You didn’t really think teams were done swapping relievers after Friday and Saturday, did you? If you thought maybe they were tapped out for late relief help on Sunday and Monday, well, you thought wrong! If your bullpen doesn’t look like there are enough dudes to capture Helm’s Deep, you’re woefully short-armed.

The San Diego Padres acquired LHRP Tanner Scott and RHRP Bryan Hoeing from the Miami Marlins for LHSP Robby Snelling, RHSP Adam Mazur, 3B/2B Graham Pauley, and 3B/SS Jay Beshears

As one of baseball’s elite closers on an expiring contract, Tanner Scott was arguably the best short-term option available among relievers. His walk rate has peeked up a little to the numbers of the bad old days, but his first-strike percentage has stayed firmly in positive territory, which is an important indicator of where walk numbers will settle. Scott is likely to help the Padres in a very tight NL Wild Card race, but he’ll probably be even more important for them in the playoffs if they can get there. In San Diego, he teams up with Robert Suarez to asphyxiate opposing lineups late in the games. As far as elite closers who occasionally walk a few too many batters go, Scott is one of the less stressful of the genre, because he’s so hard to hit against with any authority, giving him a good shot at escaping jams following those free passes.

Bryan Hoeing is a sinker/slider reliever who has never quite clicked, as he’s never really been able to induce many swings-and-misses, nor has he mastered the art of inducing weak groundballs. He strikes me mostly as a depth guy who has plenty of years of club control left, and barring a breakout, he seems destined to be shuffled back and forth between San Diego and Triple-A El Paso a lot over the next few years. This trade is about Scott. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mariners are 56-51 and tied for a playoff spot, so it might be hard to believe it, but their offense is bad. Not just bad for a playoff team, but 28th in baseball in runs scored bad, .300 OBP and that’s the good part of the offense bad, put Victor Robles at the top of the order because he’s the only one who’s been hitting bad. They already did a little to address that deficit by trading for Randy Arozarena, and now they’re doubling down on righty AL East bats by acquiring Justin Turner in exchange for RJ Schreck, as Ken Rosenthal and Ryan Divish reported.

Do you know who the Mariners have been playing at DH this year? It reads like a cautionary tale. Kids, if you come into the year trying to win only 54% of your games, you might give your DH at-bats to Mitch Garver, Mitch Haniger, and Jason Vosler. It’s not a lot prettier at first base. Ty France played so badly that he got DFA’d by a team desperately in search of offense. Tyler Locklear got the next shot, and he is hitting .163/.234/.326 so far. Those two lineup spots have combined for a .211/.304/.369 line, and that’s with some juice from Cal Raleigh when he gets a break from catching.

At 39, Turner isn’t the same middle-of-the-order force he was in Los Angeles. He’s settled into a savvy veteran hitter role, and started playing first base in 2023 to give the Red Sox more flexibility when he was in Boston. He’s continued to alternate between first and DH in Toronto, with a splash of emergency third base thrown in. He’s still absolutely a useful player, but he’s just not the Turner you might expect if you’ve tuned out for the last two years.
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.

The Boston Red Sox beat the New York Yankees 9-7 on Friday night, and regardless of which team you might have been rooting for, the game was an absolute gem. The lead changed hands fives times, the 28 combined hits included four home runs — one of them a titanic 470-foot blast by Aaron Judge — and the tying runs were on base when Kenley Jansen recorded the final out for his 440th career save. Moreover, the atmosphere at a packed Fenway Park was electric throughout. It was as close to a postseason atmosphere as you will find in July.

The loss was New York’s fifth in sixth games, so I was admittedly a bit apprehensive about asking Aaron Boone a particular question prior to yesterday evening’s affair. I did so anyway. Prefacing it by relating a press box opinion that it had been as entertaining as any played at Fenway all season, I wanted to know if, as a manager, he allows himself to think about the aesthetics of a baseball game in that manner.

His answer didn’t disappoint.

“I always try to have a little appreciation for that,” Boone replied. “Especially with what we’ve been going through as a club. We’ve struggled. There are a handful of games where I’ve felt that way, like, ‘Man, this is a really good baseball game going on.’ When you come out on the bad end it kind of sucks, but you try to have that appreciation for ‘That was a really good one.’ Hopefully we can start to be on the right side of those.” 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.
Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Bryan Woo wasn’t highly regarded when the Seattle Mariners selected him in the sixth round of the 2021 draft out of Cal Poly. That’s understandable. The low-slot righty had a 6.36 ERA in his three collegiate seasons, including a 6.11 mark in his injury-hampered junior year. After undergoing Tommy John surgery in April 2021, he made his professional debut in ’22.

Now, the 24-year-old is showing that Seattle’s director of pitching strategy, Trent Blank, wasn’t completely out of his mind when he reportedly told members of the Mariners front office prior to the draft that “this guy would be one-one for me.” While it’s unlikely that Woo is going to be as good or better than all of the 173 players drafted ahead of him, his numbers have nonetheless been impressive. Since making his big league debut in July 2023, he has a 3.60 ERA and a 3.96 FIP over 137 1/3 innings across his 28 starts with the Mariners. In 10 outings this year, he is 4-1 with a 2.54 ERA and a 3.25 FIP. It’s worth noting that this success hasn’t exactly come out of nowhere. Including four rehab outings this year, Woo logged a 2.97 ERA and 162 strikeouts over 115 innings as a minor leaguer.

Woo brought up his backstory when I asked him how he’s developed as pitcher.

“Going through the draft-and-scouting process, I feel like a lot of it was based on my potential,” Woo told me when the Mariners played in Cleveland last month. “I didn’t have great results at the time. It was based off of, ‘He could be this. It looks like he’s developing into that.’ For me, it was about believing that I could get there, that I could continue to get better. That’s kind of the story. I wasn’t too well-known. If you look at in on paper, it was never, ‘This guy is really good.’ The numbers never really showed that I was.”

Not surprisingly, Woo also brought up the fact that he’d been injured when he was drafted, and how that made for a lot of uncertainty. As he put it, “I didn’t quite know what was going to happen. It could have been a little higher. I could have gone a lot lower. I really wasn’t sure.”

He did know that his repertoire needed both refinement and enhancement. The Oakland native had a mid-90s four-seam fastball when healthy but nothing else to write home about. His slider, which he described as having been “OK,” was a pitch he’d throw here and there. He also had a changeup, but that mostly sat in his back pocket.

Developing a second heater has been especially impactful for him. He added a two-seamer to his arsenal last year while toeing the rubber for the Arkansas Travelers.

“Last year, before I got called up, our pitching coordinator came down to Double-A, where I was at,” Woo said. “He sat in on one of my bullpens and said, ‘Just try it.’ I was having a lot of high pitch count games — I wasn’t getting many quick outs — and he said that it could be a tool to use to get some quicker outs, some weaker contact. A lot of my game was strikeouts and fly balls. There weren’t many efficient outs, I guess you could say. So, we tried the two and it has progressed from there.”

So far this season, Woo has thrown 51.4% four-seamers and 27.2% two-seamers, as well as 7.2% changeups, 7.1% sweepers, and 7.0% sliders. The last of that mix, according to the righty, acts more like a gyro when he throws it low, and more like a cutter when he throws it toward the top of the zone. His circle changeup is a pitch he described as having “a little less vertical and a little bit more horizontal, as well as little bit slower, than my sinker.” Asked which of his off-speed pitches he sees as his main secondary offering going forward, he said that he’s satisfied with the progress of all three and wouldn’t take one over the other.

As for his two fastballs, the 6-foot-2 Woo wasn’t inclined to pick between them either. Instead of choosing favorites, he described why he’s had success with his heaters despite their relatively unimpressive metrics.

“Neither one plays super high metrically; the vertical and horizontal movement aren’t anything crazy,” Woo said. “I think it’s just my slot, kind of how the ball comes out, that makes them a little bit different.”

The slot is indeed different. As Pitcher List’s Jack Foley explained last summer, “At 4’11” off the ground, Woo has a release height a full foot below the average.”

Woo told me that he was more over the top in high school, only to have his arm “kind of lower on its own throughout college, post-surgery, and pro ball.” He claimed to have never purposefully dropped it down, but rather has just continued to throw in a way that feels most comfortable. Not so comfortable are opposing batters. They have just a .220 xBA and a 2.7% barrel rate against the low-slot righty this season. When healthy — he missed the first month with elbow inflammation and later was on the shelf for three weeks with a hamstring strain — Woo is hard to square up.

Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

With just seven days to go until the July 30 trade deadline, let’s round up some news and developments from the last few days and discuss how these nuggets might affect what happens over the next week. Here’s what’s new:

The Mariners Blow Their AL West Lead

Remember when the Mariners had a 10-game lead in the AL West at the end of play on June 18? Well, they surely do, and not fondly, now that it’s gone. They salvaged Sunday’s series finale against the Astros to avoid the sweep and enter the new week in a virtual tie for first, but it took just 24 games for them to blow that double-digit lead. That’s the quickest that any MLB team has ever lost a 10-game lead in its division standings.

Anyone who’s watched even a small handful of Mariners games can tell you that the offense has been the big issue for the team. Potentially making matters worse: Julio Rodríguez was removed from Sunday’s game after twisting his right ankle while leaping for a ball against the wall in center field. X-rays came back negative, and after undergoing an MRI on Monday, he’s listed as day-to-day with a mild ankle sprain. Then, in Monday’s 3-1 loss to the Angels, shortstop J.P. Crawford fractured his right pinky finger when he was hit by a pitch in the first inning. It was announced after the game that Crawford will be placed on the IL; there is no timetable for his return. Meanwhile, the Mariners placed first baseman Ty France on waivers. Though he can continue to play while he’s on waivers, he was not in the lineup Monday, and after the game he was seen cleaning out his locker, an indication that even if he clears waivers, he is not returning to Seattle.

Also not helping this offense is its home ballpark: T-Mobile Park is the most pitcher-friendly park in the league. But even by park-adjusted stats, Seattle’s offense has been quite poor; only the Pirates have a worse wRC+ among the teams with a winning percentage of at least .500.

The Mariners are still clearly on the buying side of teams entering the deadline, but their playoff hopes largely rest on winning the division outright; entering Monday, our Depth Charts projects them to have a 49.8% chance to make the playoffs and 39.6% odds to win the AL West. Back on June 25, about a weak after Seattle’s high-water mark in the standings, I wrote about the team’s anemic offense and some of the players who could help improve the lineup if the Mariners were to acquire them in a trade. All of those hitters remain with their same clubs, and Seattle’s evaporated division lead should provide the team with even more incentive to add as many impact bats as possible. The Mariners should target players whose skill sets are more “T-Mobile Park proof,” but it’s hard to imagine this offense could be worse off with any of the possible upgrades that it may acquire over the next week.

James Paxton’s DFA Sets up Musical Chairs for the Dodgers

It was a little surprising to see James Paxton get designated for assignment as the Dodgers’ corresponding move to add top pitching prospect River Ryan to their roster ahead of his MLB debut on Monday, but the fact of the matter is that Paxton wasn’t going to last much longer in Los Angeles anyhow. While he’s tied with Tyler Glasnow for the team lead in starts (18), his outings were a mixed bag at best; he averaged under five innings per start and walked 12.3% of batters faced, by far a career worst.

The Paxton-for-Ryan swap is just the first of many rotation moves coming up for the Dodgers, who will welcome Glasnow back from the injured list on Wednesday and Kershaw on Thursday. The Dodgers will have to cut a reliever to make room for Kershaw, setting up a rotation with Glasnow, Kershaw, Gavin Stone, Landon Knack, and either Ryan or rookie lefty Justin Wrobleski. Alex Vesia is the only reliever who can be optioned, and he’s not going anywhere, so the team will have a tough DFA decision afoot. My guess is that Yohan Ramírez and Anthony Banda are the most vulnerable.

But that’s just the first round of musical chairs, with at least one of Walker Buehler (hip discomfort) and Bobby Miller (ineffective and banished to Triple-A) needing a spot at some point, which could leave Knack exposed to getting optioned despite his effectiveness when called upon. There’s also the trade deadline, at which point the Dodgers may well add yet another starter to the mix.

Banged-up Braves Bolstering Bats?

Max Fried and Ozzie Albies recently became the latest in a long line of Braves players to land on the injured list.

Dan Szymborski detailed the specifics of the injuries yesterday, but the upshot is this: Whit Merrifield (who, ironically, hurt his thumb taking grounders before his first game with the Braves and is currently day-to-day) and Nacho Alvarez Jr. probably aren’t enough to paper over the loss of Albies for two months, Atlanta’s strong rotation was already spread thin before Fried got hurt because Spencer Strider is out for the year and Chris Sale and Reynaldo López are often pitching on extra rest as Atlanta monitors their innings.

Fried’s injury is reportedly a best-case scenario, so maybe the Braves feel like they can get by for a month or so with guys like Dylan Dodd, Bryce Elder, AJ Smith-Shawver, and Allan Winans, but as Dan noted, losing Albies creates a not-insignificant hit to their Playoff Odds. It certainly doesn’t help matters that Matt Olson and Orlando Arcia have struggled mightily for most of the year.

Positional flexibility fits best for the Braves, who will have Michael Harris II (and almost certainly Albies) back for the playoffs. Better versions of Merrifield (guys who can slide between the infield and outfield) include Jazz Chisholm Jr., Luis Rengifo, and Amed Rosario.

The Tigers Hold the Keys

The Tigers are on a nice little run of late, but they’re a game under .500, which makes selling at the deadline all but a guarantee. The question is this, though: To what extent will they sell? Jack Flaherty is the best rental starter on the market by far, and fellow pending free agents Mark Canha and Gio Urshela should follow him out the door to make way for younger bats auditioning for roles next year. Andrew Chafin and Shelby Miller, who have club options for 2025, could be on the move as well if the Tigers don’t plan on having them around next season anyhow and want to avoid paying their buyouts. All those players, Flaherty especially, could return something of value, but none would alter the franchise even 10% as much as would a Tarik Skubal trade.

The Dodgers and Orioles are reportedly talking to the Tigers about Skubal, and while it would be shocking to see Detroit trade the best lefty starter in baseball when he has over two years left before he’s scheduled to reach free agency, it’s still worth considering the possibility. Skubal comes with as much club control as the White Sox’ Garrett Crochet, who is far likelier to be traded, and it stands to reason that Skubal would fetch a significantly better return than Crochet.

There’s not a right answer for what the Tigers should do with Skubal. Really, the only wrong answer would be getting an unworthy return package for him because they traded him for the sake of trading him. For this reason, the Tigers are most likely going to let suitors come to them with their best offers for Skubal, and they’ll trade him only if one of them is too good to turn down.

Editor’s Note, 9:37 a.m. ET: This story has been updated to include the latest information about the Mariners’ injuries and Ty France.

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) this week. This is a strange week for the column. The All-Star break cut into the number of games available to watch; mathematically speaking, fewer games means fewer chances for weird things to happen. I took a weekend trip and didn’t watch any MLB games on Friday or Saturday. I’m also hard at work on the upcoming trade value series, which comes out between the All-Star game and the deadline every year – check back Monday for that annual exercise’s kickoff. In any case, that means this is a hodgepodge list: some stuff from this week, sure, but also plays and series that got left out last week, and some low-level baseball to boot. Thanks, as always, to ESPN’s Zach Lowe for the format idea. And two quick programming notes: I won’t be doing my regular Monday chat or Five Things next week; instead, I’ll be doing a jumbo-sized chat Friday morning.

1. The New Derby Format
The modern swing-happy Home Run Derby has been a great success, at least as far as I’m concerned. It’s more fun to see sluggers launch as many home runs as they possibly can than it is to see them agonize over every single swing. The format wasn’t perfect, though. I’m not trying to be a grump about it – is it even possible to be a grump about the Home Run Derby? – but there was one downside to the timed-round format: not enough drama.
Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »