Astros Land Dominant Giles for Potentially Dominant Velasquez

It wouldn’t be fair to say the ALDS game against the Royals was representative of the Astros’ bullpen, because that would be mean and wrong, but there was a definite lingering sense of unreliability. The Astros bullpen finished among the very best in WAR, but it was in the bottom half by WPA, and feelings mirror WPA better than anything else. Nor is this exactly a new problem — the last five years combined, the Astros bullpen is last in baseball by WPA at -22. The Mets are second-worst at -9. The bullpen hasn’t been a real strength for some time, and now the Astros’ bullpen actually matters. They’re no longer positioned to just see what sticks.

What’s the quickest way to upgrade a bullpen? Add one of the league’s true elite relievers. If he’s young and cost-controlled, all the better. Jeff Luhnow has talked a few times about wanting to diversify his group of relievers, bringing in someone overpowering. Enter Ken Giles. The Astros were circling around Giles for seemingly weeks, and now he’s about to be theirs, coming from the Phillies in exchange for Vincent Velasquez, Derek Fisher, Brett Oberholtzer, and Thomas Eshelman. In large part, it comes down to Giles and Velasquez. Giles is the proven power arm, with years of control. Velasquez is the unproven power arm, with real potential to start.

Sometimes, with teams like the Astros, you see a move and you have to do a little digging to figure out what the team might like about a given player. You search for hints provided by the analytics. You barely even have to think to identify what the Astros like about Ken Giles. What they like about Giles is that he’s dominant, and he’s dominant because he throws dominant pitches. He’s not quite Craig Kimbrel, perhaps, but he’s close enough in style and he’s close enough in results, and he’s just very clearly one of the game’s best relievers. Nothing’s being overthought. It’s hardly being thought.

Giles has faced nearly 500 batters, and they’ve collectively slugged .264 against him. The other day I pointed out the parallels between Giles and Carson Smith, and they’re definitely comparable arms, but Giles has more velocity, and less quirk, and he seems the better bet to remain in the ninth inning. He’s generated results like Jake McGee, or even Wade Davis if you want to be kind. As long as Giles is healthy, he should get his strikeouts, and he should get his results. He won’t have to trick and finesse has way through ninth innings. It’ll be power pitch after power pitch, and Giles isn’t even eligible for arbitration for another two years. Don’t make too much of the fact that he’s a reliever. The Astros picked up five years of a quality asset.

Giles does come with heightened risk. That’s the one real drawback. He’s a power reliever who throws a lot of sliders, so he’s not someone from whom you can guarantee value in four or five years. It made sense for the Phillies to move him now, for a few reasons — they won’t need a closer, not anytime soon, and you never know when Giles’ trade value might implode. Holding onto Giles would’ve seemed a bit more risky than holding onto, say, Cole Hamels. A pitcher like Giles might very well never be better than he is in his mid-20s.

He’s awful good now. He’s awful good, and cheap, and the injury risk is there, but he hasn’t shown signs yet of breaking down. It’s not easy to pick up a better reliever than Giles.

Fittingly, the Astros picked up a higher-risk power arm for a higher-risk power arm. Velasquez, for sure, could’ve helped the Astros in 2016 and beyond. He’s a subtraction from the major-league roster, but he’s not anywhere close to being a Giles-level subtraction, which allows for the Giles-level addition. The Astros, like everyone, were fond of Velasquez’s raw talent, and even most of his results, but he’s a pitcher trying to fight off the label of being fragile. His main question is health, meaning there’s the related question of durability. Velasquez has the skills to become an impact starter. What he hasn’t proven is whether he can handle the load.

Philadelphia is a good place for him to try it out. The Phillies have little to lose from seeing whether Velasquez can take regular turns. He has a gifted arm, and what the Phillies know is that Velasquez could use that arm to start, while Giles was always going to remain in the bullpen. Young pitchers with injury questions frequently turn into older pitchers with injury questions, or, worse, older pitchers with injury problems. Velasquez has already had his elbow cut open, and the durability issues keep him from ranking among the prospect elite. But this is a bet on upside, getting a risky power arm for a risky power arm. If Velasquez shows he can start, the Phillies will be ecstatic. If he needs to be more limited, he has obvious high-leverage reliever stuff. Maybe even Giles-level reliever stuff. One interpretation is that the Phillies exchanged present Ken Giles for a possible future Ken Giles. It’s not the most likely course, but a healthy Velasquez will pitch in the majors in some role, and he ought to do it effectively.

There’s more to the package, tipping it more toward the Phillies, though Velasquez is the obvious centerpiece. The secondary get is Fisher, a 22-year-old toolsy outfielder who can fake it in center field. He’s more of a future left fielder, and the tools exceed the results — he’ll swing and miss pretty often, and last year he was only above-average in the Cal League. But there’s real power, which always means there’s a real ceiling, and as a second piece coming back for a closer, Fisher’s exciting. He’s easily now one of the top 10 prospects in the Phillies system, and the Phillies have an increasingly strong system.

Oberholtzer could be in the rotation immediately, if he can just stop developing blisters. He’s unexciting, and he has a very low ceiling, but he’s a year removed from looking like a No. 4 or No. 5, and he’s not yet at two years of service time. Oberholtzer is one of those guys you like to have when you’re rebuilding, to put in the rotation to keep a slot from being a total zero.

And Eshelman was a second-round pick just this past summer. He’s completely and utterly about strikes over stuff, but over three years of starting in college, he walked a total of 18 batters. This past year, in college, he had seven walks and 139 strikeouts. There are few bigger wastes of time than trying to over-interpret a college-level K/BB ratio, but Eshelman clearly knows how to pitch to the strike zone, and he’ll have a future if he learns how to pitch around it. These guys can be underrated fairly often, so Eshelman might have a quick-arriving future.

The Phillies did well here. It probably helped to have Aroldis Chapman become more or less unavailable, but Giles is a different kind of asset anyway, being cost-controlled for so long. From the Astros’ side, they didn’t have a pitcher like Giles before, so now their bullpen is better and deeper and overall more dominant. Giles has some risk, but Velasquez also has some obvious risk, and taking a step back, the Astros probably do need to concentrate more talent instead of having more quality players than they can protect on the 40-man. This is the Astros consolidating talent. And this is the Phillies collecting it. Two teams at different stages, with the Phillies hoping to get to where the Astros are. Moves like this should help them. Losing a pitcher like Giles is never fun, and Velasquez could have any number of things go wrong, but the goal is to bring in as much raw skill as possible. A fresh haul is arriving.