Players like Juan Soto don’t get traded. Why would they? A 23-year-old with a stat line that stands next to those of the all-time greats of the game is the kind of player you dream about stumbling into. They’re shooting stars, once-in-a-lifetime phenoms. All you have to do is hitch your wagon to their meteoric ascent and enjoy the ride.

The Nationals, though, didn’t feel that way. In the depths of a crushing teardown that has seen them fall from 2019 World Series champion to worst in the majors this season, the Nationals had nothing around Soto to make the team competitive. Soto was a mint Ferrari in the garage of a one-room shack. They offered him a 15-year contract extension worth $440 million this season, but he turned it down, either holding out for more money in free agency or hesitant to sign up for 15 more years with a currently-bad team that has an uncertain future thanks to a pending sale.

Let’s just call it that: thanks to their own rebuilding plans and potential organizational changes, the Nationals decided they could neither compete in the immediate future with Soto nor retain him beyond the 2024 season. I don’t really believe that to be true – I think they could have worked something out if they had truly put their mind to it and committed to making Soto the centerpiece of their next competitive team – but that’s a discussion for another time. If you determine that your options are to trade him or let him walk after 2024, trading him is the lesser of two evils. Read the rest of this entry »

With just hours to go until Tuesday’s trade deadline, the Twins shored up their bullpen, acquiring All-Star closer Jorge López from the TwinsOrioles for four pitching prospects. López, a 2020 waiver claim who was once a big part of a Mike Moustakas trade, has blossomed in 2022 upon being converted to a full-time reliever, saving 19 games for the O’s and putting up a 1.68 ERA and 2.99 FIP. Heading to Baltimore are Cade Povich, Yennier Cano, Juan Nunez, and Juan Rojas.

Not to be outdone, the Brewers made a relief addition of their own, picking up Matt Bush for pitcher Antoine Kelly and second baseman/third baseman Mark Mathias. Finally back after the second Tommy John surgery of his career, Bush has been sterling in his return, striking out 11 batters per game with his fastball returning to the upper 90s. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, the Rays traded C/INF Ford Proctor to the Giants for Triple-A reliever Jeremy Walker. The Rays appear to have been trying to clear 40-man space. The Rays have several players on the 60-day IL who don’t currently occupy a 40-man spot but will need to once they return, including Wander Franco, Manuel Margot, and Harold Ramírez, all of whom are likely to come off of the IL between now and the end of the season. Tampa could also potentially add more big leaguers before the deadline who would require 40-man space. The move was an opportunistic pounce by the Giants, who get a player I happen to like quite a bit.

Proctor was occupying a 40-man spot while hitting .213/.329/.306 at Triple-A Durham, and his strikeout rate has climbed significantly for the second straight year. He was a contact-oriented infielder at Rice and in the lower minors who the Rays moved behind the plate during the early stages of the pandemic. While he’s made huge strides on defense, he still has moments of ineptitude, whiffing on the occasional easy-to-receive pitch, or letting a blockable ball in the dirt get past him. For a convert who has just shy of two years experience wearing the tools of ignorance, Proctor looks pretty good even though he’s 25. Read the rest of this entry »

Are you also furiously following the news ahead of today’s trade deadline? Join me on Twitch this afternoon for a live chat and transaction reactions, with guest appearances from Nick Pollack of Pitcher List and Jason Martinez of our very own RosterResource. You can tune in over on my Twitch channel or right here in this post, starting at 3 PM ET and going until we run out of deals to cover. Happy deadline day!

The Braves made their biggest headlines on Monday with the announcement of Austin Riley’s 10-year, $212 million extension, but they did make a pair of trades to shore up their roster in advance of Tuesday’s deadline. They fortified their rotation by acquiring righty Jake Odorizzi from the Astros, and added outfield depth by getting Robbie Grossman from the Tigers.

Both deals were single-player swaps. For the 32-year-old Odorizzi they sent 33-year-old lefty reliever Will Smith to the Astros, while for the 32-year-old Grossman they sent 20-year-old lefty prospect Kris Anglin to the Tigers.

After a season in which he was about league average in 23 starts and 104 innings for the Astros last year, Odorizzi has improved to a 3.75 ERA and 3.61 FIP in 12 starts this year, averaging exactly five innings per turn, and bouncing back from what initially looked like a season-ending ankle injury suffered while running towards first base against the Red Sox on May 16. At the time, there was concern that he had ruptured his Achilles or fractured his ankle, but he didn’t break anything, and the damage to his tendons and ligaments did not involve his Achilles and wasn’t nearly as serious as initially feared. He missed seven weeks, and since returning on July 4, he’s had rough starts against the Royals and A’s but also two seven-inning scoreless starts against the A’s (whom he’s faced in three of his five post-injury games) and Mariners, including a two-hit effort with a season-high eight strikeouts against Seattle on Sunday. Read the rest of this entry »

After months of rumors and loud whispering, the mega-trade for Juan Soto has finally happened, with the winner being the San Diego Padres. It’s hard to overstate the impact of a trade like this; while stars are always traded, Soto is a very young and already quite accomplished player with generational-type talent, and players in that category do not change uniforms by trade all that often. I’m already tempted to type this piece in all capital letters, damaging the eyes of our esteemed editors; the Padres adding an excellent rental in Josh Bell just makes it an even harder test for my willpower.

The stable of talent sent to Washington is impressive, as it should be. Heading to D.C. are starting pitcher MacKenzie Gore, shortstop C.J. Abrams, outfielder Robert Hassell III, outfielder James Wood, pitcher Jarlin Susana, and first baseman Eric Hosmer. For the Nationals, any lingering concerns that someone would have to take Patrick Corbin, thus reducing the value of the return significantly, have now safely evaporated, and they’ll now have to turn to other options there. The Padres even fulfilled Washington’s desire to include a major leaguer who can help the team win games right now in the form of Gore. There are still issues to iron out with Hosmer’s no-trade clause, but for now, we’re going to look at this trade with the assumption that this works out, one way or the other. One possibility is an effort to get a third team into the mix, one that is interested in Hosmer’s services and not on his no-trade list, or at least a team he’d be more willing to waive the clause to join. Who that would be exactly is a tricky question; maybe the Royals?

UPDATE: Hosmer has officially vetoed his move to Washington, though the trade will still go ahead without his involvement. San Diego now has an interesting contract situation to resolve this afternoon.

UPDATE 2: Hosmer is now heading to Boston, per multiple reports, with fellow first baseman Luke Voit now part of the Soto trade in his stead.

UPDATE 3: The deal is now official: Soto and Bell for Voit, Gore, Hassell III, Wood, and Susana.

To wet your whistle — my colleague Ben Clemens will be around shortly with a full rundown of the particulars of this trade, and Eric Longenhagen will run through the prospects — here are some projections which I swear aren’t fan service. (Year-by-year projections for Wood and Susana are unfortunately beyond ZiPS’ scope at this stage of their careers.) Some may be disappointed that Soto’s numbers aren’t quite what they were last year, but his defense looks worse and he’s not quite at his normal level of offense. But considering ZiPS has only “downgraded” his top comp to Carl Yastrzemski, it’s still a great projection!

Much more to come.

I have a history with Malcom Nunez. I started writing about baseball in 2018. I was a long-time Cardinals fan, but knew basically nothing about the outer reaches of the farm system, like many lifelong but inherently casual fans. And I was drinking from the firehose of second-wave sabermetrics; I’m inherently biased to think statistics can help me make sense of the world, and the language of numbers was a familiar and welcome sight in my baseball analysis.

Nunez set the DSL on fire that summer. He hit .415/.497/.774, which hardly sounds like a real baseball line. He had more extra-base hits than strikeouts. This was the new hitting god the Cardinals deserved, the next heir to the Pujols mantle. Doing that at age 17 when I was just learning the ropes left an indelible impression in my mind. I heard explanations for why he shouldn’t be a top prospect — he was a man among boys, he was bound for first base, there wasn’t much development left in him, he was simply so far away from the majors — but in my heart I didn’t really believe them.

I’ve changed. These days, I understand completely why factors like that are important context, and often more important than the numbers themselves. I know not to trust such a short sample, or at least to discount it heavily in my mind. Nunez has been a perfectly fine prospect — 18th-best on the Cardinals, per The Board — but not the world-beater I dreamed up four years ago. He’s played the entire season at Double-A Springfield, and while he’s put up an above-average batting line at first base, his best highlights have been on the receiving end of some crazy Masyn Winn throws. Still, when I see Nunez’s name, some small part of my brain still goes “ooh, that guy’s great!” So when the Cardinals traded him yesterday, I had to write about it.

The full deal: St. Louis sent Nunez and swingman Johan Oviedo to the Pirates in exchange for José Quintana and Chris Stratton. It is, in many ways, a standard trade of currently useful pitching for potentially interesting players. It’s also a move that shouldn’t stand on its own. Let’s break down each part. Read the rest of this entry »

Raise your hand if you’ve thought about Luke Weaver in the past month. Anyone? No? Okay. As luck would have it, he did cross my mind recently. After Luis Castillo got shipped to Seattle, I joked on Twitter that the Merrill Kelly sweepstakes would commence, and a reply led me to compare Weaver to Kelly to Castillo:

Luke 'Merrill "Luis Castillo" Kelly' Weaver

— Justin Choi ?? (@justinochoi) July 30, 2022

Not exactly A-list material, I know. But the point is that Weaver shares similarities, albeit superficial, with the two other pitchers. Castillo and Kelly are both fastball-changeup guys; Weaver is also a fastball-changeup guy. So in sum, the Royals have acquired a bargain bin version of Kelly, who’s a bargain bin version of Castillo, at the modest price of sending infielder Emmanuel Rivera to the Diamondbacks.

Despite promising stuff and command as a prospect, Weaver’s career so far has been marred by inconsistency and poor health. He made his big league debut in 2016, spent most of ‘17 bouncing between Triple-A and the majors, became a permanent fixture of the rotation to open ‘18 before being demoted to the bullpen, and struggled with injuries in ‘19, making only a dozen starts. Nothing occurred health-wise in the shortened ‘20 season, but a right shoulder strain kept him off the mound for a majority of ‘21. He’s been healthy this season, thankfully, with his low innings total explained by the fact that he is now a full-time reliever.

That doesn’t sound all too exciting, but if you look closely enough, there’s still a good amount of potential left in Weaver. He’s quietly remodeled his changeup, and it looks better than ever. The table below shows how the pitch has progressed over the past three seasons:

The biggest difference: the changeup is getting way more drop than it used to, along with extra arm-side fade. (Here, a lower vertical movement number equals more drop.) Despite a small sample, we can tell this is a genuine development because of the physical properties of the changeup; it’s spinning on a different axis than before and seems to be benefiting from more seam-shifted wake. That explains why stuff models like Cameron Grove’s are appreciative of Weaver’s efforts, viewing the new and improved changeup as a plus offering. He has always been able to command the slow ball; this is the first time he’s backed that up with enhanced movement. Read the rest of this entry »

When Tommy Pham signed with the Reds during the offseason on a one-year, $7.5 million contact, the writing was already on the wall. By the deadline, he’d be sent to a contending team, presumably one that had an outfield weakness. And so here we are, with Pham departing Cincinnati for Boston in exchange for either a player to be named later or cash considerations. But it’s a deal that leaves me furrowing my brow, mainly because it’s made unclear what the broader plan is for the Red Sox.

Before that, though, let’s talk about the player himself. We’ve been so swept away by the unbelievable saga of slap-tastic fantasy football, I think, that we haven’t really paid attention to how Pham has fared in real-life games. He’s been… fine. In a year that’s lighter on offense, his .238/.320/.374 triple slash equates to a 92 wRC+. That’s serviceable, though certainly not up to his usual standards; even in 2021, which many considered a “down” year, Pham still mustered a 102 wRC+.

Back when he signed, I wrote about how Pham had been one of the unluckiest hitters around for the past two seasons, and that a one-year deal guaranteeing him playing time and a hitter-friendly home park could reverse his fortunes. But his underperformance is no longer the product of rotten luck. His .312 xwOBA this season is only a smidge higher than his .308 wOBA, and in case you missed it, Baseball Savant re-centered its expected metrics to the current offensive environment. There’s reason to believe he isn’t the same player he once was, in other words. Read the rest of this entry »

Oakland fetched a sizable return in the trade that sent the potent combination of Frankie Montas and Lou Trivino to the Yankees on Monday afternoon. The deal is headlined by two top 100 prospects, lefty Ken Waldichuk and righty Luis Medina, and is supplemented by near-ready backend starter JP Sears and fleet-footed A-ball second baseman Cooper Bowman. All three pitchers are essentially big league-ready, with Medina and Sears already on the 40-man roster, and Waldichuk a lock to be added after the season and likely to debut next year.

The youngest of that trio is Medina, a 23-year-old flamethrower who has been a prospect of import for over half a decade, walking the starter/reliever balance beam all the while. Now at Triple-A Scranton Wilkes-Barre, he has made 17 starts (he typically works four to five innings at a time and has maxed out at six twice this season) while posting a 3.38 ERA, his third consecutive level where he has posted a sub-4.00 ERA. While he’s historically struggled with walks (he’s been at least a five walks per nine guy his entire career) and overall consistency, Medina’s stuff makes him tough to square up and induces lots of groundballs (50% GB%). His fastball has been in the mid-to-upper-90s his entire career and is parked in the 94-98 mph range again this season, peaking at 102. Read the rest of this entry »