At 4 PM EST last Friday, the trade deadline closing bell rang, and when it did, those of us on the outside looking in were glued to Twitter to learn about the trades that had been completed right before the countdown clock hit zero. It usually takes a little while to learn about all the transactions that get completed in those final minutes. Plenty of players found new homes, but the surprise of the afternoon was that when the dust settled, Trevor Story was still a member of the Colorado Rockies.

The Rockies are 21 games out of first place in their division. Per our Playoff Odds (and good sense), their chances of reaching the postseason this year are a big fat zero, and have been for some time. They also play in the toughest division in baseball, with the Dodgers and Padres looking like teams that will sit at the top of the National League West standings for years to come. The Rockies need to make drastic changes in order to take on those two powerhouses (and the Giants aren’t exactly slouches), and those changes should have begun on Friday. Instead, they sat on their hands, losing a golden opportunity to kick-start a return to competitiveness for a franchise that has reached the playoffs just five times in 28 seasons and has still never won a division title.

Colorado did make one trade during deadline week, sending reliever Mychal Givens and his expiring contract to the Reds for a pair of fringe pitching prospects. But that’s not starting a re-build or, if that term strikes you as too strong, re-tooling the roster so much as it is taking care of some necessary chores. And while Givens departed, there were other players rumored to be on the move who ended up staying put. Holding on to Jon Gray is a curious decision. The team hasn’t earned the benefit of anybody’s doubt, but let’s give it to them in the case of Gray, who has publicly stated his desire to stay in Colorado. Player comfort leads to better player performance, and if they can sign him to an extension, this makes sense. The jury can still be out on that one. But Daniel Bard still being the teams’ closer on August 1 is significantly more difficult to explain. Again, there is surely some loyalty here, and the Rockies deserve some credit for getting Bard back on the mound and finding a decent late-inning option in the process, but as a free agent following the 2022 season (a season in which Colorado will almost certainly not contend), the club just squandered Bard’s peak trade value, and yet another chance to boost a farm system that is among the worst in baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

What a ride this year’s deadline was. All told, we had 75 prospects move in the last month. They are ranked below, with brief scouting reports written by me and Kevin Goldstein. Most of the deals these prospects were a part of were analyzed at length on this site. An index of those pieces can be found here, or by clicking the hyperlink in the “Trade” column below. I’ve moved all of the players listed here to their new orgs over on The Board, so you can click through to see where they rank among their new teammates. Our farm rankings, which now update live, also reflect these changes, so you can see where teams’ systems stack up post-deadline.

A couple of quick notes before I get to the rankings. We’ve included a few post-prospect players here (those marked in blue) so you can get an idea of where we value them now as opposed to where we had them at their prospect peak. Those players, as well as the Compensatory pick the Rockies will receive after they extend Trevor Story a qualifying offer and he signs elsewhere, are highlighted below. We had closer to 40 prospects (and 23 Players to be Named Later) traded last year, with the PTBNL number inflated by 2020’s COVID-related transaction rules. The backfields are not well-represented here, with just four prospects who have yet to play in full-season ball. Two of those are currently in the DSL and have no official domestic pro experience, though Alberto Ciprian has played stateside for instructs/extended spring training. Now on to the rankings. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s sad to say farewell to what I think was the best trade deadline in the years I’ve been covering baseball, but at least there’s still an autopsy to do! With the league moving to a single trade deadline after eliminating the August waiver-trade shenanigans, this was the last, best opportunity for teams to make changes as we head into the season’s closing chapters.

So who won, who lost, and who finished in the murky middle? To aid us in answering those questions, I ran two sets of ZiPS projections. First, I ran the projections as of Monday morning with each team’s post-deadline roster. Then I ran ZiPS again with today’s standings and current injuries, but having undone all the additions over the two weeks before the trade deadline (including differences in WAR between players). I then compared the pre- and post-deadline projections. Some differences surprised me. Others … did not. Read the rest of this entry »

This past week was one of the most action-packed trade deadlines in recent history. A perfect storm of motivated sellers with strong cores and contenders looking to avoid a one-game play-in led to a pile of big names changing teams, with marquee prospects coming back. With the caveat that instant reaction pieces like this one are educated guesses at best — we don’t know how any of the players traded will turn out, or what other offers teams made — let’s assign some winners, losers, and overall head-scratchers.

Winners

Los Angeles Dodgers
The Dodgers got the best pitcher and the best hitter traded at the deadline, and they did it in one trade. The NL West will be the hardest-fought division in baseball, regardless of who wins; all three contenders are in the top eight in baseball by actual record, Pythagorean record, and BaseRuns record. This is a Glengarry Glen Ross situation; first place is hugely important, and the prize for second place is a single-elimination game against your fellow divisional loser, with one of the best teams in baseball heading home with only one playoff game in the books.

By adding Max Scherzer and Trea Turner, the Dodgers accomplished two things. First, they managed to upgrade a roster that already had very few holes. The more talent you start with, the harder it is to find an upgrade, and many of the available players would have been marginal upgrades at best in Los Angeles. With Scherzer in the fold, no other starter who moved could have cracked their playoff rotation, and Turner lets them put All-Stars at every position on the field when the team is fully healthy.

Just as important, however, was the blocking value of the move. When it looked like Scherzer was on the way to San Diego, I wrote a transaction analysis of that deal that focused on how much of a boon adding Scherzer for a one-game playoff would be — it would be worth, per my rough math, a three percentage point better chance of winning that game as compared to starting Yu Darvish. If the Giants had acquired Scherzer, the upgrade from Kevin Gausman would have been even steeper. If the Dodgers end up in the Wild Card game despite their best efforts, they won’t have to face one of the best pitchers of our generation there — and both rivals will have to turn to lesser starters rather than Scherzer as the regular season wears on. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past two weeks, the FanGraphs staff has written over 50 pieces dedicated to analyzing the 2021 trade deadline, from Jay Jaffe’s Replacement-Level Killers series, which previewed teams’ positions of need, to Eric Longenhagen’s breakdown of the teams with impending 40-man roster crunch, to our analysis of every deadline move, to Ben Clemens and Dan Szymborski’s recaps of the deadline’s winners and losers. It’s a lot to sort through, so to assist you in finding anything you may have missed during the flurry, I’ve rounded up all of our deadline pieces in one place. You’ll find the broader preview and summary pieces (of which we’ll have a few more today, so stay tuned) listed first, followed by a team-by-team listing of the transaction analyses that involved your favorite squad, either as buyers or sellers. In instances where we dissected a transaction across multiple pieces — hello, Max Scherzer/Trea Turner trade! — you’ll see them grouped together.

As always, all of the pieces linked below are free to read, but they took time and resources to produce. If you enjoyed our coverage of the trade deadline and are in a position to do so, we hope you’ll sign up for a FanGraphs Ad-free Membership. It’s the best way to support our work and experience the site. Now, on to the roundup! Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve been able to keep pace with our trade deadline articles, you’ve probably noticed a lot of articles about the Braves. They’ve brought in an entirely new outfield just today: Jorge Soler from the Royals and Eddie Rosario and Adam Duvall from Cleveland and Miami, respectively. That’s after acquiring Joc Pederson a few weeks ago when they lost Ronald Acuña Jr. to injury. It’s a flurry of moves for a team in a precarious playoff position: below .500 and with playoff odds under 10%. At the same time, Atlanta is only four games back of the Mets in the NL East.

With both the stretch run and a potential postseason stay in mind, the Braves decided to keep churning, acquiring reliever Richard Rodríguez from the Pirates for a pair of prospects: right-handers Bryse Wilson and Ricky DeVito. Rodríguez is no playoffs-or-bust rental, though; he has the most team control left of any of the players Atlanta added at the deadline, as he won’t reach free agency until after the 2023 season.

Rodríguez, 31, will go from being the Pirates’ closer to a high-leverage role with the Braves, perhaps even getting some save opportunities if manager Brian Snitker wants to platoon the righty with primary closer Will Smith, a lefty. Rodríguez’s 2.82 ERA and 2.58 FIP are excellent, but there are some red flags in his profile. His strikeout rate has dropped precipitously, going from 36.6% in 2020 to 22.8 this year — from the 96th percentile to the 40th. He’s also sporting an unsustainably low HR/FB rate of 3.3%.
Read the rest of this entry »

This deadline had its share of earthquakes, but it also featured smaller aftershocks, as teams improved their depth or addressed smaller, specific needs. So let’s run down some of the deals that might get buried by the higher-Richter scale shakes of the likes of Max Scherzer and Kris Bryant.

The Houston Astros acquired pitcher Phil Maton and catcher Yainer Diaz from the Cleveland Guardians for center fielder Myles Straw

This trade is actually a slightly unusual one, as the team in the playoff shot — it’s not Cleveland — is the one giving up the best player. Straw’s offensive profile will likely prevent him from being an actual star at any point, but he’s fast, plays enough defense, and gets on-base at a respectable enough level to be an average or even better starter in center; he’s already hit the 2-WAR threshold, after all. UZR, our defensive input for WAR, has him at +6.6 runs, while OAA has him at +5 runs and DRS has him at +2. I don’t think I’d ever play him except in a pinch, but Straw’s theoretical ability to at least stand at second or short in an emergency has some additional value, too. Read the rest of this entry »

With a 51-51 record and 2.1% playoff odds entering Friday, the Cardinals didn’t have much reason to approach the trade deadline in aggressive fashion, but they did busy themselves with incremental upgrades of their rotation. In a move that Ben Clemens broke down here, they traded righty John Gant and lefty prospect Evan Sisk to the Twins for lefty J.A. Happ, and in a separate move, they got in on the Nationals’ fire sale by adding southpaw Jon Lester in exchange for center fielder Lane Thomas.

It would be an understatement to say that the 37-year-old Lester ain’t what he used to be. After pitching to a 5.16 ERA, 5.14 FIP, and 5.85 xERA — the last of which was the majors’ worst among qualifiers — in the final season of his six-year, $155 million deal with the Cubs in 2020, the team quite understandably turned down its end of a $25 million mutual option and sent him on his merry way with a $10 million buyout, all of it deferred. He signed a one-year, $5 million deal with the Nationals, but before he could make his regular season debut, he missed time during spring training to undergo a parathyroidectomy and then tested positive for COVID-19 amid the Nationals’ first outbreak of the season. He finally took the mound for the Nats on April 30, and over the course of 16 starts, posted a 5.02 ERA, 5.41 FIP, and 4.90 xERA in 75.1 innings.

The indicators, as you’d imagine, aren’t good. Via Statcast, Lester’s fastball velocity has dropped from an average of 89.4 mph last year to 89.0 this year. Of the 113 pitchers with at least 70 innings as starters, his 14.9% strikeout rate and 6.4% strikeout-walk differential are the fourth-lowest and his 5.41 FIP the sixth-highest. This may not be the end of the line for the five-time All-Star with a pair of World Series rings, but we can probably see it from here. Read the rest of this entry »

The San Diego Padres made big moves in the offseason in an attempt to chase down the Dodgers. They traded Luis Patiño, Blake Hunt, Cole Wilcox and Francisco Mejía to acquire 2018 AL Cy Young award winner Blake Snell from the Tampa Bay Rays. Less than 24 hours later, they traded Zach Davies, Reginald Preciado, Owen Caissie, Ismael Mena, and Yeison Santana to the Cubs for 2020 NL Cy Young runner-up Yu Darvish and his personal catcher Victor Caratini. They turned Hudson Head, David Bednar, Omar Cruz, Drake Fellows into Joe Musgrove in a three-way trade with the Mets and Pirates. Earlier this week they kicked off trade deadline season trading Tucupita Marcano, Jack Suwinski and Michell Miliano to the Pirates for All-Star second baseman Adam Frazier. That flurry of deals alone has seen the Padres part with their second, seventh, eighth, 13th, 15th, 21st, 26th, 28th and 52nd ranked prospects, and send their 2020 second and third round draft picks to other teams for major-league ready talent.

When laid out like that, it seems less surprising that the Padres were outgunned when it came to the deadline’s blockbusters, like the “super-ultra-mega-juggernaut deal” that sent Max Scherzer and Trea Turner from the Nationals to the Dodgers. But the Padres were not done dealing just because they missed out on the starter they craved. With three minutes before the deadline, they made a smaller move, adding center fielder Jake Marisnick from the Cubs. Anderson Espinoza, a 40+ FV prospect who slots in at No. 29 in the Cubs’ system, is headed back to Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »

The Phillies’ team defense, specifically their infield defense, has been bad. As a team they’ve allowed a .302 BABIP, which is sixth-highest in baseball, and while that’s not a catch-all metric for team defense, it is a fair shorthand. They are also in the bottom third of baseball in most advanced defensive metrics on the site and second to last in Defensive Runs Saved. The scouty, visual evaluation of their infielders reinforces this. Didi Gregorius will still make the occasional slick play, but he’s lost a step-and-a-half due to age, and so has Jean Segura. Rhys Hoskins and Alec Bohm have never been good defenders; they should probably be playing at DH and first base, respectively.

Freddy Galvis, who debuted as a Phillie, can’t change all of that on his own, but he will bring his leather wizardry back to Citizens Bank Park and help in this specific area. He has been the platonic ideal of a 45 FV player throughout his career: a flawed hitter with a one-note offensive skillset (in his case, empty power) who can play the heck out of shortstop or second base. His trademark pirouette and ability to make strong, accurate throws from his knees have led to a long highlight reel of defensive plays spanning nearly a decade in the big leagues. He and José Iglesias were both briefly part of the same middle infield in relative obscurity with the 2019 Reds, comprising what I believe is the best defensive middle infield tandem of this century.

The 31-year-old Galvis is currently out with a quad injury, but before being sidelined, he was producing on par with his career norms, which is to say he remains swing-happy, is going to run an OBP close to .300, and will smack a few doubles and homers here and there. It makes sense for him to spell Gregorious and Segura once in a while, especially when Zack Wheeler (50.4% ground ball rate) or the newly acquired Kyle Gibson (50.8%) start.

In exchange for Galvis, the Phillies sent Tyler Burch to the Orioles. A 23-year-old undrafted free agent from Lewis-Clark State, Burch was leading the org in swinging-strike rate at the time of the trade, whiffing 49 hitters in 30 innings (mostly at Low-A) at the time of the trade, though all of that has come in relief. Twenty-three-year-old relievers in A-ball aren’t exciting if you look at them like that, but Burch has real arm strength (93–96 mph, up three ticks from 2019) and a plus breaking ball, and he’s performing at a superlative level on paper. And because of when he signed (2019), there’s still time for him to be seasoned in the minors without occupying a 40-man roster spot.

The Phillies have a habit of trading pitching prospects away (I count eight in the last year) while struggling to maintain competitive pitching depth at the big league level. Netting Galvis fills a small need, one Philadelphia has also tried to address several times in the last year (remember Kyle Holder?). But Burch is the sort of piece recent Phillies clubs have been missing: a young, homegrown reliever who at the very least projects to provide depth and resiliency to injury without forcing the team to turn to reclamation projects or cost them real assets to acquire.

Phillies fans will, and should, be stoked to see Galvis back in the uniform. News of this deal made me feel like someone who quit smoking years ago catching a whiff of an early-morning cigarette on the walk to work. But they also gave up the pitcher missing bats at the highest rate in the org for a glove-first bench infielder who has been freely available on the open market several times in the last few years. It’s logical, but short-sighted.