an average pitcher like Doug Davis.

One of the things that Melvin has consistently said is that there has to be a better option available for the Brewers to pursue in order to make a move, otherwise there really is no point. I’m not yet convinced trading for one of the available pitchers is really a good option at this point compared to internal options. Here’s why:

Javier Vazquez would cost too much. He’s probably the best pitcher available on the trade market right now who isn’t an oft-injured Erik Bedard, sporting one of the best years of his career with a 3.05 ERA and 130 strikeouts in 112 innings. Naturally, he’s going to get the most return if he’s traded and deservedly so; how much Atlanta gets back for him depends on just how far one team is willing to go, and I fear that the Braves will ask for Alcides Escobar in addition to Corey Hart and if the Crew politely declines the Braves will then move on to the team who would give up that much.

That’s not to mention that Vazquez is even on the trade market at all. Atlanta’s tied with the New York Mets in the NL East, only 4 games back of Philly. They could just as easily be buyers instead of sellers at the deadline if they do well in between now and the All-Star Break.

Doug Davis isn’t that good. Davis has been super hot lately, tossing seven innings and giving up one run or less in his last three starts. However I’m not convinced that when he does come back to earth that he’s a much better option than the Brewers have internally.

So far this year Davis has a 3.15 ERA, which is really pretty good. But considering the prospects the Brewers would have to give up to get him, I’m not quite convinced he’s the best posible option.

Davis is a full run below what his FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching) would indicate, implying that he’s been lucky — extremely lucky, also, since Chase Field in Arizona is a pretty intense hitters’ ballpark. One would naturally expect that number to regress back towards the norm. He’s also been lucky in regards to his other stats too — his batting average on balls in play (BABIP) this year is the lowest of his career at .278 and his left-on-base percentage (LOB%) is nearly 79%, a number way too high for a pitcher of Davis’ quality. One would expect him to get worse and not better. His three recent starts should only be regarded as a mirage and not representative of what he’s going to do for the rest of the season.

By the way, just as an aside, I’ve never understood why a pitcher throwing three straight starts really well is “improving his trade stock.” If anything I’d expect that pitcher to have a little regression and have a couple of poor starts, which would make the trade not worth it. Why do teams look at two hot starts and determine that a pitcher is going to do that well for them for the rest of the year? I don’t know if people realize how lucky the Brewers were last year when C.C. Sabathia ruled for the better part of 3 1/2 months straight.

Anyways, I’m not so sure doing something from within the organization isn’t the answer here. Manny Parra on the other hand has been doing pretty well in AAA and has been on the extreme end of misfortunes while in the big leagues this year. Just like I expect Doug Davis to regress back to what he does, I expect Parra to do better than he has been. This means getting lucky.

Parra so far has stunk to the tune of a 7.52 ERA, but his peripherals imply he’s been on the extreme end of misfortune, as his FIP is just over 5 and his LOB% has been barely over 60%. These numbers aren’t a far cry from Doug Davis, but he’s just been on the other side of the luck equilibrium.

Just as a totally made-up and hypothetical scenario, imagine Doug Davis having an ERA one run worse than his FIP. That would mean his ERA for the rest of the season is about 5.1, give or take a little bit. Now reverse tha trend for Parra. His ERA would be about 4 for the rest of 2009. Parra would be the much better option, and he wouldn’t cost the Brewers unreplacable parts in their farm system.

I know it’s a fallacy to assume that just because someone’s been unlucky with their pitching that they will become lucky and balance it out. However it is reasonable to think they won’t continue to be as unlucky and instead pitch as to what their career statistics would imply. If Parra’s fixed his walking problem, he should be back out there to the tune of a 4.5 ERA or so, which would be better than what I’d expect Doug Davis to do.

If Parra comes back at full strength and Dave Bush comes back into the rotation, the Brewers will be just fine. Gallardo, Braden Looper, and Jeff Suppan have done a fine job with the rotation in a mess as it is; soon they will be at full strength.