It sure seems like the Diamondbacks knew something the rest of us didn’t. Back in February, when Arizona signed shortstop Geraldo Perdomo to a four-year contract extension to keep him around through the 2029 season, I wrote, “I think the Diamondbacks are paying for floor rather than ceiling. However he gets there, if Perdomo keeps performing like a two-win player, the contract will work out well for both sides.” Perdomo was coming off a knee injury and two straight seasons of absolutely average offensive performance. It may have looked like the Diamondbacks were comfortable with that level of production, but the 2025 season has put things in an entirely new light.
Perdomo has been unequivocally one of the best players in baseball. He leads all National League position players in bWAR, and if not for Shohei Ohtani, he would have a very good argument for the MVP. Geraldo Perdomo, whom I first wrote about because he was a great test case for players with extremely low exit velocities. Geraldo Perdomo, whose offensive approach I summed up earlier this year as, “Try with all your might to avoid swinging.” Geraldo Perdomo, whose 12th-percentile hard-hit rate represents a career-high! That guy has 6.7 WAR. That guy has 19 home runs after coming into this season with a combined 14 for his major league career, which began in 2021. That guy is running a 138 wRC+ and none of the advanced numbers is saying it’s because of batted ball luck. Perdomo really has been a great hitter. We’ve been all over the story. Michael Baumann has written about him twice, I’ve broken down his breakout and documented one of his trademark swingless plate appearances. Now that October is near, we need to acknowledge how big a deal it is that Perdomo has kept this going all season long.
Perdomo has gotten bigger and stronger. He’s changed his mechanics from both sides of the plate. He’s somehow chasing and whiffing even less than he did last season, and he’s somehow doing so while lifting the ball more, swinging a bit harder, and hitting the ball a bit harder. We’ve broken down all those points in the articles I linked to above, so I’m not going cover that ground again. I’m here to show you one graph that cracks me up.
This is from the last paragraph of my article back in February: “I am so, so curious to see what it would look like if Perdomo were to start attacking the ball. He’s still young, and I really do think it’s possible that he has the capacity to be more than an average hitter.” I’m not trying to say I called this. I definitely did not. One sentence later, I wrote “Still, I don’t think we should expect that going forward.” But Perdomo really did start attacking the ball in his own way, so I can now show you what it looks like.
In terms of average exit velocity, it doesn’t look like all that much. He’s running a career-high 87.6 mph, up half a tick from last season. That’s still only enough to put him in the 19th percentile. However, you know better than to just look at average EV and call it a day. His 90th-percentile exit velocity jumped from 100.4 mph to 101.5. That’s a bigger jump, but in terms of percentiles, it only moves him from the 14th to the 18th. So, uh, that doesn’t look like that much either.
It’s impressive that Perdomo can swing harder, lift the ball more with a steeper swing, and maintain his absurdly high contact and squared-up rates. Regardless of where you’re starting out, that’s not normally how things work. But it’s also not enough to earn him respect. For all the reasons in the previous paragraph, pitchers still aren’t afraid of Perdomo, like at all. He ranks fifth among qualified players in zone rate. He’s seen 873 pitches over the heart of the plate. That’s the most in the game, and nobody else is even close. But Perdomo has the best hard-hit rate of his career by a wide margin, and that does matter. He’s never going to break the power scale, but let me show you Tom Tango’s graph for the thousandth time.
Going from a 25.8% hard-hit rate to a 31.5% hard-hit rate means crossing that threshold way more often. Even if you’re just barely crossing it, it’s still a big deal. There are way more hits on the right side of the line. The odds have changed on all those pitchers who are content to let Perdomo put the ball in play. Perdomo is still not a big, powerful guy, but he’s got a new A-swing. Here’s Baseball Savant’s distribution graph of his bat speed. This is for all swings.
Perdomo’s right-handed numbers from the 2025 season are in orange in the front. It’s still not as fast as the dotted line that represents the league average, and even though its peak is more than 1 mph higher than the peaks of the previous seasons, its shape doesn’t look all that different. It’s just that the tails on either side are fatter. That’s really noticeable on the left of the graph. Perdomo isn’t taking fewer super-weak, 57-63 mph swings than he did in previous seasons. What he’s cut down on are the medium-speed swings, and he’s getting off more fast swings than ever before. In other words, when he knows he has a chance to hit the ball hard, he’s making sure he does it. I know that looks pretty subtle here, and the difference between the green and blue areas that represent his 2024 and 2025 stats batting left-handed is even smaller. But now we’re getting to the graph I really want to show you, the one that has me cackling. Here’s the same exact thing, except it only shows the swings that result in hard-hit balls.
Well that’s different! Look how far the 2025 distributions are from the 2024 ones. The blue left-handed peak is roughly 2 mph faster than it was in 2024, and the orange right-handed peak is 5 mph faster! All of a sudden, Perdomo is getting his getting his money’s worth. He’s still happy to take a slow swing and put the ball in play – that’s why the tail on the left side of even this graph extends farther than in any of the previous seasons. But not only is he kicking into high gear more often, it’s a higher gear than he ever had before. Perdomo still doesn’t have the top-end bat speed to keep up with the league average on the right side of the chart, but he’s way above that dotted distribution line until we get to 77 mph or so. He’s more than doubled his fast-swing rate from 2024. That’s what it looks like when Perdomo starts attacking the ball, and it’s even more fun than we could’ve hoped.
As you surely know, Michael Baumann has been writing about MeatWaste for two weeks now. Specifically, he’s been writing about who is great at hitting pitches in the Meatball and Waste portions of the strike zone, according to Statcast’s Attack Zones diagram. Those are hitter’s pitches. The meatball zone right down the middle (zone five in the diagram below) is where batters crush the baseball, and the waste zone far away from the strike zone is where they have no trouble laying off pitches that are certain to be called balls. Baumann wrote about how the Brewers are great as a team at capitalizing on those pitches last week, and then today he ran down the individual MeatWaste leaderboard, a phrase I didn’t know I needed in my life until Tuesday.
This is useful information with a delightfully repulsive name, and it made me wonder about the opposite leaderboard. MeatWaste tells you who’s crushing hitter’s pitches, but let’s find out who’s excelling against pitcher’s pitches. Technically, that isn’t the opposite of MeatWaste. MeatWaste makes up just nine of Statcast’s 33 attack zones. The true opposite would include the other 24 that make up the Chase, Shadow, and Heart zones (except for zone five, the spot right over the very middle). It would also look very, very similar to the list of the best hitters in the game.
This list isn’t telling us anything we don’t already know because we’re looking at too much of the zone. If we want the opposite of MeatWaste, we need to look at the edges of the strike zone, where swing decisions are difficult and loud contact is hard to come by. Statcast calls this the shadow zone, and it includes any pitch within one baseball’s width (or 2.9 inches) of the edge of the strike zone.
What do we call the opposite of MeatWaste? Is it meat that’s the opposite of waste, like filet mignon? If we acknowledge vegetables as the opposite of meat (though you could make a strong argument for pudding), does that mean it’s veggie waste, like edamame shells? Or does that mean it’s the opposite of both meat and waste, like an artichoke heart? In the end, I decided to keep it simple and just follow Statcast’s taxonomic principles. These aren’t Meatballs, they’re Shadowballs, and if you know anyone who goes by that nickname, I urge you to explain in the comments how they came by it. Read the rest of this entry »
With just 12 days left to go in the regular season, two teams — the Brewers and Phillies — have clinched playoff berths, and on Monday the latter became the first to win its division. From among the four other division races, only in the AL West and NL West are the second-place teams closer than five games out, putting the chances of a lead change in the range of low-fat milk. With the exception of those two races, the lion’s share of the remaining drama centers around the Wild Card races.
Once upon a time, this space would be filled with my reintroduction of the concept of Team Entropy, but through the 2022 Collective Bargaining Agreement, Major League Baseball and the players’ union traded the potential excitement and scheduling mayhem created by on-field tiebreakers and sudden-death Wild Card games in exchange for a larger inventory of playoff games. The 12-team, two-bye format was designed to reward the top two teams in each league by allowing them to bypass the possibility of being eliminated in best-of-three series. Often, however, things haven’t worked out that way, because outcomes in a best-of-five series are only slightly more predictable than those of a best-of-three.
Aside from the Dodgers beating the Padres in last year’s Division Series, every National League team that has earned a first-round bye under the newish system had been bounced at the first opportunity, with the Dodgers themselves falling in rather shocking fashion in both 2022 and ’23. The AL has had only one such upset in that span: the 2023 Rangers, who beat the Orioles and went on to win the World Series. Read the rest of this entry »
I learned a new fact while watching the Yankees-Blue Jays game on Sunday, and I’d like to share it with you: YES Network play-by-play man Michael Kay mentioned that Austin Wells is tied for the league lead in sacrifice flies with Geraldo Perdomo.
I don’t want to disabuse anyone of the notion that FanGraphs writers are all-seeing brains-in-jars, but I had no idea this was the case. Even considering the vast bigness of my highly learned noggin, I can’t say that sacrifice flies have ever been a stat I cared much about tracking. I’m sure there’s some connection (positive or negative, I cannot say) between the quality of a hitter and the number of sac flies he produces, but mostly sacrifice flies seem to be more a function of opportunity than skill. Not least because I don’t think anyone sets out to hit a sacrifice fly as such; if you’re putting the ball in the air with a runner on third and less than two outs, you’d probably rather hit a home run or a double. A sac fly is a fallback position.
But this fun fact about the major league sac fly leaderboard struck me, because in my mind, Perdomo isn’t the sac fly guy, he’s the sac bunt guy. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. August is a month I like to use for rest and recovery. After the chaos of July, there’s a natural lull in the season before the drama of September. Both deadline buyers and sellers are figuring out their new rosters and allocating playing time to new arrivals and minor league call-ups. No race is down to the wire, and yet many races are already decided. That’s a great time to relax – and what I like to do to relax is watch baseball. This week’s set of five things doesn’t have a lot of pivotal plays or playoff squads on the brink. It doesn’t have walk-offs or game-ending defensive plays. It’s just guys doing cool things, and sometimes that’s the best part of baseball. So with a quick programming note – Five Things is off next week while I go to the US Open – and a nod to Zach Lowe of The Ringer, let’s get started.
1. Ultimate Reversals
In an 0-2 count in his first start off the IL, Hunter Greene lost control of a fastball:
Hey, it happens. It was an 0-2 count, so no big deal, get ‘em next pitch. Only, wait, something was going on:
Hit… by pitch? I’m not sure anyone at the plate was sure what happened. J.T. Realmuto said something to umpire Carlos Torres. Torres thought about it and then eventually awarded Realmuto first base. Tyler Stephenson went full John Travolta behind home plate, looking around in vain for someone to make this make sense to him.
How did Reds manager Terry Francona feel about this? The same way I did, and the same way you do right now, presumably:
When the first slow-motion replay came in, everything started to make a little more sense:
Realmuto wasn’t hit by the pitch; his bat was. It’s an easy overturn. Why didn’t anyone notice? Well, Stephenson had his eyes closed and his glove blocked Torres’ view of the butt of Realmuto’s bat. No one noticed the deflection right away either; after all, Stephenson stuck up his glove trying to catch it and the ball landed in the mitt.
The replay review was short and conclusive. The call on the field was overturned; instead of a hit-by-pitch, it was a foul ball. Only, that’s not quite right – there were two strikes. The ball landed in Stephenson’s mitt after making contact with the bat. That’s a textbook foul tip strikeout. Instead of strolling to first base, Realmuto trudged back to the dugout.
There have only been five other HBP-to-strikeout overturns in the replay review era. I watched video of all of them. The one this week was the strangest. Here’s AJ Pollock getting “hit” by Tyler Chatwood in the first one I found:
See the umpire’s quick and decisive reaction? That’s normal. Call a dead ball, determine what happened, point to first to signal a hit-by-pitch – it’s standard operating procedure. Torres didn’t even call a dead ball, because he didn’t realize he needed to.
In fact, I think Realmuto might have inadvertently done this to himself. It’s feasible that if he didn’t say anything to Torres, that would have just been a ball. No one saw the ball deflect off the bat in real time, and it was such a glancing blow that no one seemed to hear it. You can tell because of their reactions; Torres doesn’t call the ball dead right away and Stephenson definitely has no idea what’s going on. Also? Change this rule! That has to be one of the hardest-luck strikeouts of all time.
2. Coordination Jung Hoo Lee’s second year in San Francisco has gone much better than his first. He’s healthy, for one thing: After an injury limited him to just 158 plate appearances in 2024, he’s been active for the entire season and has already crested 500 plate appearances this year. He’s improved across the board offensively, flashing gap-to-gap power and consistently working counts and avoiding strikeouts. It’s been more of a struggle defensively, where he’s been somewhere between blah (per OAA) and quite poor (per DRS and Baseball Prospectus’ DRP). It’s tough having your fielding compared to the ridiculous monsters who roam center these days. But how many of them can do this?
What’s that, you say? That was a standard play, catch probability 99%? The wind looked a little swirly, which made it slightly more difficult, but you’re not wrong. Lee took a meandering route to the ball and still had time to flatten his route and more or less come to a complete stop to judge the wind; he probably could have caught it standing up if he’d gotten a better read initially. That’s all true! But wait for the reveal:
It’s like a magic trick, pulling a coin out from behind a kindergartener’s ear only in baseball form. Oh, you’d expect the ball to be in my glove? No, of course it’s somewhere else. See, the ball actually kicked out of Lee’s glove, but he made a spectacular instinctual adjustment:
Lee’s right leg made that entire play. He lunged and missed with his hand, the normal thing you’d use to catch a baseball. For most players, that would be the end of the play. But Lee somehow flipped his hips to get in position, drove his right knee past the ball without bumping it away, and then pincered it into the hollow between his knees to protect it from falling to the ground.
Don’t try this at home. I say that out of personal experience – my dog looked at me funny for about five minutes while I tried to replicate it on my living room floor. There’s no practicing or teaching this. No one works on it in spring training. For nearly every outfielder in baseball, the play would have been over after it kicked out of their glove. Lee might be a below-average outfielder when you take the sum of his defensive contributions into consideration. His coordination and ability to make last-minute adjustments, though? It’s certifiably excellent.
3. Necessity Ryan O’Hearn doesn’t face lefties. In his entire Orioles career – 1,223 plate appearances – he faced only 137 lefties. It’s no secret why: He posted an 89 wRC+ against them, as compared to a 126 wRC+ against righties. That’s a huge platoon split, more than double the major league average for lefties. The O’s had a surfeit of righty platoon options, and even this year, when O’Hearn put up his best season yet, they generally didn’t let him face lefties, and he hit poorly against them when he did get the chance.
In theory, the Padres are similarly capable of sheltering O’Hearn. They’ve only given him six plate appearances against lefties, and they’ve pretty much all been out of necessity rather than desire. Your bench isn’t always as full as you’d like, the other team can sneak in lefty relievers at almost any time late in the game, and no hitter avoids facing lefties altogether. In fact, the Padres have given him those opportunities at about the same rate as the O’s. But let’s just say he’s not hitting southpaws quite so poorly with San Diego:
That’s 4-5 with a walk, and all four hits have gone for extra bases. It’s far too small of a sample to make substantive conclusions, of course, but O’Hearn has already socked as many homers against lefties in a Padres uniform as he did in Baltimore, where he played for 20 times as long.
The last one, a two-run blast against All-Star Robbie Ray, came after Mike Shildt pinch-hit with O’Hearn against a lefty. It wasn’t exactly a normal decision – Jake Cronenworth was hit in the hand in his previous plate appearance, and while he played the field afterwards, he didn’t appear to be capable of swinging a bat. Since the Padres had already juiced their lineup with righties against Ray, the only bench hitter with a platoon advantage was Elias Díaz, and your light-hitting backup catcher isn’t a real pinch-hitting option. O’Hearn was the logical play even if “pinch-hit with the guy we never let face lefties against a dominant lefty” isn’t normally a good decision.
So, is O’Hearn suddenly a lefty killer? I don’t think so, but I definitely hope so. The Padres are going to run into many more chances to either let O’Hearn hit against a lefty or replace him with an inferior hitter (Jose Iglesias? Bryce Johnson?) who stands on the other side of the plate. Previously, the decision has rarely been interesting – get the righty in there. In the last 20 days, though, O’Hearn is making it hard to pull him from the game. Yes, it’s six plate appearances. Sure, that’s not how sample sizes work. But since coming to the Padres, he’s slashing .800/.833/2.400 against lefties. Can you really turn that down in favor of Candelita? It’s gonna be a great subplot to watch down the stretch.
4. Thievery Alejandro Kirk doesn’t steal bases. In his entire minor league career, he swiped five bags, all in 2018 and 2019. He’s never so much as attempted one at the major league level. He’s listed at 5-foot-8 and 245 pounds, kind of the reverse of a prototypical base stealing frame. His 24.2 ft/sec sprint speed is in the second percentile league-wide. Could you, personally, beat Alejandro Kirk in a footrace? Probably not, but it’s at least closer than it would be for pretty much every other major leaguer.
Anyway, here’s Alejandro Kirk stealing a base:
This play was a perfect storm of pro-stealing factors. With only one out and a runner on third in a one-run game, the Rangers infield was all the way in. That meant Jake Burger couldn’t hold Kirk on first base because he was off the line and on the grass. It wasn’t a big deal, though. Is there a runner less important to hold on than the guy with 2,000 plate appearances and zero stolen base attempts? Meanwhile, with Daulton Varsho on third base, Kyle Higashioka had no interest in throwing down to second and letting Varsho maraud home. The Rangers knew there was no throw coming to second. Look at their positioning with the ball already in Higashioka’s glove:
In other words, they were more or less daring Kirk to go. Why wouldn’t they? Kirk batted 1,946 times before attempting his first steal. Second place in the majors for most plate appearances without attempting one? Spencer Horwitz with 723. The post-integration record for career plate appearances without a stolen base attempt is 2,224, by Johnny Estrada from 2001-2008. Very few batters reach 1,000 plate appearances without trying to steal at least once. Kirk was a true standout in his field of standing around.
Now he’s got a swipe in his back pocket. Estrada’s record is safe; the odds of Horwitz getting to that milestone are negligible. He’s not even a catcher! But more importantly, Kirk is on the board. He tried to act casual after stealing the base, but the crowd wouldn’t let it go (the Jays posted that it was his first career stolen base on the scoreboard). You know you’ve done something fun when you get Max Scherzer to react like this:
5. Pratfalls With Happy Endings
If your only understanding of outfield defense came from this column, you might think that falling over was a key part of the job:
Sorry for the camera angle; it’s all both broadcasts had. But in any case, what a disaster. You can’t fall down there. That’s Alek Freaking Thomas on the basepaths. He’s maniacally aggressive and has the speed to make it work; he’s 10 runs above average on the basepaths in his career even without taking stolen bases (he’s not a great base stealer) into account. He was on his horse right away and had eyes on home plate. Watch Thomas clock what’s going on in center, pick up third base coach Shaun Larkin waving him on, and book it home:
Wait, what? He got thrown out?!? Yeah, and by a lot, as it turns out. See, Angel Martínez fell, but it was fairly graceful as falls go. He didn’t lose the ball, didn’t panic, and was back on his feet quickly to toss in the relay. It took him about a second-and-a-half to recover, which isn’t great, but it’s a lot better than staying down or losing his grip:
That was a decent relay throw, perfectly on line but without a ton of vigor. Martínez has a cannon arm, but he didn’t show it off there; he was just thinking of getting the ball to the infield. When Gabriel Arias received the throw, though, he had maximum effort on his mind. Arias has an incredibly strong throwing arm, too. He knew there was going to be a play at the plate. He received the relay throw while already stepping into a throw home:
Don’t overlook Bo Naylor’s role in that play. The throw beat Thomas by plenty, but it reached Naylor on a short hop. Without perfect concentration, that ball would probably skip away. It hit so close to Naylor that he had to make a first-base-style scoop:
Meanwhile, though, even with an outfielder falling down and then feathering in a relay throw instead of ripping one, Thomas was out by quite a bit. I think I can show you what went wrong. Here’s Thomas with Martínez sprawled out in the outfield:
He’s nowhere near third base. Forget how hard Arias threw the ball on his relay; there aren’t many players who are making it home safely from this position:
The play wasn’t in front of Thomas; he noticed that Martínez fell, but he had to turn his head to run at maximum speed after that. But the timing just wasn’t right for even a fast runner to score. Martínez was throwing the ball in before Thomas reached third base. Arias was releasing it from shortstop before he was halfway home. Major league fielders are great. This just wasn’t a safe time to score, even after Martínez’s stumble.
It’s perhaps not a coincidence that Shaun Larkin isn’t coaching third base for the Diamondbacks anymore. Manager Torey Lovullo removed him after this very game, in fact. It was a straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back situation, but I think it’s emblematic of how hard it is to wrap your head around just how athletic major leaguers are. Angel Martínez was on his back in the outfield, and then he made a natural-looking, low-effort move and just wasn’t. He didn’t have to make a hero throw. He didn’t have to try to whip it home on the fly to make up for his stumble. He just kept his head about him and let his natural coordination plus his team’s competence make up for the trip. Martínez has been quite bad in the outfield this year. He’s a shortstop by trade and hasn’t adapted to the broad expanses of grass all that cleanly. But making an athletic, tumbling play, and having the rest of the Guardians turn it into an out? He looks pretty good doing that.
Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. Between a vacation, the All-Star break, the Trade Value Series, and the trade deadline, Five Things has been on a bit of a summer hiatus. Baseball itself doesn’t stop, of course; weird and delightful things happen whether I’m documenting them or not. But I still couldn’t shake the feeling that this week had an extra helping of whimsy. Balls took funny hops. Good pitchers got shelled in unexpected ways. Balks took center stage. Leads changed hands late, defenders kicked things into high gear – there was so much delightful baseball this week that I struggled to narrow it down to five things. Seven things just doesn’t have the same ring to it, though, so let’s quickly nod to Zach Lowe of The Ringer for the column inspiration and get going.
1. The True King of Contact
Writing about Luis Arraez can be a bummer sometimes. Not because he’s bad – he’s emphatically not – but because merely mentioning his name reinvigorates the age-old argument between those who say there are too many strikeouts and those who insist that slug is in the air. Should everyone be doing what Arraez is doing? Is he an anachronism? Is he underrated? Overrated? He’s so good at what he does – and what he does is so different from what most good baseball players do – that these questions are frustratingly omnipresent in any discussion about Arraez.
That said, I think I found an Arraez play that won’t divide the audience. The key is for it not to involve a ball in play, a walk, or a strikeout. Take a look at this beauty:
Katie Stratman, Orlando Ramirez, Steven Bisig-Imagn Images
Now that the deadline dust has settled – or at least, started to settle – it’s time to start making sense of it. The Padres, Twins, and Orioles were everywhere. Top relievers flew off the board. Both New York teams spent all day adding. But who did well? Who did poorly? Who was so frenetic that they probably belong in both categories more than once? I tried to sort things out a little bit. This isn’t an exhaustive list. There were 36 trades on deadline day, a new record, and more than a dozen before it. Nearly every team changed its trajectory at least a little, and this is just a brief look into the chaos. Here are the trends that most stood out to me.
Winner: Teams Trading Top Pitchers
This year’s crop of rental players was lighter than usual, but deadline activity didn’t slow. Instead, it simply spilled over into relievers under contract for a while. Mason Miller, Jhoan Duran, Griffin Jax, and David Bednar are under contract for a combined nine more years after 2025. That drove the prospect priceup onallfour. Having long-term control of relievers might be less valuable than at other positions, but it’s still valuable.
Most of the best prospects who swapped teams at the deadline were involved in a trade for top pitching. Leo De Vries, the consensus best player of the 2024 international signing period, was the big name here, but both the Phillies and Yankees offered up multiple good minor leaguers in exchange for Duran and Bednar. Taj Bradley, whom the Twins got back for Jax, is a former top prospect who won’t be a free agent until 2030. Read the rest of this entry »
You might’ve been worried that the Brewers had slept through the trade deadline. Maybe general manager Matt Arnold had overslept, or maybe the Twins were hogging all the cellphone bandwidth in the Midwest. But no, sure enough, Milwaukee got on the board right at the last minute, first by sendingNestor Cortes to San Diego, and then by making an unusual trade for Arizona teammates Shelby Miller and Jordan Montgomery.
Wow, that’s a reliever with a sub-2.00 ERA and a guy who pitched the Rangers to a championship two years ago. For just a player to be named later or cash? Sounds like a steal… wait, both of them are hurt, and both of them are free agents at the end of this year. That can’t be right. Read the rest of this entry »
On June 30, the Rangers lost to fall to 41-44, 10th place in the American League. Then they turned it on. Since the calendar flipped to July, they’ve gone 16-8 and rocketed into the playoff picture. They’re tied with the Mariners for the last AL Wild Card spot. With their sights now set on thriving in October, they needed to reinforce a pitching staff that has been quite good up top but got shakier as you went down the depth chart, and the Diamondbacks were happy to oblige. As Ken Rosenthal first reported, the Rangers are getting Merrill Kelly in exchange for Kohl Drake, Mitch Bratt, and David Hagaman. They also acquired Danny Coulombe and Phil Maton in separate deals to shore up the middle of their bullpen.
Texas has a famous starting rotation. The two stars, Jacob deGrom and Nathan Eovaldi, need no introduction. Second on the team in innings, slightly ahead of Eovaldi? That’d be World Series winner Patrick Corbin, famous both for his high highs and low lows. The back of the rotation? Jack Leiter and Kumar Rocker, famous college teammates before they were famous prospect teammates. But Leiter and Rocker have been flat this year, and Corbin was bad enough for long enough that I’d be a little scared of counting on him. Tyler Mahle, another celebrated Rangers starter, has been out since June. Jon Gray is headed for free agency and has perhaps been banished to the bullpen for the remainder of 2025. And it’s not like deGrom has been the paragon of health over the last few years.
Kelly lengthens the playoff-ready portion of Texas’s rotation immediately. His career 3.74 ERA and 3.97 FIP are accurate representations of his work, as are his 22% strikeout rate and 7.4% walk rate. In other words, he’s a perfect mid-rotation arm, better than average (he’s managed a 3.22 ERA and 3.53 FIP this season) but squarely short of an ace. He’s 36 and a free agent after this year, which limits his return somewhat, but he’s a dependable playoff starter and thus a very desirable deadline target. Read the rest of this entry »
For the second time in eight days, the Mariners have upgraded their lineup by landing a corner infielder from the Diamondbacks in exchange for multiple prospects. On July 24, they acquired first baseman Josh Naylor in exchange for a pair of young pitchers, and on Wednesday night they brought back All-Star third baseman Eugenio Suárez for a three-prospect package.
The full trade sends the 34-year-old slugger, a pending free agent, to Seattle in exchange for 24-year-old first baseman Tyler Locklear, 24-year-old righty Hunter Cranton, and 25-year-old righty Juan Burgos; both Locklear and Burgos have a bit of major league experience. This is Suárez’s second go-round in Seattle. President of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto previously acquired him and Jesse Winker from the Reds as part of a six-player deal in March 2022, one driven in part by Cincinnati’s desire to dump the last three years and $35 million on Suárez’s contract. He served the Mariners well, totaling 53 homers and 7.8 WAR with a 118 wRC+ in two seasons, and helping them end their epic playoff drought in 2022. Dipoto traded him to the Diamondbacks in November 2023 for Carlos Vargas and Seby Zavala, and he’s been even more productive in Arizona, clubbing 66 homers and 7.0 WAR with a 127 wRC+.
