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:

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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 »

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 sending Nestor 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+.

Those Arizona numbers conceal a major turnaround:

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The weekend before the trade deadline was light on big names moving — poor Eugenio Suárez has probably had to take his phone charger out of his go bag a dozen times this month — but we did see plenty of preliminary action. The Orioles began their sell-off by shipping hard-throwing left-hander Gregory Soto up to the Mets. Meanwhile, the Royals sought to maintain their spot on the postseason wait list by picking up a right-handed bat from Arizona: not Suárez, but Randal Grichuk.

Finally, the Braves picked up some reinforcements for their injury-riddled rotation, tossing the Cardinals a player to be named later or cash in exchange for the right to jump the waiver line on recently DFA’d right-hander Erick Fedde. Read the rest of this entry »

The deafening quiet of this year’s July trade market was disturbed on Thursday night with the announcement that the Seattle Mariners were acquiring first baseman Josh Naylor from the Arizona Diamondbacks. Naylor has provided more than respectable offense for the Snakes this year, hitting .292/.360/.447 with 11 homers, good for a 123 wRC+ and 1.4 WAR. Heading to the desert in return are two minor league pitchers, lefty Brandyn Garcia and righty Ashton Izzi.

While the Diamondbacks have generally disappointed in 2025, little of the fault can be placed at Naylor’s feet. The team expected to compete in 2025, but lost Christian Walker to the Astros in free agency, so the hope was that Naylor would fill the hole for a year before hitting the open market himself. He was never going to be an elite defensive first baseman like Walker, but the expectation was that he would at least provide a similar level of offense. Naylor is likely to fall well short of his career-high 31 homers from 2024, but he’s compensated for that by adding nearly 50 points of batting average, meaning his 123 wRC+ is actually slightly higher than his 119 mark from last season.

If the season ended today, the Mariners would make the playoffs as the second AL Wild Card, and the five-game separation between them and the division-leading Astros is not an insurmountable distance. Houston’s edge in the AL West seems even smaller when you consider how much of its lineup is currently out hurt. The injured quartet of Yordan Alvarez, Isaac Paredes, Jeremy Peña, and Jake Meyers would represent a huge chunk of any team’s offensive value. First base has been a particular source of trouble for the M’s this year, with their first basemen ranking in the bottom third in baseball with a combined 0.4 WAR. The original plan had been for Luke Raley to get the lion’s share of the playing time at first, mostly against righties, with fill-ins around him to take care of the southpaws. However, injuries to Mitch Haniger and Victor Robles thinned out Seattle’s corner outfield and DH depth and pushed Raley mostly to right field. As a result, the team was forced to give a lot of playing time to Rowdy Tellez; he posted an execrable .249 on-base percentage with the Mariners before they dropped him in June.

Naylor is not a superstar, so naturally, his acquisition doesn’t dramatically change the face of the AL West race. After last night’s win over the Angels, ZiPS gave the Mariners a 76% chance to make the playoffs and a 24% probability to win the division. These numbers would be 72% and 21% without the trade.

So, what’s the cost for their new first baseman? Neither Garcia, nor Izzi was torching up the prospect lists, but then again, Naylor is a free agent after the season, making this trade is a pure short-term rental. The 25-year-old Garcia has already made a brief major league debut, and since I don’t believe the Diamondbacks are going to go full rebuild, that has a lot of allure over the compensation draft pick they would have gotten if they’d held onto Naylor and he’d signed elsewhere this offseason. Garcia is a hard-throwing lefty sinkerballer with a three-quarters delivery who predictably induces a lot of grounders. My colleague Eric Longenhagen gave him a 40+ FV when Seattle’s top prospects list was published last month.

The ZiPS projections see Garcia as a solid, though unspectacular, mid-bullpen arm with at least some upside.

As a 21-year-old in High-A ball, Ashton Izzi has more developing to do than Garcia, but even with decidedly mixed results, the righty showed enough upside for Eric to also give him a 40+ FV. According to Eric, Izzi boasts a four-seamer that sits around 94 mph with solid movement. He gets “near elite” extension with his fastball, but it doesn’t generate many whiffs. Izzi also has a usefully average two-seamer, Eric says, as well as a sweeper and a cutter; the sweeper is a big swing-and-miss pitch for him. His changeup is mediocre, and Eric is concerned that Izzi will struggle to develop a good weapon to wield against lefties. Overall, per Eric, if Izzi can clear his developmental hurdles, he can make the majors as a starter.

In all, I think getting two real prospects, one who can impact the parent club immediately, is an absolutely fair return for Naylor. The Mariners have only two playoff wins over the last two decades, and now is the time to go all-in to add to that total. Their offense is better this season than in previous years, but they still needed to fill their hole at first base, and Naylor represents a major upgrade over what they had before.

The Arizona Diamondbacks, like King Solomon confronted with a baby, split their first 100 games straight down the middle. With the trade deadline looming a week from Thursday, the Diamondbacks could use a little wisdom right now, because it’s tough to tell whether they should buy or sell.

As of this writing, Arizona sits in fourth place in the NL West, nine games behind the Dodgers. Even after sweeping the Cardinals, a direct Wild Card rival, over the weekend, the Snakes still need to leapfrog four teams — including St. Louis — in order to slither in to the National League’s final Wild Card position. Five and a half games out of the playoffs with 61 games to go is a substantial hill to climb, especially for a team that’s been devastated by injuries. And the Diamondbacks, with their plethora of impending free agents, could command the market if they chose to sell.

Selling is the pragmatic move, the temperate move, the sustainable move, the move for the guys with the longest view in the room, and all the other business school-informed malarkey that gets spouted by the quarter-zips upstairs.

Poppycock, says I. Don’t listen to them, or my colleague Jay Jaffe. The Diamondbacks should go the other direction, and buy at the deadline. Read the rest of this entry »

This was supposed to be the Diamondbacks’ year. After sneaking into the playoffs in 2023 with just 84 wins, then scoring upset after upset to reach the World Series, they improved to 89 wins last year, missing out on October only due to a tiebreaker. The near-miss stung, but the response — signing Corbin Burnes to head their rotation, and keeping the rest of their core intact en route to a club record payroll ($197 million) — made sense. Unfortunately, things haven’t panned out this season, and as the July 31 trade deadline approaches, I believe the Diamondbacks would be best served by selling. (My colleague Michael Baumann feels differently, and will soon make the case on why they should approach the deadline more aggressively.)

Arizona isn’t a bad team. The Diamondbacks have gone just 50-51, but they’ve outscored their opponents by 17 runs; they’re roughly two wins shy of their PythagenPat-projected record and three wins shy of their BaseRuns-projected records. But they’re also running fourth in the NL West, nine games behind the Dodgers (59-42), and they’re 5 1/2 games out of the third NL Wild Card spot, currently occupied by the Padres (55-45), with the Giants, Cardinals, and Reds (all 52-49) between them. It’s not the distance that’s working against them with 61 games to play, it’s the traffic. With so many teams vying for playoff spots, the Diamondbacks have just a 14.9% chance of reaching the postseason — better at least than the Reds (10.8%) — but their odds of winning the World Series are down to 0.7%. It’s tough to envision them making a deep October run not only without Burnes, who underwent Tommy John surgery in June, but with lesser versions of Zac Gallen, Brandon Pfaadt, and Eduardo Rodriguez than they expected. Read the rest of this entry »

Merrill Kelly is having a rock-solid season. Over 21 starts comprising 122 innings, the 36-year-old right-hander has a 9-6 record to go with a 3.32 ERA and a 3.48 FIP. Those numbers are pretty much par for the course. Over the past three-plus seasons — all with the Arizona Diamondbacks — Kelly has made 97 starts and gone 39-22 with a 3.42 ERA and a 3.75 FIP. Neither overpowering nor of ace quality, Kelly is nonetheless a good pitcher who adds value to a big league rotation.

He could soon be taking the mound for a different team. Signed by the D-backs in December 2018 following a four-season stint in the KBO, Kelly is now on the doorstep of free agency; should Arizona decide to be sellers at the deadline, he could find himself in another team’s uniform come August 1. If that happens, the club that acquires him would be getting a known commodity. He has put up between 2.2 and 3.2 WAR in four of his last five seasons, with the exception coming last year, when injuries limited him to just 13 starts and 73 2/3 innings. His overall big league ledger reads: 62-49, 161 starts, 946 1/3 innings, 3.76 ERA, 3.97 FIP, 13.9 WAR.

With free agency looming, I spoke with the veteran hurler earlier this year about his approach to pitching, his evolution on the mound, and his steady performance since returning stateside.

“That’s an interesting question,” Kelly replied when asked how how he gets hitters out. “I would say that I do it in a lot of different ways. Ideally, I would like to get them out on as few pitches as possible. I guess you’d consider that a little bit more old school. Read the rest of this entry »