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 »

Though many predicted heading into the 2025 season that the Orioles’ weak starting rotation and general inactivity over the offseason would come back to haunt them, even Baltimore’s biggest skeptics weren’t prognosticating that the team would sit well under .500 and 7.5 games out of playoff position at the end of July. Such as it is, the Orioles spent this year’s trade deadline turning over roughly a third of their roster. Over the last week or so, the O’s have traded relievers Gregory Soto, Seranthony Domínguez, and Andrew Kittredge, along with infielders Ryan O’Hearn and Ramón Urías. Then on Thursday afternoon, Anthony DiComo reported that Cedric Mullins was on his way to the Mets; a few hours later, Jeff Passan broke the news that Charlie Morton would be joining the Tigers. The only healthy pending free agent who wasn’t traded out of Baltimore is Tomoyuki Sugano, and with Zach Eflin hitting the IL mere hours before the deadline, Sugano is now a load-bearing member of the rotation. Read the rest of this entry »

The National League East is shaping up into full-on sprint down the homestretch. Entering the day of the trade deadline, the Mets find themselves half a game ahead of the Phillies, but our playoff odds give Philadelphia a 51-49 edge at winning the division. Both teams have spent past two weeks reinforcing their bullpens, and on Wednesday night, just hours after the Phillies traded for a fireballing closer in Jhoan Duran, the Mets found their own slightly-less-fireballing closer in Ryan Helsley. The 31-year-old Helsley is a rental in his final year of arbitration, and for his services the Mets sent the Cardinals prospects Jesus Baez, Nate Dohm, and Frank Elissalt. After trading for Gregory Soto last week and Tyler Rogers earlier on Wednesday, the Mets have now completely reshaped the backend of their bullpen. Jon Heyman of the New York Post and Anthony DiComo of MLB.com were the first to report different parts of the deal.

Before we get into the trade, let’s take a moment to marvel at how quickly the Mets and Phillies have remade their relief corps. I should start by crediting the prolific Michael Baumann, who wrote up the Soto deal, the Rogers deal, and the Duran deal. I also wrote up the Phillies’ signing of David Robertson last week. Put all that together, and the Mets and Phillies have added the players who rank ninth, 12th, 37th, 54th, and 72nd in reliever WAR since the start of 2024. Impressively, Robertson comes in at 37th even though he hasn’t pitched in the big leagues yet this season, because his 1.9 WAR ranked ninth among all relievers last year. This measuring stick also underrates Rogers, who came in at 54th, because our version of WAR relies on FIP, and the submariner has made a habit of beating his through the mystical art of groundball induction; when using RA9-WAR, Rogers jumps all the way up to 10th. In other words, we’re talking about four of the most valuable relievers in all of baseball and Soto, who is also pretty good.

This is what it looks like when your goal is to win a World Series. The Phillies and Mets are paying heavy prices to give themselves the best possible chance of locking down games late in October. The Mets started out in a better position, as their bullpen currently ranks 11th in baseball with a 3.80 ERA and 4.02 xFIP, and eighth with a 3.70 FIP, and they’ve added one more reliever than Philadelphia. But the Phillies have now added the best reliever on the market (note: I wrote this sentence before the Mason Miller trade went down) and one of the best and most consistent setup men in the game. None of this guarantees that the division will come down to the wire or that these relief corps will actually shut down the opposition in October, but it’s awfully fun to watch them gearing up for a championship run.

Now to the deal! As Anthony Franco noted for MLB Trade Rumors, Helsley has $2.65 million remaining on his $8.2 million salary. Because the Mets are in luxury tax territory, they’ll actually pay something like $5.6 million in total for him over the next two months.

With Edwin Díaz ensconced in the closer role, Helsley and Rogers should slot in as shutdown setup men. After making his debut in 2019, Helsley really took off in 2022, running a 1.25 ERA and 2.34 FIP over 54 appearances and taking over the St. Louis closer role that July. Helsley led baseball with 49 saves last year, and that total represented more than half of the Cardinals’ wins. Though still excellent, it wouldn’t be unfair to say that he has taken a step back this season. He’s currently running a 3.00 ERA, though FIP, xERA, and xFIP all see him as deserving something closer to 3.50. This is a far cry from the combined 1.83 ERA, 2.35 FIP, and 3.04 xFIP he put up over the three previous seasons.

As for why this is happening, Helsley’s strikeout rate has fallen in each of the last three seasons, from a massive 39% in 2022 to a merely good 26% this season. After running absurdly low home run rates on his fly balls for the past two seasons, Helsley is up to a 2.5% home run rate. Because he’s a reliever, we’re only talking about four home runs this season. That could just be randomness evening out, but his hard-hit and barrel rates have also increased. Batters are having less trouble elevating and celebrating than they used to against him. That 2.5% home run rate is the same as his mark in 2022. The difference is that because he was striking out so many batters back then, a few home runs didn’t matter all that much. Dingers were all hitters were going to get, and I mean that literally. In 2022, Helsley allowed nine earned runs. All nine of those runs scored on homers.

Home runs are always going to be a risk for a pitcher who depends on high four-seamers. When players aren’t swinging under them, they’re elevating them. Helsley is still averaging 99.3 mph on his fastball this season, and stuff models are still swooning over the slider that he throws nearly half the time and the curveball he throws 5% of the time. The issue is location. He has an extreme overhand delivery, averaging an arm angle of 63 degrees. That should make for a really fun contrast when Rogers pitches the seventh and Helsley pitches the eighth. It also means that Helsley’s four-seamer is almost pure rise, averaging 17.6 inches of induced vertical break and just 2.3 inches of arm-side break. A pitch like that plays best at or above the top of the zone, but he has struggled to keep the ball up there this season.

As a result, Statcast’s run values have the pitch going from being worth 0.7 runs per 100 pitches in 2024 to worth -2.0 runs this season. Its whiff rate has fallen, its hard-hit rate has risen, and its wOBA has climbed from .325 to .439.

This is still a dangerous pitch, and if Helsley can locate it better and pair it with his unhittable gyro slider, he instantly returns to being one of the best relievers in the game. Maybe the Mets think they can help him find his command or that it will come back in time anyway. Maybe they’ll just tell him to keep throwing hundos over the heart of the plate and trust in his stuff. No batter is dying to see a 100-mph heater, even if it comes in a couple inches lower than the pitcher hoped. If all Helsley does it keep pitching to a 3.00 ERA, he’ll still be very useful over the next couple of months.

That brings us to the prospects going back to the Cardinals. Baez is the main attraction here, and he happened to be on base when the trade went down, which meant that he learned the news when a pinch-runner came to take his place. Eric Longenhagen just wrote up the Mets top prospects a month ago, at which time Baez ranked 16th in the system with a future value of 40+. It’s at least worth noting that Baseball America had him ranked all the way up at sixth in the organization, though he was at least somewhat blocked in an organization with young infielders like Mark Vientos, Luisangel Acuña, Brett Baty, and Ronny Mauricio, along with two other infielders who came in ahead of him on our prospect rankings — Jacob Reimer and Elian Peña — and two 2024 draft picks: Mitch Voit and A.J. Ewing. Eric updated his blurb about Baez in light of the deal, so here it is in its entirety:

A $275,000 signee from 2022, Baez slashed .262/.338/.444 at St. Lucie last year and was given the quick hook up to Brooklyn after just a few games back there to start 2025. As of his trade to St. Louis for Ryan Helsely, he had a .740 OPS as a Cyclone, and is on his third consecutive season of a K% in the 15-17% range. This is a sensational hip-and-shoulder athlete who wows you with his ability to throw across his body, as well as his ability to rotate hard through contact. It’s a special, if specific, characteristic that creates some highlight reel plays on both sides of the ball, but doesn’t make Baez a great player or prospect on its own.

Let’s start with defense, where Baez continues to mostly play shortstop. He has the pure arm strength and actions to play short but nowhere near the requisite range, and his first step is slow enough that at times he looks lacking at third base, too. There is a subset of plays where Baez is forced to throw from a low arm slot that he appears most comfortable making, but he isn’t as consistent when he has to get on top of the baseball to throw long distance. This might make his best long-term position second base, where a lot of throws are made back across your body.

On offense, Baez has all-fields doubles power right now thanks to his lubricated hips, and he’s posting roughly average contact and power metrics under the hood. He has pull power even when his feet are early because he’s able to keep his hands back and rotate well through contact. The shaky Jenga block in Baez’s profile is his plate discipline, which gives his profile a Maikel Franco flavor that I can’t quite get out of my mouth. He’s been more patient in early counts this year than in seasons past, but he still expands too much with two strikes. Baez cuts his leg kick with two strikes to be in a better position to spoil tough pitches and grind out long at-bats, but this limits his pop; he had a paltry .490 OPS with two strikes at the time of the trade. This is a talented player who has performed like a future average everyday player on the surface, but who has some issues (defensive fit, strike zone judgment) that force one to round him down into a second division or bat-first utility FV tier.

Dohm and Elissalt are right-handed pitching prospects drafted out of college in 2024 who came in toward the end of the Mets list with future values of 35+. The Mets drafted the 23-year-old Dohm out of Mississippi State in the third round in 2024, and he has put up good results so far as a professional. He has looked solid this season, striking out nearly 30% of the batters he faced in seven games at Low-A and 11 games at High-A. He has a combined 2.87 ERA and 3.25 FIP over nearly 63 innings. Here’s what Eric wrote about him last month:

Dohm transferred from Ball State to Mississippi State, moved from the bullpen to the rotation, and had a hot start to his 2024 season before he was sidelined with an elbow injury. His mid-90s fastball has uphill angle and ride that helps it miss bats at the belt, and Dohm commands his slider (which isn’t especially nasty) to the bottom of the zone. He’s already blown through his career innings high in 2025 and is more of a dev project than the typical SEC arm. He projects as a fastball-heavy reliever.

The Mets took Elissalt in the 19th round of the 2024 draft out of Division-II Nova Southeastern. He was just promoted from Low-A to High-A, and he has a combined 3.04 ERA and 3.46 xFIP over 20 appearances and 56 1/3 innings. So far he’s also striking out right around 29% of the batters he faces. Elissalt can now touch 98, but Matt Eddy and Geoff Pontes of Baseball America have noted that he struggles with both command and maintaining consistent pitch shapes. Here’s what Eric wrote about him last month:

Elissalt went to high school in Miami but somehow ended up in Philly at LaSalle for his freshman season of college ball. It was his only one, as he would then transfer to Florida Southwestern and then Nova Southeastern before he was drafted. Elissalt has already experienced a four-tick bump to his fastball and an eight-tick bump to his primary breaking ball. He’s now averaging 95 mph and releasing from a low point that creates flat angle on a fastball with mediocre movement. Elissalt’s college curveball was scrapped in favor of a harder slider with plus length and bite. It’s the mix of a middle reliever if Elissalt can command his fastball to the location where it thrives.

In all, this is exactly the kind of deal we expect to see at the deadline. The Cardinals aren’t going anywhere with or without Helsley. He’s a pure rental who now has the chance to serve as a crucial piece in a playoff run. The Mets have built up their farm system to the point where they have enough players who may one day end up as good everyday infielders that they can afford to lose one. Dohm and Elissalt have a lot of developing to do for 23-year-old college arms, and they’re likely to get more chances as the Cardinals rebuild than they would have for a Mets team that is intent on building a dynasty.

Having just added Gregory Soto to the bullpen, the Mets are at it again. Less than 90 minutes after his identical twin went to Pittsburgh in the Ke’Bryan Hayes trade, Tyler Rogers is also on the move.

Rogers, with his 1.80 ERA and 2.59 FIP in 50 innings this year for the Giants, has been one of the best relief pitchers in baseball. Still, he’s 34, and a rental, and a major departure from the hard-throwing Adonises the Mets might otherwise have pursued. And yet, David Stearns saw fit to give up Drew Gilbert, Blade Tidwell, and José Buttó — two big-name prospects and a guy who’s been decent in the majors this year — for two months of a guy who throws underhand. Maybe up to three months, if the Mets make the playoffs and stay there for a couple rounds.

It’s not quite that simple. Rogers is good, relievers are expensive now, and fame does not always equal value in the prospect world. Read the rest of this entry »

Happy Wednesday. Would you like some sad news? Are your cheek muscles getting tired from constantly smiling because everything in the world keeps humming along so smoothly? Let’s bring you down with a roundup of star outfielder injury news. We’ll go in ascending order of scariness, so if you don’t feel sufficiently depressed at the beginning, just stick with it. We’ll get you there.

We start in Minnesota, where Byron Buxton is headed to the IL with left ribcage inflammation. Buxton was removed from Saturday’s game after experiencing pain in his ribs while he was running. At the time, the Twins said Buxton would be day-to-day with “left side soreness.” He hasn’t spoken to the press since Friday, so all updates have come from manager Rocco Baldelli. On Saturday, Baldelli told reporters, “We’re just going to get an image tomorrow morning just to see what we’re dealing with. He actually felt it more running than anything else.” The MRI delivered good news, revealing only “cartilage irritation” rather than structural damage to the ribs. The team again classified Buxton as day-to-day. “It’s a good outcome,” said Baldelli. “We’ll see how he is tomorrow and so on, but to be day-to-day with what he left the game with, it’s a good thing. We’ll measure him out, get him looked at by the trainers each day, get him a lot of treatment and hopefully he’ll be back very soon.”

Unfortunately, Buxton hasn’t gotten back into a game and the Twins have lost three of four, cementing their status as deadline sellers. Harrison Bader has taken over in center field, but he’s widely expected to be moved at the deadline. Buxton has a no-trade clause and recently reiterated his stated desire to say with the Twins for life, but the injury seems likely to silence any remaining whispers about the possibility that he could be traded too. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Payton Tolle is the top pitching prospect in what is arguably baseball’s best farm system. Drafted 50th-overall last summer by the Boston Red Sox out of Texas Christian University, the 22-year-old left-hander features a fastball that Eric Longenhagen has assigned a 70 grade, and not just because of its high octane. Per our lead prospect analyst, the 6-foot-6, 250-pound hurler possessed “the 2024 draft’s most deceptive secondary traits,” which included seven-and-a-half feet of extension.

I asked Tolle about his four-seamer, which sat 95 mph when I saw toe the rubber for the Double-A Portland Sea Dogs versus the Hartford Yard Goats 10 days ago.

“The velo is something we’ve kind of driven hard ever since I got to the Red Sox org,” said Tolle, who was 90-92 in college and is now topping out at 98-99. “I’m buying into the system, buying into how the velo is going to change how everything looks. I also understand that more swing-and-miss is going to come at the top of the zone. At Wichita State, my first year, I felt like I was almost more sinkers, but then I switched up my grip. I brought my fingers closer together and started to have more ride on it.”

Tolle transferred from Wichita State to TCU for his junior year, where he — along with the Horned Frogs coaching staff — “really dove into how the fastball plays and what we can play off of it.” Since turning pro, that evolution has continued with a heavy emphasis on secondary offerings. Whereas his fastball usage as an amateur was often 70-75%, it has been closer to 50% in his recent outings. A work-in-progress changeup has become more prevalent — Tolle got bad swings on a few of them when I saw him in Portland — but a hard breaking ball is currently his top option behind his heater. Read the rest of this entry »

Cam Schlittler has emerged as the top pitching prospect in the New York Yankees organization. His ability to overpower hitters is a big reason why. In four starts since being promoted to Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre on June 3, the 6-foot-6, 225-pound right-hander has logged a 1.69 ERA and a 40.2% strikeout rate over 21-and-a-third innings. Counting his 53 frames at Double-A Somerset, Schlittler has a 2.18 ERA and a 33.0% strikeout rate on the season.

The 2022 seventh-rounder out of Northeastern University is averaging 96.5 mph with his heater, but more than velocity plays into the offering’s effectiveness. As Eric Longenhagen wrote back in January, Schlittler’s “size and arm angle create downhill plane on his mid-90s fastball akin to a runaway truck ramp, while the backspinning nature of the pitch also creates riding life.”

I asked the 24-year-old Walpole, Massachusetts native about the characteristics our lead prospect analyst described in his report.

“Arm slot-wise it’s nothing crazy,” Schlittler said in our spring training conversation. “I’m more of a high-three-quarters kind of guy, but what I didn’t realize until looking at video a couple months ago is that I have really quick arm speed. My mechanics are kind of slow, and then my arm path is really fast, so the ball kind of shoots out a little bit. With my height, release point— I get good extension — and how fast my arm is moving, the ball gets on guys quicker than they might expect.” Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the New York Mets. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fifth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

In a post yesterday, I wrote about the BaseRuns approach to estimating team winning percentages and how it attempts to strip away context that doesn’t pertain to a team’s actual ability, so as to reveal what would have happened if baseball were played in a world not governed by the whims of seemingly random variation. In this world, a win-loss record truly represents how good a team actually is. Try as it might, the BaseRuns methodology fails to actually create such a world, sometimes stripping away too much context, ignoring factors that do speak to a team’s quality, or both.

I delayed for a separate post (this one!) a deeper discussion of specific offensive and defensive units that BaseRuns represents quite differently compared to the actual numbers posted by these teams. To determine whether or not BaseRuns knows what it’s talking about with respect to each team, imagine yourself sitting in the audience on a game show set. The person on your left is dressed as Little Bo Peep, while the person on your right has gone to great lengths to look like Beetlejuice. That or Michael Keaton is really hard up for money. On stage there are a series of doors, each labeled with a team name. Behind each door is a flashing neon sign that reads either “Skill Issue!” or “Built Different!” Both can be either complimentary or derogatory depending on whether BaseRuns is more or less optimistic about a team relative to its actual record. For teams that BaseRuns suggests are better than the numbers indicate, the skill issue identified is a good thing — a latent ability not yet apparent in the on-field results. But if BaseRuns thinks a team is worse than the numbers currently imply, then skill issue is used more colloquially to suggest a lack thereof. The teams that are built different buck the norms laid out by BaseRuns and find a way that BaseRuns doesn’t consider to either excel or struggle. Read the rest of this entry »