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 »

While the rest of the baseball industry was focused on the flurry of rumors and trades leading up to Friday afternoon’s deadline, Joey Votto was mashing like never before. From Saturday, July 24 through Friday, July 30th, the Reds’ first baseman not only homered in seven consecutive games, he doubled up on back-to-back contests on July 27-28 against the Cubs. With a chance at tying the major league record for consecutive games with a home run on Saturday against the Mets at Citi Field, Votto managed just a groundout and a pair of routine fly balls against starter Rich Hill. He had another shot in the eighth inning against Seth Lugo, and whacked a center-cut changeup 109.4 mph off the bat, a drive with an expected batting average of .970, and an expected slugging percentage of 3.649…

…but it came just inches from going over the wall in right-center. Votto had to settle for a loud single. D’oh! Because the Mets tied the game in the ninth inning, he actually got one more shot in the 10th, but struck out against Edwin Díaz. Thus Votto fell short of becoming the fourth player to homer in eight straight games, and the first since Ken Griffey Jr. in 1993:

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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 »

Eric Haase is having a breakout season with the Tigers. Acquired from Cleveland in January of last year, the 28-year-old catcher has a 128 wRC+ and a team-leading 18 home runs. Opportunity has helped fuel the production. Coming into the current campaign, Haase had appeared in just 26 games at the big-league level.

As impressive as Haase has been with the bat, it’s his background that drove a conversation that took place at Comerica Park on Thursday. I began by asking the Detroit-area native about his old organization’s well-earned reputation as a pitching-development machine.

“I think it starts with the guys you’re taking the draft,” opined Haase, who was in the Cleveland system from 2011-2019. “Obviously, there some are high-upside guys, and some organizations pick those top guys and kind of say, ‘Go out there and pitch.’ They think they’ve got themselves more of a finished product. With Cleveland, it was more about picking guys that already had a good feel for pitching, and then implementing things that would give them little spikes in velocity. They were big on weighted balls, big on strength and conditioning. Basically, they’d take guys who already had good command and give them some more legitimate weapons to get hitters out.”

Haase cited Shane Bieber, Aaron Civale, Mike Clevinger, and Zach Plesac as prime examples, and technology played a big role in their respective development paths. Drafted out of Dearborn Divine High School in 2011, Haase was there when the organization began transforming itself. 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 »

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 Braves have added an entire outfield in one deadline day. They swung two deals earlier on Friday, one with Cleveland and one with Miami, helping them set up a left-field platoon of Eddie Rosario and Adam Duvall. But they made an even bigger splash just prior to the buzzer with a one-for-one deal with the Royals, acquiring Jorge Soler from Kansas City in exchange for righty Kasey Kalich.

Soler is a huge name on paper, but he’s in the midst of a major down year. He’s pretty much your typical big-power, swing-and-miss outfielder, but a deflated BABIP at just .229 and a below-career-norm ISO at .179 have contributed to an uncharacteristically low .192/.288/.370 triple slash, good for a 81 wRC+. He’s still slugged 13 homers, but the lack of production at the plate — in combination with poor defense in right field and half of his starts coming at designated hitter — has yielded an ugly overall output. Soler has been worth -1.0 WAR, the fourth-lowest mark among all position players.

Still, there’s plenty of reason to think that Soler’s 2021 is something of an anomaly. He’s hitting the ball hard — his average exit velocity and hard-hit rates are both in the 91st percentile — and he’s still hitting the ball in the air, with a 17.3 degree average launch angle and just a 39.7% ground ball rate, a touch below his career averages. Perhaps he is hitting too many popups though, as the percentage of batted balls he’s “under” has risen to his highest level since 2017, before his breakout. Perhaps that is still a bit nit-picky for someone who has seemingly just been dealt a lot of poor luck; Soler’s expected wOBA is still roughly in line with his 2020 figure, and the disparity between his expected and actual wOBAs is the fifth-largest in the game. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a bit of wiggle room to the definition of “contender” in the NL East. That is what drove the Phillies to buy on trade deadline day, with a particular focus on shoring up some of the pitching depth issues that have plagued them throughout the season.

They made two moves on Friday, one small and one big, netting them a total of three pitchers. They swung the big trade in the afternoon, acquiring Kyle Gibson, Ian Kennedy, and minor league lefty Hans Crouse from the Rangers in exchange for Spencer Howard and two prospects: righties Kevin Gowdy and Josh Gessner. They also received $4 million from Texas. This move came after one made earlier in the day that saw them acquire minor league lefty Braeden Ogle from the Pirates in exchange for minor league catcher Abrahan Gutierrez.

The moves were certainly motivated by the relatively soft competition in the division as well as a weak rest-of-season schedule that could allow the Phillies to make some late noise. Philadelphia is 51-51 at present, but they’re just 3.5 games behind the Mets for first place in the East, and the .476 win percentage for their remaining strength of schedule ranks as the second-weakest in baseball (just behind the Reds). Their ability to hang around, coupled with the Mets’ injury issues, provided the front office a blueprint to the postseason with odds that might be a bit rosier than their record would suggest. Into games on Friday, our Playoff Odds give the Phillies a 20.3% chance of punching a ticket to October baseball, something they have not done since 2011. They have the second-longest active playoff drought in the majors. Read the rest of this entry »

The Braves could have been buyers or sellers at the start of this trade deadline season; I wouldn’t have been surprised either way. They have struggled to gain traction in a winnable National League East, and despite preseason projections that had them finishing 91–71 and in a tie with the Mets atop the division, they have not spent a single day in 2021 over .500 and entered Friday with playoff odds of just 9.7%.

A big reason for Atlanta’s woes is the outfield, where the team has lost two starters. On June 1, Marcell Ozuna dislocated two fingers on his left hand on a slide; less than a week later, he was arrested in connection to a domestic violence call and was charged with aggravated assault strangulation and misdemeanor battery. It’s unlikely he sees the field again this season (and probably as a Brave as well). A little over a month later, things reached DEFCON 1 when Ronald Acuña Jr. landed awkwardly trying to make a catch and tore his ACL, which required season-ending surgery.

The Braves have tried patching those holes as best they can. Not long after Acuña went down, they sent Bryce Ball to the Cubs for Joc Pederson. On Friday, they tossed some more bodies into the mix, adding Eddie Rosario from Cleveland and Adam Duvall from Miami. In exchange, Cleveland will get Pablo Sandoval, and the Marlins will receive Alex Jackson, who ranked eighth in our preseason Atlanta top prospects list. (The Braves also picked up Jorge Soler from the Royals in a deal announced after the deadline; we’ll have that transaction written up separately later.) Read the rest of this entry »