When the Red Sox acquired Dustin May from the Dodgers at Thursday’s trade deadline, they brought on board a starter with a pair of elbow surgeries in his rearview. The 27-year-old right-hander had Tommy John in 2021, then needed to have a flexor tendon repaired in 2023. Boston also brought on board a pitcher who has matured admirably since he was drafted 101st overall in 2016 out of a Justin, Texas high school.

“As a pitcher, I haven’t changed a whole lot,” May told me prior to the trade. “My stuff is pretty comparable to what it was before. But off the field, I’ve changed a lot. A lot of life changes have happened through the surgeries — a lot of good things — and I feel like I’ve definitely improved as a person and as a husband.

“We’re all very blessed, and talented, to be here,” he added. “Stuff can be taken away from you in an instant, and you can have no control over it. No matter how hard you work, or what you put into it, life can come at you very fast at times.”

A serious health scare last summer is an example. May suffered a torn esophagus that required emergency surgery. Less scary, but nonetheless troublesome, was his not bouncing back from TJ as well as he’d hoped. Read the rest of this entry »

Thirty-six trades in a span of 18 hours. A deadline day record. This after there were a whopping 16 swaps the day before, for an astronomical two-day total of 52 — that’s also a record, and nine more than there were over the final two days before the deadline last year.

Conceptually, the numbers are staggering. But as I sit here writing this mailbag after 7 PM on Friday, the reality of what we all experienced is starting to sink in. And I don’t know about all of you, but after a marathon of editing trade analysis pieces for the better part of the last 48 hours, I’m twitching from what can only be described as an unholy cocktail of caffeine and adrenaline, and I can feel the comedown coming. I’m both absolutely riveted and utterly drained, and the only thing keeping me upright is a keen sense of anticipation for all of the great baseball still to come.

We won’t be covering any trade news in this week’s mailbag. If you want to catch up on or relive the chaos of the last few days, you can find everything we wrote about the trade deadline linked within this roundup post. Instead, we’ll lean a little more evergreen. Before we get to your questions, though, I’d like to remind all of you that while anyone can submit a question, this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

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 price up on all four. 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 »

And so ends another action-packed trade deadline. It came in with a whimper, with a quiet Adam Frazier trade to the Royals, but it ended in an exciting crescendo during which seemingly every reliever in baseball moved to a new team in a 45-minute period. Whoever said comparison is the thief of joy had never heard of the ZiPS projections, here to distill that bullpen beauty pageant (and the rest of deadline period’s action) into some cold hard numbers estimating what all these moves actually mean in the big picture.

Deciding who “won” or “lost” the trade deadline is a fairly tricky philosophical question, since different teams come into deadline day with different goals. So instead, I’ll focus on a simpler question: Who helped their 2025 chances the most? That’s a more straightforward inquiry, one a projection system can assess. For this, I used my usual methodology, first projecting the league as it currently stands using the full-fat ZiPS projections, and then re-projecting the league as it stands, but having unwound every transaction made since the Frazier trade on July 16. Read the rest of this entry »

I was a young baseball writer working in Houston when Carlos Correa came up with the Astros. At the time, I was convinced that this 6-foot-4 mountain of a man with a massive throwing arm but unimpressive foot speed would end up at third base before too long. A lot has happened since then. When fellow shortstop prospect Alex Bregman got promoted a year later, it was Bregman, not Correa, who slid over to third. From there, Correa developed into a Platinum Glove winner and a consistent plus-10 defender or better.

Then Correa left the Astros entirely and stayed away after a successful one-season audition with the Twins. Even after a reunion with Houston was mooted in the lead-up to the deadline, the scuttlebutt said it wasn’t happening and the Astros traded for Ramón Urías to fill the Isaac Paredes-shaped hole in the infield.

But after all those bumps in the road, and after 10 years of waiting, I turned out to be right after all: Correa is headed back to Houston, along with $33 million in cash, for minor league left-hander Matt Mikulski, and in accordance with my prediction, Correa is going to play third base.

Never abandon your takes, kids, you have no idea when the universe will decide to prove you right. Read the rest of this entry »

It was shaping up to be a boring trade deadline day, with the most interesting rental, Eugenio Suárez, already off the board and no huge prospects or stars in play. But the San Diego Padres don’t limit themselves to the guys that everyone knows are on the block. They swung a massive, unexpected deal earlier today, getting Mason Miller and JP Sears from the Athletics in exchange for Leo De Vries, Braden Nett, Henry Baez, and Eduarniel Núñez, as ESPN’s Jeff Passan first reported.

Miller burst onto the scene last year with one of the great relief seasons of the decade. He ramped up his fastball to nuclear velocities, sitting 100-101 mph and topping out above 103 en route to a 41.8% strikeout rate and a 2.49 ERA with peripherals that were even better. He did all that over 65 innings, a career-high workload for the 2021 draft pick. His fastball is a pitch modeler’s dream, all backspin and flat approach angle, and his slider is nearly unhittable for batters thinking “don’t get put on a poster by this fastball” from the minute they step into the box.

Miller’s 2025 encore hasn’t gone quite as well. For relievers not named Mariano Rivera, that tends to be the case. He’s still breathing as much fire as ever, but he’s aiming it a bit less effectively, and his walk rate has ballooned from 8.4% to 11.9%. Oh, don’t get me wrong, he’s still been very effective. Did you miss the part where I said he throws 103 with great shape and mixes in a nasty slider? Of course he’s still been effective. The decline has only been on the margins — ERA estimators in the high 2.00s instead of the low 2.00s, a low strand rate, and bam, suddenly he has a 3.76 ERA instead of a 2.49 mark. His stuff still looks really good, it’s just hard to maintain a two-handle ERA. Those are the numbers you put up when things go right, and 2025 seems more like an average year for Miller.
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+.

Those Arizona numbers conceal a major turnaround:

Read the rest of this entry »

The Philadelphia Phillies needed to get a reliever at the deadline, and they’ve got a doozy. Jhoan Duran, the 27-year-old flamethrower late of the Minnesota Twins, is taking his splinker east. This is a seller’s market for relievers, and Duran is the best one available; certainly the best with any kind of long-term team control remaining, and even more so now that Emmanuel Clase is indisposed.

Given Duran’s prodigious gifts, track record of durability and reliability, and two full remaining arbitration years, the cost is high: rookie right-hander Mick Abel and teenage catcher Eduardo Tait. Abel, the first high school pitcher taken in the 2020 draft, had an unsteady progression through the minors, but has shown flashes in limited major league action. Tait, fresh off a futures game invite, is an 18-year-old catcher and therefore quite raw, but he has the tools to be a good defender with plus, even plus-plus power at the plate.

It’s not Andrew Painter, or even Aidan Miller, but it’s a lot of freight from a not-that-great farm system, in order to get a one-inning reliever. Why would the Phillies do this? Well, not to be impolite, but they’re kind of desperate. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not going to sugarcoat it, it’s been a slow week for deadline trades. The way the haves and have-nots line up this year, impactful additions are few and far between. The teams out of the playoff picture don’t have a lot to give up, and the teams with intriguing rental players are mostly already in the race. But the Pittsburgh Pirates, consistent innovators in ways to do weird things without contending, have entered the fray by trading Ke’Bryan Hayes to the Cincinnati Reds in exchange for Taylor Rogers, minor leaguer Sammy Stafura and cash considerations, as Mark Feinsand first reported.

Hayes is about as far from a deadline rental as you can imagine. He signed a lengthy contract extension in April 2022 and is still on that deal; he’s under team control through as long as 2030, in fact, and for cheap! He’s due an average of $7.5 million annually for the next four years, and the pact’s 2030 club option is for just $12 million with a $6 million buyout. That’s the kind of deal that gets teams salivating: long team control at rates that would barely get you a good middle reliever in free agency.

It gets better! Hayes is one of the best defenders in baseball. Since his 2020 debut, he leads all major leaguers with 73 Outs Above Average. Think that’s a fluke? He leads all major leaguers in Defensive Runs Saved – by 28 runs! The distance between him and second place is the same as the distance between second place and 25th. There are plenty of good third basemen with good defensive numbers. Hayes is head and shoulders ahead of all of them, unquestionably, and he’s lapping the third base field again this year, with 15 OAA (second place is four guys tied with four). Read the rest of this entry »

At the outset of Sunday’s Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Cooperstown, chairman of the board Jane Forbes Clark invoked the words of 2005 honoree Ryne Sandberg, who was not among the 52 returning Hall of Famers onstage for the festivities:

“As I have said many times before, the National Baseball Hall of Fame is an extraordinary place, and no one has described our game and what the Hall of Fame means better than Ryne Sandberg, Chicago Cubs legend and member of the Hall of Fame’s Class of 2005,” began Clark. “During his induction speech, he said, ‘The reason I am here, they tell me, is that I played the game a certain way, that I played the game the way it was supposed to be played. I don’t know about that, but I do know this: I had too much respect for the game to play it any other way. And if there is a single reason I am here today, it is because of one word: Respect.'”

As she continued, Clark’s voice audibly cracked, but she pushed through. “There is not a man seated behind me this afternoon who didn’t play the game the same way Ryno did. It is that respect, character, sportsmanship, integrity, and excellence that leads to just one percent of those that have ever played major league baseball to be inducted into the Hall of Fame.”

Her message — which referenced the Hall’s own voting rules, the so-called “character clause” — was evergreen, but the absence of Sandberg, who had attended the last two induction ceremonies, was conspicuous. So was Clark’s display of emotion, and now we know why. Sandberg, who was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer in January 2024, died on Monday at age 65. Read the rest of this entry »