From 2018 through the first half of 2021, watching Jacob deGrom carve his way through whatever hapless lineup the Mets faced was a constant. His 1.94 ERA over that stretch was wildly impressive, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. He wasn’t just enjoyable for the ERA, or even his entire statistical line, though that also boggled the mind.

To me, what was most impressive about deGrom is how he seemed to make the opposition inconsequential. It didn’t matter who he was facing, really. Every start was deGrom against himself, a pitcher perfecting his craft. When he located well (and he frequently did), he might as well have been pitching to cardboard cutouts. Fastball on the upper corner, slider falling away beneath it — the specifics changed, but deGrom’s repetition of his pitches never did.

Then disaster fell. Though he’d been remarkably durable during his run, missing only a few games with lat issues early in the 2021 season, the fun came to an end last July. He sprained his flexor tendon — the tendon that runs from forearm to finger, which sounds pretty important for pitching — and never threw another pitch that year. Some of that was the Mets falling out of the race; the team said he would have been ready for the postseason.

After he missed the first half of this season with a right scapula stress reaction, no one would blame you for wondering whether the ride was coming to an end. An entire year without a major league start is an eternity for someone who didn’t get Tommy John surgery. But I have good news for those of you who, like me, found watching deGrom’s casual dominance calming and delightful: He’s back, and with little rust to be found.
Read the rest of this entry »

In what may prove to be their highest impact move of the trade deadline, the Dodgers traded swingman Mitch White to the Blue Jays as part of a four-player deal that lessened the immediate depth of their rotation. Less than 48 hours later, they watched as Clayton Kershaw once again left the mound in the company of a trainer, his future availability in doubt. While the combination of the trade and the loss of the three-time Cy Young winner isn’t likely to threaten their stranglehold on the NL West, the Dodgers suddenly have little margin for error when it comes to assembling a strong rotation for October — an issue that they’re all too familiar with after last year.

Kershaw left Thursday afternoon’s start against the Giants after experiencing lower back pain while warming up for the bottom of the fifth inning. Via MLB.com’s Juan Toribio: “Kershaw felt his back tighten up after his penultimate warmup throw. He then tried to throw one more to test the back, but immediately motioned over to the Dodgers dugout.”

The 34-year-old lefty underwent an MRI that didn’t yield any surprises, but he received an epidural injection to counter the pain and was placed on the 15-day injured list. “There wasn’t any new findings, so that’s a positive,” said manager Dave Roberts “This was the best-case scenario coming from the MRI.”

A best case scenario still is likely to mean a substantial absence for Kershaw. This is his seventh time in nine seasons missing time due to a back injury, and the second time this year; he had never doubled up before:

That’s an average of 36 games missed for the previous six absences, with four of the six lasting longer than one month. An absence of similar length would still leave Kershaw enough time get a few regular-season turns under his belt before the playoffs, but any kind of setback could threaten his October availability. Read the rest of this entry »

Detroit didn’t do much at the deadline. Trading Robbie Grossman to Atlanta in exchange for soon-to-turn 21-year-old pitching prospect Kris Anglin was the only move. Many expected more. A disgruntled fan base thought that Monday’s swap of an underachieving outfielder for a potential future asset would be the first of multiple deals for Al Avila’s underachieving team.

[Update/correction: The Tigers also traded reliever Michael Fulmer to the Minnesota Twins in exchange for Sawyer Gipson-Long, a 24-year-old 2019 sixth-round pick who was pitching at the Double-A level.]

The extent to which the relative inactivity was an indictment of Avila is a matter of opinion. Rival executives almost assuredly weren’t knocking down the GM’s door with appealing offers, and making trades for the sake of making trades is eyewash. Placating fans by simply moving pieces around doesn’t move the needle in any meaningful direction.

With a record of 43-66 and baseball’s 24th-rated farm system, which direction the club is heading in is far less clear than it was a year ago. Much for that reason, it’s easy to see why many in Motown would like to see Avila kicked to the curb.

Not everything that has gone wrong — and a lot has certainly gone wrong — can be placed squarely on the Detroit GM’s shoulders. But while this year’s plethorae of injuries and disappointing performances were largely beyond his control, Avila is nonetheless the architect of what has been a sluggish rebuild. The idea that said rebuild is in need of a rebuild of its own may be a valid one.

Which brings us to the crux of the issue at hand: Who can right the ship? Read the rest of this entry »

A week ago Thursday, I put my pre-trade deadline work to the side long enough to down a few beers while taking in a Yankees-Royals game from Yankee Stadium’s Section 422. The game — Andrew Benintendi’s debut in pinstripes, as it turned out — unfolded as a pitchers’ duel between the Royals’ Brady Singer and the Yankees’ Jameson Taillon. Singer struck out 10 in seven innings while limiting the Yankees to a fourth-inning single by Gleyber Torres, while Taillon scattered four hits across six frames. The two bullpens did their jobs as well, and the game remained scoreless until the bottom of the ninth, when after Benintendi fouled out to complete an 0-for-4 night, Aaron Judge brought down the verdict on a 95-mph middle-middle fastball from Scott Barlow, sentencing it to an exile 431 feet away in the Royals’ bullpen.

The homer — which looked even cooler from our birds-eye view just off to the third-base side of home plate, I swear — was Judge’s 39th of the year, tying the total he hit in 148 games and 633 plate appearances last year. It was also his third walk-off of the season, tying the franchise record set by Mickey Mantle in 1959. None of the other sluggers in Yankees history — not Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Reggie Jackson, or Alex Rodriguez — ever had three walk-off homers in a season for the the team (Jackson had three for the A’s in 1971).

Judge proceeded to leave the yard three more times in the next two games against the hapless Royals, with the second of those shots a grand slam (his second of the year) and the third his 200th career homer. He added another in Monday’s series-opening victory over the Mariners to run his total to a major league-leading 43 but went homerless on Tuesday and sat out Wednesday afternoon’s game. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s the day after the trade deadline, which always means one thing: baseball writers begrudgingly cleaning up their gross, sparkling-water-can-filled workspaces. Oh, wait, actually it means two things: that, and a flood of “who won the trading deadline” articles.

This year, I’m going to do something slightly different. I won’t claim that I’ve re-invented the wheel, but I’ve always thought that those winner/loser columns are too deterministic and don’t leave enough room for nuance. I thought about listing each team that made a trade as a winner, with a “maybe” appended to indicate that we don’t know what will happen in the future; if you really want to know who won and who lost, check back in October… or maybe in October of 2025. I thought about making each team a “loser (maybe)” for the same reason. In the end, I settled on some broad archetypes. I’ll throw a subjective grade on how much I like the move, and also endeavor to explain the risks around each team’s deadline. You can find all of our deadline coverage here. Let’s get started. Read the rest of this entry »

Another trade deadline has come and gone, and I must say, this one was more exciting than I expected. I didn’t see the Yankees, Astros, or Dodgers making huge splashes, given that all three are in a daunting position both for first place in their divisions and a first-round playoff bye. There were also relatively few short-term rental options available; Juan Soto, Frankie Montas, and Luis Castillo, among others, could always be traded, but with none of them free agents after this season, teams could also pull them back if they didn’t like the offers. Meanwhile, players like Willson Contreras, Ian Happ and Carlos Rodón stayed put, also to my surprise. By and large, though, we had a whirlwind of a 48-hour period leading up to the deadline.

So, who won and who lost? That’s a bit of a loaded question, because the definition of winning and losing varies depending on each franchise’s goals. A contending team improving, a rebuilding team getting worse but acquiring a stable of prospects, or an indolent team only re-signing its 37-year-old closer are all things that can be considered a win in one way or the other. But we’re here to do some hardcore ranking, so let’s look only at who improved themselves the most in 2022.

To keep this all science-y rather than a somewhat arbitrary exercise, I first projected the entire league’s rest of season in ZiPS and then repeated the exercise with all trades since July 19 unwound. Since some teams primarily got overall playoff boosts and some teams saw improvement mainly in terms of World Series gains, I took each team’s rank in both categories and then ranked everyone by the harmonic mean of those two ranks. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

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.

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 »

Frankie Montas needed to be set free. When the A’s began their selloff in earnest this offsesaon, he looked like a lock to end up elsewhere. Sean Manaea and Chris Bassitt, fellow rotation stalwarts, were gone. Matt Chapman and Matt Olson were shipped out. Montas (along with Sean Murphy and Ramón Laureano) seemed likely to be next, but then the season started, and there he was, still atop the Oakland rotation.

He’s done everything Oakland could possibly ask of him this season, to the tune of a 3.18 ERA in 19 starts. Meanwhile, the A’s have the second-worst record in baseball, ahead of only the woeful Nationals. Montas will reach free agency after the 2023 season, another year in which the A’s will likely be far from the playoff conversation. He had a brief injury scare, missing two turns with shoulder inflammation, but he’s returned to the field and made two starts without incident. One way or another, the A’s were going to move him.

The Yankees, for their part, stormed to the best record in baseball but would still like starting pitching help. Gerrit Cole is great and Nestor Cortes has been a revelation this year, but the group of pitchers behind them has been uneven. Jordan Montgomery started strong, but he’s been homer-prone of late. Jameson Taillon is steady but a step below Montas results-wise, and will be a free agent after this year. Luis Severino just hit the 60-day IL, pushing a potential return even deeper into September. The aggregate results have been solid, but you can see why the team wants more certainty given the difficulty of cleanly upgrading their lineup. Read the rest of this entry »