On Tuesday, pitchers and catchers officially reported to Camelback Ranch, the spring training home that the Dodgers share with the White Sox in Glendale, Arizona. Among the Dodgers reporting was a familiar face, that of Clayton Kershaw. According to ESPN’s Alden Gonzalez, the three-time Cy Young winner — who had entered free agency for the fourth offseason in a row — has agreed to terms with the Dodgers and will return for his 18th major league season.
For as much as the move was anticipated, the sight of Kershaw in camp was a reassuring harbinger of spring. Given his accomplishments and the slew of injuries he’s endured in recent years, the continuation of the future Hall of Famer’s career isn’t something to take for granted. The details of his contract have not been announced at this writing, and the deal is still pending a physical. Once it’s finalized, we can probably expect some incentives and mechanisms that help to lower the team’s tax hit, whether in the form of deferred money or a less lucrative player option for 2026. The Dodgers’ 40-man roster is full, but with the opening of camp, the team can transfer players to the 60-day injured list and free up roster spots. On Tuesday, they did just that in order to accommodate the return of Enrique Hernández, moving pitcher Gavin Stone, who will miss the whole season due to shoulder surgery, to the 60-day IL.
[Update: The deal became official on Wednesday, with River Ryan, who is recovering from August 2024 Tommy John surgery, transferred to the 60-day IL to make room. According to FanSided’s Robert Murray, Kershaw will receive a base salary of $7.5 million, and can max out at $16 million via incentives. He’ll receive an additional million apiece for starts 13 through 16, a roster bonus of $2.5 million for being active for at least 30 days, and additional $1 million bonuses for reaching 60 and 90 days.]
Kershaw, who turns 37 on March 19, could be a candidate for a 60-day IL slot himself, as he underwent a pair of offseason surgeries following a season in which he made just seven starts totaling 30 innings, the last of them on August 30. He was a bystander during the Dodgers’ championship run, though anyone who witnessed either the clubhouse festivities at Yankee Stadium — during which Kershaw shed his shirt — or the celebration at Dodger Stadium following their victory parade through Los Angeles can attest that he was no less exuberant about the team’s World Series win. Read the rest of this entry »
For much of last summer, it looked as though Enrique Hernández had reached the end of the line with the Dodgers. For as popular as the team’s longtime superutilityman had been, his production was dreadful, and it seemed only a matter of time before he got caught in a numbers game as the team ran out of roster spots. Fortunately for both him and the Dodgers, a visit to the eye doctor helped, his production improved dramatically, and he had some huge moments in October while helping the Dodgers win the World Series. On Sunday afternoon, just before the Super Bowl, Hernández himself announced that he was returning to the fold.
The statement refers to general manager Brandon Gomes’ words at the Dodgers’ recent FanFest. “Obviously, we’ll never close the door to Kiké,” said Gomes of the free agent, who has played a vital part on all four of the Dodgers’ World Series teams during the Dave Roberts era. Read the rest of this entry »
Department: Baseball Strategy and Information Status: Full Time Reports to: Director, Baseball Strategy and Information Salary: $23.00/hour*
*Compensation rates vary based on job-related factors, including experience, job skills, education, and training.
The Baseball Strategy and Information team of the Los Angeles Dodgers is responsible for supporting the Major League Coaching Staff and Baseball Operations leadership group with data and information needed for strategic decision making. As a Junior Analyst, you will work with other members of the Baseball Strategy and Information team to build reports and visualizations to communicate insights clearly and concisely to stakeholders. This position offers the opportunity to push the boundaries of conventional thinking, grow analytically by solving challenging problems, and collaborate with leaders throughout Baseball Operations. As a member of the Baseball Strategy and Information team, you will see your work impact the Major League team on a nightly basis.
Essential Duties/Responsibilities:
Coordinate and execute a selection of R scripts on a daily, series, and ad-hoc basis, which produce reports containing data and visualizations for Major League Coaching staff and Baseball Operations Leadership.
Interpret data and conduct in-depth analysis on players, team strategy, and in-game tactics, providing insights and observations to enhance coaching and decision making.
Support Data Collection and Data Management processes involving a variety of tracking and training technologies.
Work with Performance Science and Quantitative Analysis departments on the development of new proprietary metrics.
Collaborate across departments within Baseball Operations to advance various initiatives related to player evaluation and process automation.
Assist with on-boarding and training of interns within Baseball Operations
Occasional travel to represent the department outside of LA, such as an annual Spring Training trip, road trips with the club, affiliate visits, and scouting trips.
Complete ad-hoc research using SQL and R/Python to enhance in-game strategy and/or player improvement as requested.
Basic Requirements/Qualifications:
Bachelor’s degree in a STEM field (or equivalent experience)
1+ Years of Experience with R or Python in a non-classroom environment
Familiarity with SQL, Git, and cloud-based computing
Experience playing on a sports team or working with a sports organization is preferred (college or professional)
Ability to relocate to Los Angeles and commute to Dodger Stadium
Ability to work frequent overtime including evenings, weekends, and holidays. Overtime compensation will be provided according to company policy and applicable laws.
The Dodgers won 100 games in 2023. Then they signed the top two free agents in that year’s class: Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, a pair of unicorns the likes of which aren’t available every offseason. In 2024, the Dodgers had the best record in baseball. Then they won the World Series, and along the way made the last two rounds of the playoffs look pretty easy. Ohtani won the NL MVP award.
Look, I get it. You’re up in arms about the Roki Sasaki deal. The rich got richer and we’re all tired of the Dodgers signing every free agent (even you, Dodgers fans) — can they at least make it seem like it’s a level playing field? If that’s how you’ve been feeling this week, though, I’ve got some bad news for you, because I think the two moves the Dodgers have made since signing Sasaki might be bigger deals for 2025. Over the weekend, they signed the top reliever on the market, Tanner Scott. Now, they’re reportedlyworking on an agreement with Kirby Yates. As Yates’ signing is still pending a physical and has yet to be finalized, let’s cover Scott first, then ruminate on Yates at the end.
Scott’s deal, for four years and $72 million, befits an elite reliever, and that’s exactly what he is. He’s compiled a 2.04 ERA (2.53 FIP) across 150 innings over the last two years, using a lights-out slider and excellent fastball in roughly equal measure. We’re not talking about smoke and mirrors here; both of our pitch models think his fastball is one of the best handful in the game. His gaudy swinging strike rates provide supporting evidence. He sits 96-98 mph and touches 100. Sure, he walks his fair share of batters, but he’s a reliever – that’s just part of the bargain you accept sometimes.
If you’ll recall, the Dodgers leaned heavily on their bullpen in the 2024 postseason. Some of that was because of injuries to the starting rotation, but plenty of it was by choice. The Dodgers assembled a unit with four late-game options, and they used those options aggressively and opportunistically. Best opposing hitter up in the sixth inning? Send in a closer. Starter in a jam and the game on the line earlier than you expected? Send in a closer. Save situation? Fine, sure, we have a few left over anyway, send in a closer. Read the rest of this entry »
Major League Baseball had its “Kevin Durant is a Warrior” moment on Friday, when 23-year-old Japanese phenom Roki Sasaki agreed to sign with the defending World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers for $6.5 million. Sasaki himself announced his decision via his Instagram, while his bonus was reported on X by The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya and Alden González of ESPN.
If he can stay healthy, Sasaki is a likely front-of-the-rotation arm who has the talent to win Cy Young Awards. When he’s been fully operational, his fastball has averaged nearly 99 mph, he has an elite splitter, and his slider became a useable weapon in 2022. He joins a loaded Dodgers roster that has five or six other players who either have won a Cy Young or MVP (Freddie Freeman, Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Blake Snell), or could conceivably do so in their best season (Tyler Glasnow and maybe Yoshinobu Yamamoto). One and a half of those players weren’t even on last year’s Dodgers title team. As I’m writing this, the Dodgers have not yet announced the signing. Though Sasaki’s contract is technically a minor league deal, and he isn’t yet on the 40-man roster, he is overwhelmingly likely to break camp with the Dodgers’ big league club and be part of their squad that opens the season against the Cubs in Japan on March 18-19. Read the rest of this entry »
Do me favor. Don’t imagine trading Mookie Betts. Who would do that, anyway? Instead, imagine Mookie Betts trading Mookie Betts. That is to say, imagine Mookie Betts deciding to trade the current version of himself for a younger version of himself. Most of us would make that trade in a second – my younger self had so much hair and was already reading at a fifth-grade level! – but why would Mookie Betts make that trade? Coming into 2024, he had just put up a seven-win season while running a 166 wRC+, the second-best batting line of what should end up as a Hall of Fame career. That’s the ideal self, right there. No trades necessary.
From afar, Betts’s 2024 season was of a piece with the ones that preceded it. He put up his eighth-career 4-WAR season and ran a 141 wRC+, almost exactly in line with his career mark. But look at this:
Go ahead and ignore the short 2020 season, when Betts posted a low pull rate. All the numbers go up toward the second half of the graph before dipping back down in 2024. In a couple of major ways, Betts looked a lot less like what we’ve seen in this decade, and a lot more like what we saw back in the first few seasons of his career. He went back to striking out less, pulling the ball less, and hitting the ball significantly softer. In case that graph isn’t clear to you, let me show you the same numbers, this time split up into three chunks: 2014 through 2017, 2018 through 2023, and then just the 2024 season.
See the chunks? If those three metrics — Betts’ strikeout rate, hard-hit rate, and pull rate — are ringing some bells, it’s probably because I wrote about them back in May. At the time, I noticed that pitchers were doing their absolute best to pitch Betts away, away, away. Well, that trend continued throughout the season, and it certainly seems possible that it explains a lot of these numbers. Continuing with our theme, let’s take this in chunks. We’ll talk about the strikeout rate first because it’s the least dramatic.
Betts has never been anything but excellent at avoiding strikeouts. However, he had an 11% strikeout rate in 2024, and even by his own ridiculous standards, that was something. It was tied for the best mark of his career, it represented a nearly 30% drop-off from his 2023 rate, and it put him in the 98th percentile of all major league hitters. The thing is, his plate discipline didn’t change all that dramatically. He saw fewer pitches in the zone, which is a good way to avoid strikeouts, but he also had one of the higher chase rates of his career. The big difference was that he swung more often on the first pitch and he recorded one of the highest contact rates of his career. That’s a little odd, because chasing more normally leads to whiffing more. However, seeing more outside pitches could lead to more contact, as the ideal contact point for an outside pitch is further behind home plate, which gives the batter more time to react. As I mentioned, all of these numbers were within Betts’ career norms, but between the aggression, especially on the first pitch, and the higher chase rate, it seems safe to say that Betts was looking to put the ball in play a bit more often.
At the same time, Betts’ contact quality took an enormous dip. His hard-hit rate fell from 48.5% in 2023 all the way to 39.5%. That still left him fairly close to the league average, but it was one of the biggest drops in baseball, and the underlying numbers are even uglier. Betts’ 90th percentile exit velocity and his best speed (which throws out the weakest 50% of batted balls and then takes the average of the remaining 50%) represented career lows. The 90th percentile mark put him in the 27th percentile. This is not the direction in which you want to be trending.
As I noted back in May, Betts adjusted to the outside pitches by setting up closer to the plate. That can make it difficult to hit the inside pitch with authority, because you have less time to turn on it, but Betts’ contact quality was down across the board. Here’s his hard-hit rate on pitches in the zone:
The inner third definitely saw the biggest drop-off, but his hard-hit rate was down on pitches out over the plate too. That brings us to our third and final chunk. Betts ran a 34.3% pull rate, the lowest of his career and at least 10 percentage points lower than his rate in each of the three previous seasons. Here are spray heat maps for 2023 and 2024. Everything’s shifting away from left field and toward right field. It’s also shifting away from deep fly balls.
Betts has never been the strongest player in the league, but he’s always hit the ball hard, and he transformed himself into one of the game’s true masters at turning on the inside pitch and ripping it down the line or over the fence. In 2024, however, he traded that super power for the ability to spray line drives to all fields. It certainly seems like this was a response to the way he was being pitched. After all, it’s pretty hard to yank a pitch on the outside corner down the left field line. And if you’re not seeing pitches that you can yank to the pull side, then it no longer makes sense to build your whole approach around that goal.
I don’t want to overreact to a single season, let alone one in which Betts produced his typical fantastic offensive numbers — especially considering that Betts missed nearly two months with a fractured hand. This is one of those times when I really wish we had bat tracking data stretching back over the last several years. Betts had an average bat speed of 69.1 mph in 2024, which put him in just the 14th percentile, and I wish there were a way to know whether that was a big drop-off from previous seasons. He turned 32 last year, and just Tuesday, Tom Tango published an aging curve that makes it look like there’s a dramatic bat speed drop-off starting at 32. If you look at Betts’ spray charts and his contact rates, you get the sense that he just reworked his approach in order to make the most of the pitches he was seeing. However, the exit velocity numbers are such an extreme departure from his previous seasons. To some degree, they’re probably a symptom of that larger adjustment, but Betts’ bat may just be slower than it used to be.
It wasn’t supposed to go down like this. After a sensational contract year — striking out 30% of hitters, posting the lowest walk rate of his career, bedazzling his jewelry cabinet with a World Series ring — Jack Flaherty looked like he was set to make a boatload of money. Days after his 29th birthday, we here at FanGraphs ranked Flaherty eighth among our Top 50 Free Agents, one spot behind his former high school teammate, Max Fried.
Not all of them, it turns out. As the calendar creeps uncomfortably close to the start of spring training, the youngest available starting pitcher in free agency finds himself without an employer. Every couple weeks, a sparsely sourced rumor about Flaherty bubbles up on MLB Trade Rumors — there’s “mutual interest” with the Orioles, the Tigers have “some interest” in a reunion — but for a large part of the offseason, it’s been silence on the Flaherty beat.
The most substantial of these rumors flowed from the estimable pen of Ken Rosenthal over the weekend. Rosenthal and Will Sammon reported in The Athletic that Flaherty was “open to considering” a “short-term deal” with a “high average annual value.” The hot market for starters and the comparatively cool market for Flaherty suggest that, unlike the rest of the nominal “front-end” starting pitchers at the top of the market, something about him scares teams. All of this leads me to ask: What’s the matter with Jack Flaherty?
One obvious answer is the track record. On some level, teams are going to be somewhat hesitant to commit serious resources to anyone whose last healthy and effective season before 2024 came prior to the pandemic. Rosenthal and Sammon wrote in their report that “teams perhaps want to see Flaherty put together two consecutive seasons of elite performance.” And there are the shoulder issues in 2021 and 2022 that limited him to just 114 1/3 innings over that two-year span.
But I don’t think the track record tells the full story. I think the weak Flaherty market comes down to concerns about his 2024 season itself. Specifically, I think teams are worried about his fastball.
They get there in different ways, but the three pitchers who received $200 million (or thereabouts) contracts this winter all have plus fastballs. Snell throws the prototypical ace four-seamer, averaging 96 mph with 19 inches of induced vertical break. Corbin Burnes’ cutter is one of the signature pitches in baseball, capable of missing bats and neutralizing contact quality against hitters on both sides of the plate. Fried is a bit of a different case — his fastball averaged just 93.9 mph last season — but the shape is totally bizarre relative to his arm angle, resembling Burnes’ cutter from the left side. Fried also throws five other pitches, minimizing the importance of his four-seamer.
Free Agent Fastballs
Pitcher
Arm Angle
Fastball
Velocity (mph)
Induced Vertical Break (in.)
Horizontal Break (in.)
Blake Snell
59°
Four-Seamer
95.9
18.7
5.8 (Arm Side)
Corbin Burnes
44°
Cutter
95.3
12.5
2.4 (Glove Side)
Max Fried
48°
Four-Seamer
93.9
11.0
0.1 (Glove Side)
Jack Flaherty
28°
Four-Seamer
93.3
15.4
4.2 (Arm Side)
SOURCE: Baseball Savant
Flaherty’s fastball was the slowest of these four primary offerings, averaging 93.3 mph. In September, that dropped all the way to 92.6 mph. At below-average velocities, even a half-tick of heat loss can be brutal. And while the shape of the fastball is unusual — Flaherty throws from a low slot and gets just four inches of horizontal movement, meaning the pitch unexpectedly cuts in a funky fashion — it doesn’t have the sink that allows Fried’s and Burnes’ fastballs to burrow beneath barrels. Also unlike Fried, Flaherty in effect throws just three pitches: his four-seam fastball and the two breaking balls. (He also flashes a changeup and sinker, but last season he used each of those pitches less than 3% of the time.)
Given the mediocrity of his fastball, Flaherty must aim for fine locations. His success can vary. (I want to caveat the following with the fact that the Dodgers have a strong organizational preference for where their pitchers locate their fastballs, which may or may not be the way Flaherty will pitch with a new team.)
I’ll start with his matchups against left-handed hitters, because these were the majority of hitters that Flaherty faced in 2024. After his trade to the Dodgers in late July, the target for his fastball was almost exclusively set up in one location: Low and away.
A handful of times per start, Flaherty tried to climb the ladder, aiming for swinging strikes at the top of the zone. But in the three starts I watched in full, he almost always targeted his fastballs low and away when facing lefties.
Now, as the plot below of his fastball location to lefties shows, his execution wasn’t perfect. Aiming a baseball is really hard. But I’d venture to say that it was pretty good — he hardly yanked any of his fastballs to the glove side, and most of his misses drifted harmlessly off the plate. In any case, the plot tells a clear story: Flaherty was looking to paint with his fastball rather than challenge hitters over the plate.
This sort of nibbling quality with the fastball is perhaps not what teams want to see from their high-paid free agent starter. Snell, Burnes, and even Fried to some extent can throw fastballs with a large margin for error. Flaherty’s margins are thinner.
This is especially true against right-handed hitters, where his glove-side command is not as good. Against righties, Flaherty also frequently targeted low and away. But as the plot below of fastballs to righties shows, Flaherty doesn’t have the same level of command to the outer edge of this side of the plate. Note the lack of dots in that low-away corner compared to the yanked misses off the plate:
To lefties, Flaherty has the luxury of his misses generally drifting off the plate for balls. When he misses his target to righties, however, the miss tends to drift middle-middle. And when you’re missing middle-middle with 93-mph four-seamers, it’s generally not going to turn out well for you. (This might explain part of Flaherty’s reverse splits last season.)
When executed well, the low-and-away target serves an important function — it sets up his two nasty breaking balls, a harder gyro slider at 85 mph and a loopier knuckle-curve at 78 mph. As this pitch plot shows, these two pitches blend together in a deceptive manner, forcing hitters to guess which one is coming:
Flaherty is at his best when he’s mixing in the low fastballs with the two breakers right below the zone. Check out this two-pitch sequence to Ryan O’Hearn. He nails his 0-0 target to get ahead:
On 0-1 — the perfectly executed fastball fresh in O’Hearn’s head — Flaherty buries a curveball right below the previous location, getting O’Hearn to swing way over the pitch:
After a couple of breaking balls in the dirt, Flaherty punches O’Hearn out on a high fastball. With hitters laser-focused on the bottom of the strike zone, that occasional late-count high heater leads to a ton of whiffs. It’s a pretty combo when it works.
But if Flaherty falls behind, there just isn’t a great option to induce weak contact. When the early-count fastball execution is less than perfect, he tends to back himself into a corner. And when he’s forced to come over to the plate with the heater, he can be vulnerable to the long ball. Just ask O’Hearn:
If Flaherty’s fastball velocity remains in that 92-93 range, it will likely be a tradeoff between giving up a few too many walks due to nibbling (as he did early in his career) or risking extra-base damage by coming over the plate.
So, yes, there are reasons to be concerned about Flaherty. But overly fixating on his fastball risks ignoring his upside.
That two-breaking-ball attack works against both righties and lefties; when he gets ahead in the count, there’s almost nobody better. That strikeout rate is no illusion. So the question becomes: How can Flaherty reliably get ahead of hitters?
One option is pitching backwards. Flaherty’s fastball usage in 0-0 counts is roughly 50%. (On the plot below, red represents the four-seamer, gold represents the slider, and blue represents the curveball.) Given the frequency of his slider usage in 3-1 and 3-2 counts (50% and 44.8%, respectively) it follows that he has the confidence to throw it for a strike when he needs it. Mixing in more breaking balls in early counts could take some pressure off the four-seamer.
Credit: Baseball Savant
Flaherty could also use his sinker more often. If his problem at present is mostly with right-handed hitters, the sinker could give him a weak-contact option and a pitch that he feels comfortable throwing on the inner-half of the plate. Notably, the sinker grades out fine by stuff models — PitchingBot, for example, gives it a 56 on the 20-80 scale.
It’s also not impossible that some of his velocity could return. Maybe he no longer can regularly dial up 95-96 mph as he did in his early 20s, but it’s also possible that his late-season swoon can be chalked up to his posting his highest innings total in five years. In the range of velocity that he sat in the later months of the season, every half-tick is crucial, but if he can consistently live at 93-94 mph with the ability to touch 96, that softens many of the concerns.
Concluding this article definitively is challenging. On the one hand, the skittishness of the clubs is perfectly understandable. But plenty of contending teams need starting pitching, and an industry-wide fear of Flaherty’s weaknesses could cost clubs their chance to add someone who just performed like one of the best hurlers in the game.
On Thursday the Dodgers and Twins agreed to a small trade involving former Top 100 Prospect, Diego Cartaya, a 23-year-old Venezuelan catcher who has struggled to develop as he’s been exposed to upper-level pitching. The Dodgers designated him for assignment earlier this week. In exchange, the Dodgers received hulking 20-year-old DSL righty, Jose Vasquez, a hard-throwing prospect who has spent the last two seasons in the DSL.
Cartaya was a big bonus amateur player ($2.5 million) whose career had a very promising first four seasons. He slashed .254/.389/.503 in 2022, at mostly High-A, when he was still just 20 years old. He was striking out at an elevated rate (26.7%) at the time, but he was also getting to impressive power and playing a premium position. His big frame and plus raw arm strength were the foundation of a likely defensive fit at catcher, and at the time it felt fine that Cartaya (who had missed all of 2020 because of the COVID shutdown, and most of 2021 due to injury) was a little behind as a receiver and ball-blocker.
In the two seasons since then, though, Cartaya has either plateaued or regressed in basically every facet of the game. His hands remain below average, and this shows in the way he tries to frame borderline pitches and in how he tries to pick balls in the dirt. Cartaya is capable of hurling darts right to second base with plus pop times, but he often either takes too long to get rid of the baseball, or airmails throws into center field. He has a good arm, yet he’s allowed stolen bases at an 80% success rate in his minor league career and 84% in 2024.
At a mix of Double- and Triple-A, Cartaya hit .189/.278/.379 in 2023 — his first year on the Dodgers 40-man roster — and .221/.323/.363 in 2024. His measurable power has dipped, with his hard hit rate dropping from 41% in 2022 to 33% last year. It’s prudent to give young catchers a long runway to develop as hitters because their bodies take a beating playing defense, and they might be physically compromised for large chunks of a season, such that it impacts their overall offensive output. But Cartaya has now had two years with the look of a fringe prospect, and so at this point it’s fair to consider him exactly that. He’s still a big-framed young guy with that big arm, and the Twins have had success at developing catchers who were once considered long shots to remain behind the plate, so Cartaya still carries some prospect value as a potential late-bloomer.
While Cartaya’s development stagnated and his options nearly ran dry, Dalton Rushing emerged as a potential everyday catcher in the Dodgers system. Hunter Feduccia (whom I have a backup catcher grade on) is a solid third option on the 40-man right now, behind starter Will Smith and backup Austin Barnes, while Rushing further develops in the minors. There was probably still time for the Dodgers to attempt to develop Cartaya if they really wanted to, but as a contending team they’ll likely have other, more pressing needs for that 40-man roster spot, and they got an actual prospect in return.
Cartaya is now on Minnesota’s 40-man in what will be his final option year. He is very unlikely to make the Opening Day roster, barring injuries to the catchers in front of him, and he’s likely to be the Twins’ fourth catcher on the depth chart when camp breaks, behind Ryan Jeffers, Christian Vázquez, and another former Dodgers minor leaguer, Jair Camargo. Industry inventory at catcher is always low, and depth at that position is coveted on the margins of every roster. If the Twins develop Cartaya enough that he can be their backup next year when Vázquez’s contract ends, then they can feel okay about having given up an actual prospect for him.
That actual prospect is Jose Vasquez, who signed with Minnesota at the tail end of the 2022 signing period (December 13) for $120,000, and he spent both 2023 and 2024 in the DSL. After walking more than a batter per inning in his debut season, Vasquez had a much better second campaign, working 2-to-4 innings at a time, as both a starter and reliever, and amassing 30 2/3 innings, 45 strikeouts, and a much more tenable 15 walks.
Despite his strike-throwing improvement, Vasquez is still most likely going to be a reliever. He’s a physical, 220ish-pound 20-year-old who has had trouble harnessing his 94-97 mph fastball, which sometimes has very heavy late sink. His 84-88 mph slider is curt and cuttery at times, but it flashes bat-missing two-plane shape and above-average length. Vasquez’s realistic ceiling is better than a generic middle reliever, but he’s maybe a half decade away from the bigs. He’ll probably begin his Dodgers career in Extended Spring Training.
On Monday the Dodgers traded Gavin Lux to the Reds for outfield prospect Mike Sirota, and Cincinnati’s 2025 Competitive Balance Round A selection, which is the upcoming draft’s 37th overall pick. Lux, who turned 27 in November, is a career .252/.326/.383 hitter in just shy of 1,500 career plate appearances. He is entering his first arbitration year; the Reds will have him under contract for three seasons.
The Lux Era in Los Angeles was rocky even though the team had championship success around him. He became one of baseball’s best prospects during an incredible 2019 season in which he slashed .347/.421/.607 with 59 extra-base hits in 113 minor league games. He spent the back half of that season, still age 21, at Triple-A Oklahoma City, briefly made his big league debut, and was my no. 2 prospect in baseball entering 2020. Expectations for him were sky high, not only in terms of his impact but also the immediacy of that impact.
Instead, problems with Lux’s throwing accuracy arose during the pandemic season and have been an intermittent problem ever since. His bout with the yips led to 2021 experimentation at third base and in left field, neither of which stuck. The Dodgers seemed determined to move Lux back to shortstop in 2023, but misfortune found Lux again when he blew his ACL in a Cactus League game and missed the whole year. Back at the keystone in 2024, Lux turned in an average offensive season – he slashed .251/.320/.383 over 487 plate appearances with a career high 10 home runs and 100 wRC+ – with below average second base defense, culminating in 1.5 WAR.
Lux is a good fit on a Reds roster teeming with versatile infielders, most of whom hit right-handed. While he’s anemic against lefties, especially their sliders, Lux is a career .264/.337/.408 hitter against righties and slashed .262/.332/.407 against them in 2024. The Reds look as though they’ll have the capacity to play in-game matchups at a variety of different positions if they want to, but from another point of view, they lack stability at every position but shortstop. Center fielder TJ Friedl has been on the IL five times within the last two years, second baseman Matt McLain got Arizona Fall League reps in center field when he returned from a serious shoulder injury of his own. Spencer Steer (1B/LF), Jeimer Candelario (1B/3B), Santiago Espinal (2B/3B/SS), and Rule 5 pick Cooper Bowman (2B/OF) all play a number of different positions, several overlapping with where Lux plays or has played. All are also right-handed. The Reds don’t have a obvious first baseman (Christian Encarnacion-Strand is the projected starter there, but he was bad last season) and it’s possible one of either Steer or Candelario will occupy that spot every day, necessitating a platoon at their other position. It’s conceivable that Lux will revisit left field or third base so that he, too, can bring some amount of versatility to the table and be part of said platoon, but no matter which players claim Opening Day roster spots in Cincinnati, they seem poised to move all over the place to help ensure favorable matchups for the offense.
The main return in this deal for Los Angeles is the draft pick, the 37th overall selection in what I believe to be a deep draft. Lux has performed like a 45-grade player so far, and prospects of about that talent level tend to be available in the Comp round of a deep class. This becomes the Dodgers’ first selection in the 2025 draft, as their ordinary first round pick was chuted 10 spots down to 40th overall because their big league payroll exceeded the second luxury tax threshold. They now have three of this year’s first 70 picks.
The transition from an infield with Lux to one with recent Korean signee, Hye-seong Kim (analysis here), represents a sizeable upgrade for the Dodgers on defense. Kim has played only second base for the last several KBO seasons, but he’s a great athlete with great range, and it’s reasonable to project that he’ll be able to play an MLB-quality shortstop, as well as several other positions, if given the opportunity. The Dodgers’ middle infield contingent in 2024 was a yip-prone Lux, several guys in their mid-30s, and a rusty-from-injury Tommy Edman, whom they acquired at the trade deadline. Their 2025 mix will depend on what kind of shortstop defender Kim ends up being — right now, they are still planning to have Mookie Betts open the year at short — and is pending whatever else the Dodgers do between now and Opening Day.
The sidecar to the trade is Sirota, a 21-year-old outfielder who was Cincinnati’s 2024 third round selection out of Northeastern, where he hit .324/.458/.577 during his career. (Unfamiliar readers should be aware that college stats are bloated.) He has yet to play an actual pro game, but he participated in Cincinnati’s instructional league activity during the fall. Here was my pre-draft report:
Speedy, power-over-hit center field prospect with plus plate discipline. Tightly wound athlete with narrow build, wiry and strong. Hands are especially lively with low-ball power. Likely going to swing underneath a ton of in-zone fastballs and be a below-average contact hitter. Speed fits in center; reads and routes need polish but the footspeed is there. Projected issues with the hit tool and Sirota’s flavor of build/athleticism look more like a part-timer. His on-base ability buoys his profile and gives Sirota a shot to be a Tyrone Taylor type of complimentary outfielder.
The Dodgers often target players with speed-driven profiles and attempt to make them stronger (Jake Vogel, Kendall George, Zyhir Hope), and Sirota is of that ilk. This is also the second year in a row the Dodgers have pounced on a recently drafted prospect who had yet to get his footing in pro ball (also Hope, from the Cubs).
So the Dodgers turn essentially a part-time player into a draft asset of comparable value (albeit a slow-to-mature one) and a likely lesser, but decent young prospect in Sirota. In a vacuum it’s a pretty even trade, but knowing they arguably replaced Lux with a better roster fit in a separate deal, and then cashed him in for multiple pieces feels like vintage Rays-era Andrew Friedman snowballing assets. For the Reds, Lux’s fit on their roster and their desire to compete for the NL Central crown helps justify things on their end, though it’s tougher to swallow a smaller market team coughing up such a high draft pick.
