We’re barreling toward the trade deadline, which means it’s time for teams to decide if they’re in, out, or Tampa Bay. After picking which of those categories they fit into, the next move is obvious. In? Trade for a reliever. Out? Trade away your relievers. Tampa Bay? Make 10 moves, with more moving parts than you can possibly imagine. All of those types were on display this weekend, so let’s round up some reliever trades.

The Brewers and Rockies got the party started with a simple swap: Nick Mears to the Brewers, Bradley Blalock and Yujanyer Herrera to the Rockies. This one is basically what you’d expect from a deadline deal. The Brewers need relief help; they have nine pitchers on the IL, and while they just got Devin Williams back, they lost Bryan Hudson to injury earlier this week. It’s been an uphill battle to fill innings in Milwaukee this year. Mears slots right into the middle of the bullpen, helping to lengthen the number of innings the Brewers can cover with high octane arms. The Brewers have the fewest innings pitched by starters this year, so that depth really matters.
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At best, the Rays (54-52) and Cubs (51-56) are on the outskirts of their leagues’ respective Wild Card races, and while both have been busy ahead of the July 30 trade deadline, they’re geared towards improving for down the road rather than this season. On Sunday, the two teams came together for a swap of club-controlled third basemen, with Isaac Paredes heading to Chicago and Christopher Morel to Tampa Bay along with a pair of pitching prospects, righties Hunter Bigge and Ty Johnson.

The 25-year-old Paredes is no stranger to the Cubs, as they signed him out of Mexico for an $800,000 bonus in July 2015, then traded him to Tigers on July 31, 2017 — when he was still in A-ball — alongside Jeimer Candelario in exchange for Alex Avila and Justin Wilson. Since being dealt to the Rays in April 2022, he’s developed into an effective middle-of-the-lineup hitter. After receiving down-ballot MVP support for his 31-homer, .250/.352/.488 (137 wRC+) performance last year, he made his first All-Star team this year, and is currently hitting .245/.357/.435 (130 wRC+) with 16 homers.

Despite that output, Paredes does not hit the ball very hard. His 85-mph average exit velocity ranks in just the fourth percentile, while his 26.1% hard-hit rate is in the fifth percentile; his 5.4% barrel rate is in the 26th percentile. But Paredes excels at pulling fly balls, and particularly at depositing them into the left field corner, which at Tropicana Field is closer to home plate (315 feet) than any current ballpark, since balls hit to Fenway Park’s Green Monster (310 feet away but with a 37-foot high wall) and Minute Maid’s Crawford Boxes (315 feet away with a 21-foot high wall) both require greater elevation to get out. Entering Sunday, Paredes’ 46 pulled fly balls tied him with Anthony Santander for the major league lead, with all 16 of his homers coming via that route. Read the rest of this entry »

While trades of relievers at the deadline are rarely the hottest moves featuring the best prospects, there are usually a lot of them. As the summer reaches its peak, contenders start to think about their bullpens down the stretch and beyond, and with modern bullpens seemingly as densely populated as the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s, there’s always room to add a quality arm. Let’s dig through them!

Editor’s Note: This reliever roundup doesn’t include the more recent trades for Carlos Estévez, Nick Mears, and Jason Adam. Ben Clemens will cover those moves in a separate post.)

The Arizona Diamondbacks acquired LHRP A.J. Puk from the Miami Marlins for 1B/3B Deyvison De Los Santos and OF Andrew Pintar

Don’t focus too much on the raw ERA or unimpressive walk rate when judging the merits of Arizona’s trade for A.J. Puk. Partially in response to their myriad rotation injuries in the spring, the Marlins took Puk’s attempt to get back into the rotation seriously, and he started the season there after a successful spring. I still think that was a well-founded experiment, but it didn’t pay dividends for Miami. Puk was absolutely dreadful as a starter, and it wasn’t long before he landed on the IL with shoulder fatigue. His four starts resulted in a 9.22 ERA, a 6.29 FIP, and an alarming 17 walks in 13 2/3 innings. He was moved back to the ’pen upon his return in mid-May, but the damage to his seasonal line was so significant that it still looked underwhelming at the time of the trade (4.30 ERA, 3.62 FIP, 44 IP).

As he has the last few years, Puk has dominated as a reliever; across 30 1/3 relief innings with the Marlins, he had 33 strikeouts and, perhaps most importantly, only six walks. The result was a 2.08 ERA/2.42 FIP, with batters managing a bleak .159/.204/.252 against him. The Diamondbacks are short on lefty relievers, with Joe Mantiply shouldering a very large share of the southpaw burden. Puk has historically been better against righties than Mantiply, so he can be used in more situations.

In return, the offense-starved Marlins pick up a couple of possible bats to add to their farm system. With a .325/.376/.635 and 28 homers combined at two levels in the high minors this year, Deyvison De Los Santos looks impressive at first look, but it’s important to contextualize those numbers. He’s playing in some very high offensive environments and there’s a lot of hot air to remove from those numbers to turn them into expected MLB performance. ZiPS translates his 2024 minor league performance to .263/.302/.428 in the majors and projects for wRC+ lines between 95 and 110 in the coming years with the Marlins. Now, that’s enough for the Marlins to be interested in him and chase any upside, but don’t be shocked if he’s not an offensive force.

Similarly, ZiPS translates Andrew Pintar’s season at .235/.302/.365 and doesn’t see a ton of growth from him offensively, viewing him as most likely to be a spare outfielder if he reaches the majors. I talked a bit with my colleague Eric Longenhagen about him on Friday and Eric still grades Pintar as a fifth-outfielder type, which is about how ZiPS evaluates him. Still, as with De Los Santos, Pintar’s interesting enough for a team like the Marlins to take a chance on him and give him an extended look; projections are frequently wrong, after all, by design!

The Seattle Mariners acquired RHRP Yimi García from the Toronto Blue Jays for OF Jonatan Clase and C Jacob Sharp

With the Blue Jays as short-term sellers, it’s hardly surprising to see them trade Yimi García, who is a free agent at the end of the season. His three-year, $16 million deal turned out to be a success for the Jays; he’s been worth 2.7 WAR and put up a 3.44 ERA/3.28 FIP over 163 appearances across two-plus seasons. This season has arguably been his best, as he’s striking out nearly 13 batters per nine innings. With Gregory Santos limping a bit after a knee injury – not believed to be severe – García slots in behind Andrés Muñoz in the Mariners’ bullpen pecking order. Seattle’s relief corps has been in the middle of the pack, but adding García to a group that features Muñoz, a healthy Santos, and Taylor Saucedo gives the M’s an excellent quartet of high-leverage guys, which could be crucial in what’s shaping up to be a tight AL West race.

Jonatan Clase was listed with a FV of 40 earlier this month when Eric ran down the top Mariners prospects, but with Julio Rodríguez entrenched in center field and backed up by other outfielders who can capably cover the position (namely Victor Robles, Cade Marlowe, and even, in a pinch, newly acquired Randy Arozarena), Clase’s ability to do so was simply less valuable in Seattle. Beyond that, the team needs more thump in its lineup at this point, and that’s not Clase’s speciality. For the Jays, Kevin Kiermaier is a free agent after the season and the organization has a real lack of center field candidates anywhere near the majors. ZiPS projects Clase at .218/.291/.373 with an 84 wRC+ for 2025 but views him as an above-average defensive center fielder, suggesting that he’s at least a reasonable stopgap option or a useful role player for Toronto. Jacob Sharp has been off the radar as a prospect, a fairly small catcher who is hitting decently well, albeit as a 22-year-old in A-ball.

The New York Mets acquired RHRP Ryne Stanek from the Seattle Mariners for OF Rhylan Thomas

The Mets have an extremely unimpressive bullpen once you get past Edwin Díaz, and now that they are firmly in contention for an NL Wild Card spot this season, they are looking to improve their relief corps. Ryne Stanek hasn’t excelled in Seattle, but the veteran reliever still throws in the high-90s, is durable, and misses bats. Guys like that will always resurface. Especially after trading for García, the Mariners have better options than Stanek to pitch in high-leverage, non-save situations. But that’s not the case in Queens, and he’s a welcome addition to the bullpen.

Rhylan Thomas isn’t a high price to pay and he largely fills a similar role to the departed Clase in Seattle’s organization, though he’s a different type of player. As a high-contact hitter, Thomas may fare well in pitcher-friendly T-Mobile Park. ZiPS sees Thomas as a .263/.313/.333 hitter with plus defense in the corners in 2025.

The Tampa Bay Rays acquired RHRP Cole Sulser from the New York Mets for cash

Cole Sulser is a relative soft-tosser who relies on deception. He had a big breakout season in 2021, but after a trade to the Marlins, he struggled with his command in ’22 and had his season marred by a lat injury that landed him on the 60-day IL. A shoulder injury ruined his 2023 and he’s spent ’24 trying to rehabilitate his value in the minors for the Mets, with mixed results. This is the third time the Rays have traded for Sulser in his career, so they seem to see something in him, and given Tampa Bay’s record with random relievers, I wouldn’t be shocked if he became useful for the Rays next season.

Cash is slang for currency, which can be exchanged for goods and services. It can be vulnerable to inflation, and because of this, it doesn’t represent a stable medium of exchange in some countries. But cash also has the benefit of being very flexible.

The Chicago Cubs acquired RHRP Nate Pearson from the Toronto Blue Jays for OF Yohendrick Pinango

Nate Pearson was rightly a hot prospect back in the day, and there were good reasons to think he’d play a key role in Toronto. Both scouts (he graduated at a FV of 55 here) and projections (ZiPS was a fan) thought a lot of his abilities, but the question was how he’d hold up physically as a starter. This worry turned out to be a real issue, and for the most part since 2019, his seasons have been marred by a wide variety of nagging injuries, costing him significant development time. Pearson throws hard, but he’s still rather raw, a problem given that he turns 28 in a few weeks and he has only two years left of club control after this one — not a lot of time for a reclamation project. The Cubs have decided to take a shot at fixing him. They are short-term sellers, but if Pearson pays off, he could be a significant player for their ’pen in 2025 and ’26.

Yohendrick Pinango is rather raw as well, a corner outfielder with decent power upside who hasn’t really shown that home run pop in the minors so far. The Cubs are kind of stacked with raw, interesting outfield prospects, while the Jays are rather short of them, making Toronto a better home for Pinango. ZiPS only translates Pinango’s 2024 season to a .344 slugging percentage; he hit well in High-A, but that was as a 22-year-old in his third stint there. Like Pearson, Pinango’s a lottery ticket.

After a somewhat slow start to this year’s trade deadline, one of the better pitchers available has a new team, with Zach Eflin heading from Tropicana Field to the land of Old Bay and Natty Boh. (That’s Baltimore, for those of you unfamiliar with properly seasoned shellfish and/or nostalgic mass-market budget lager.) Heading back to the Rays from the Orioles are three prospects, right-handed starter Jackson Baumeister, infielder Mac Horvath, and outfielder Matthew Etzel. In his second season with the Rays, Eflin has a 4.09 ERA and 3.65 FIP over 19 starts, good for 1.8 WAR.

Entering the season, the depth of Baltimore’s rotation was something of a concern. Acquiring Corbin Burnes in his walk year did a lot to alleviate the situation, and with the seventh-best ERA and 10th-best WAR in baseball, the rotation hasn’t really hindered the Orioles’ quest to win their first World Series trophy since I was just a wee cynical kindergartener. Still, despite their positive starting pitching rankings, the water has gotten pretty choppy. Both Kyle Bradish and John Means underwent Tommy John surgery in June, and Tyler Wells is out for the season after an internal brace surgery on his UCL in . Further complicating matters is the fact that Cole Irvin, a pleasant surprise in the season’s early going, had a worse June than the Soviet army in 1941. Cade Povich was decidedly mediocre in his debut and was optioned to Triple-A earlier this month, and Chayce McDermott still has command issues to iron out. The team has good reason to expect more from those two in the future, but that future isn’t going arrive this week, and the team needed a bit more certainty in the rotation behind Burnes and Grayson Rodriguez. Read the rest of this entry »

I updated the Top 100 Prospects list today. This post goes through the pitchers and why they stack the way they do. Here’s a link directly to the list, and here’s a link to the post with a little more detail regarding farm system and prospect stuff and the trade deadline. It might be best for you to open a second tab and follow along, so here are the Top 100 pitchers isolated away from the bats. Let’s get to it.
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The Mariners have suffered through a pretty terrible stretch over the last five or so weeks. After blowing a 10-game lead in the AL West during a 24-game span — the quickest that any team has ever surrendered such a large divisional lead — they enter play Friday a game behind the first-place Astros and 3.5 games out of the final AL Wild Card spot. Over their last 30 games, they’ve gone 10-20 and have scored a measly 3.4 runs per game while their pitching staff has allowed the fewest runs in the American League. Things got worse earlier this week, when they were swept by the Angels and lost both Julio Rodríguez and J.P. Crawford to injuries. Rodríguez sprained his right ankle and there is no timetable for his return; Crawford, who fractured his right pinky, is expected to miss 4-6 weeks. Even before those two core pieces of the beleaguered lineup landed on the injured list, Seattle desperately needed an infusion of talent onto their roster.

With that need exacerbated by those two injuries, the M’s wasted very little time making their first addition ahead of Tuesday’s trade deadline: On Thursday night, they acquired outfielder Randy Arozarena from the Rays. In exchange, Tampa Bay received minor league outfielder Aidan Smith (40 FV), right-handed pitcher Brody Hopkins (45+ FV), and a player to be named later. Dan Szymborski put together a hypothetical version of this trade just a few days ago and nailed all the broad strokes: The Mariners got the offensive upgrade they needed and the Rays got some really interesting prospects that they can now sculpt.

The former AL Rookie of the Year and All-Star got off to a agonizingly slow start to the season; through the first month of play, he was slashing .143/.220/.241 with three home runs, a strikeout rate just a hair below 30%, and a 37 wRC+. He started to pull himself out of his slump in May (104 wRC+) but was still underperforming. Since June 1, though, he’s been one of the hottest hitters in the league, putting together a .284/.397/.507 slash line with seven home runs and a 161 wRC+ across 179 plate appearances.

As Jay Jaffe noted back in April when he checked in on Arozarena’s woes, and then again during his replacement level killers series last week, “Rays hitting coach Chad Mottola had expressed the belief that Arozarena’s desire to use the whole field more often, in an effort to make himself an even better hitter, may have backfired.”

That change in approach might be related to his diminished contact rate early in the season, particularly on pitches in the strike zone.

His rebound in June and July aligns pretty clearly with his ability to put the bat on the ball when pitchers leave their pitches over the plate. And thankfully, almost all of his other plate discipline metrics are either improved or within range of his established norms.

He’s still making excellent swing decisions at the plate — his SEAGER is in the 84th percentile among all batters this year — and his batted ball metrics are as solid as ever. That two-month funk to start the season is dragging his overall offensive line way down, but make no mistake, it certainly appears as though Arozarena has put those struggles behind him.

He’ll immediately slot into the middle of the Mariners lineup as their regular left fielder and will give them a potent bat to help protect Rodríguez whenever he returns while providing dynamic run production himself. Perhaps more importantly for Seattle, Arozarena won’t reach free agency until 2027; he’s making $8.1 million this season, his second year of arbitration. The organization has developed a mostly homegrown rotation that has emerged as one of the best in the majors, but over the last few years, the Mariners have been reluctant to use free agency to improve their lineup. That makes it imperative for the front office to be aggressive on the trade market to acquire impact batters who can help the Mariners not just this season but throughout this competitive window, before their group of pitchers either breaks down or becomes too expensive to keep together. Arozarena boosts this lineup now and in the future.

For the Rays, this trade comes at an interesting time. They’re actually only a half game behind the M’s in the AL Wild Card standings and their pitching staff is getting a lot healthier. Shane Baz just came back from his Tommy John rehab earlier this month, Jeffrey Springs should be returning to the majors within a week or so, and Drew Rasmussen isn’t that far behind Springs. Tampa Bay has been hovering on the edge of the AL playoff picture for nearly the entire season, but a late-season surge wouldn’t have been out of the question. By moving Arozarena at this point in the season, the Rays have indicated that they’re more interested in ensuring they’re set up well for the future than in hoping for a long-shot playoff run over the next few months.

The timing also says a lot about what they think of the prospects they’re getting in this deal. Arozarena’s escalating salary now that he’s in the middle of his arbitration seasons had made him an obvious trade candidate this year, but the Rays could have waited until the offseason to move him if they didn’t like the players they were getting in return. That they acted now indicates they liked this package enough to pounce on it five days before the trade deadline. On the very fresh Mariners prospect list that Eric Longenhagen recently put together, Hopkins was ranked seventh and Smith 21st.

In a Seattle organization that is notorious for helping pitchers develop into the best versions of themselves, Longenhagen called Hopkins the most exciting pitching prospect in the system. He’s a converted outfielder who was selected in the sixth round of last year’s amateur draft and is still very new to pitching. He’s got a low-slot release with some deception in his mechanics, and that arm slot creates a ton of ride and life on his mid-90s heater and gives him a wipeout slider that flashes plus. He still needs to develop a third pitch to flesh out his repertoire to reach his ceiling as a mid-rotation starter, but even if he doesn’t, he appears to have a pretty nice floor as a two-pitch high-leverage reliever. He’s already 22 years old, which makes him pretty old for Single-A, where the Mariners had placed him in their organization, but as he gains development time as a pitcher, he should move quickly up the ladder.

As for Smith, he was Seattle’s fourth-round pick in last year’s draft and has hit very well in his brief professional career. A prep selection out of Texas, he’s an athletic outfielder with plenty of speed to stick in center field. He was slashing .284/.402/.470 at Single-A Modesto, and it looks like he had made the necessary adjustments to his swing to improve his feel for contact. He’s a ways away from the majors, but his physical projection and successful start to his minor league career were both intriguing enough for Tampa Bay to take a chance on him.

Even with Arozarena in the fold, the Mariners should not be done adding to their roster. Their offensive issues are too deep to be solved by one player. Even after moving Hopkins and Smith, Seattle has enough highly regarded prospects available to move for another big splash. They’ve been linked to Jazz Chisholm Jr. and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. over the last few days — both would be significant upgrades to the black holes the Mariners are running out at second and first base this year. Given the Mariners’ place in the standings and the state of their roster and farm system, this move for Arozarena should not preclude them from continuing to improve their offense over the next few days.

At last we reach the end of my annual series spotlighting the weakest positions on contenders. While still focusing upon teams that meet that loose definition of contenders (Playoff Odds of at least 9.5%), I have also incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because the team’s performance at that spot is worth a look.

At the other positions in this series, I have used about 0.6 WAR or less thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — as my cutoff, but for the designated hitters, I’ve limited the list to the teams below zero, both to keep the length manageable and to account for the general spread of value. In the third full season of the universal DH, exactly half the teams in the majors have actually gotten 0.0 WAR or less from their DHs thus far, four are in the middle ground between 0.0 and 1.0, eight are between 1.0 and 2.0, and three are above 2.0. DHs as a group have hit .245/.321/.421 for a 109 wRC+; that last figure is up three points from last year, and seven points from the last time I did this list, via a slash line that’s virtually identical (the majors’ slugging percentage as a whole has dropped 17 points from last season).

This year, we’re seeing a greater number of teams invest more playing time in a single DH. Whereas each of the past two seasons saw three players reach the 500 plate appearance threshold as DHs, this year we’re on pace for five; similarly, 11 player are on pace to reach 400 PA as DHs, compared to eight last year. That said, many of the teams on this list are the ones that haven’t found that special someone to take the lion’s share of the plate appearances.

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Today the Killers list turns the corner — or rather turns to the teams receiving less-than-acceptable production in the outfield corners. While still focusing on teams that meet the loose definition of contenders (Playoff Odds of at least 9.5%), and that have gotten about 0.6 WAR or less out of a position thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — I have also incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because the team’s performance at that spot is worth a look.

As noted previously, some of these situations are more dire than others, particularly when taken in the context of the rest of their roster. I’ve batched the two corners together into one supersized roundup because three of the seven teams below the WAR cutoff for left field also make the list for right field, and because there’s plenty of crossover in play with regards to personnel. The capsules are listed in order of their left field rankings first, while noting those three crossover teams with an asterisk. As always, I don’t expect every team here to go out and track down upgrades before the July 30 deadline, but these are teams to keep an eye on. All statistics are through July 14.

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The National League Wild Card race is wide open, with eight of the league’s 15 teams separated by a grand total of four and a half games in the standings. Five of those teams are currently below .500, their flaws on display on a daily basis — and some of those teams are at a particular disadvantage when it comes to their defenses.

On Wednesday, I investigated what a handful of the major defensive metrics — Defensive Runs Saved, Ultimate Zone Rating, Statcast’s Fielding Run Value (FRV), and our catcher framing metric (hereafter abbreviated as FRM, as it is on our stat pages) — told us about the teams with the best defenses. Some of them appear to be playoff-bound, while others are barely hanging onto hope thanks in part to those defenses, among them the Diamondbacks. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a bounce-back season for Yandy Díaz, and not in a good way. After two straight seasons with a wRC+ above 145, the Rays first baseman is at 106 so far in 2024. When Jay Jaffe checked in on him on June 13, Díaz had just climbed out of a hole. Through May 10, Díaz was running a wRC+ of just 77 with a 90.9 mph average exit velocity. Since that date, he’s been at 128, and his exit velocity has jumped all the way to 93.7 mph. Even more important, he was running a 60.3% groundball rate on May 10, but has run a 53.3% groundball rate after that point. For the season, that still leaves him at 56.4%, highest among all qualified players, but for Díaz, that handful of percentage points has always been the difference between being a good hitter and being one of the best in baseball. When his groundball rate is up, his wRC+ is down, and vice versa. The relationship is plain to see:

MLB’s new bat tracking data put the issue in stark relief. Blasts are a combination of two metrics: fast swings and squared up swings. The official definitions are here, but if you swing hard and you barrel the ball up, you’ll end up with a blast. That’s a good thing, because so far this season, blasts have a wOBA of .731, and a barrel rate of 27.7%. For Díaz, however, those numbers are .423 and 16.0%. He’s tied with Gunnar Henderson for fourth in baseball with 100 blasts, but just five of those blasts have turned into home runs. Of the 260 players who have hit at least 25 blasts this season, that 5.0% home run rate puts him in 248th place. Why? You know why. He has a launch angle of 1 on his blasts, tied for 259th out of 260. On the left, with the infield dirt almost completely obscured by dots, is Díaz’s spray chart on blasts. On the right, with home runs sprinkled liberally on top, is Henderson’s. Read the rest of this entry »