Last night’s three-way trade between the Padres, Indians, and Reds, which was headlined by two mercurial big leaguers, also featured the movement of several notable prospects, including two from our Top 100 (sort of) in left fielder Taylor Trammell, who comes in at No. 31 overall, and left-handed pitcher Logan Allen, who is No. 110. As I move through the trade, talking about the young pieces used to headline, balance, and sweeten this deal to completion, I’ll remind you of who the team gave up to acquire the prospect. I’ll touch on some big league stuff throughout the piece because three-way deals make it hard to isolate analysis to just the prospects, but there’s also analysis that focuses on the major leaguers — including the Reds’ return, which I ignore because they only received a big leaguer — from Dan right here. Let’s begin by looking at the best prospect included in the trade.

Padres acquired
LF Taylor Trammell (55 FV)

Padres traded
OF Franmil Reyes
LHP Logan Allen (50 FV)
3B Victor Nova (35+ FV)

Trammell becomes our fourth-ranked prospect in a Padres system that we have rated as the second best in baseball; this deal helps San Diego close the gap between itself and No. 1 ranked Tampa Bay by about $20 million.

We like Trammell a lot, even though we moved him down from a 60 to a 55 FV in a recent update to THE BOARD. Until a slight (and ultimately unconcerning) downturn this season, Trammell had been a consistent statistical performer, which is atypical of most two-sport high school prospects (he was an electric high school running back and could have played college football) who often come to the pro game with an unrefined feel to hit. He’s a scowling, intense guy who plays with focus and effort. Across four pro seasons, Trammell has hit .273/.367/.408, amassing 112 extra-base hits and 107 stolen bases (76% success rate) in just shy of 400 career games. He’s a plus-plus runner who could be an elite defender in left field due to his range (his arm is comfortably below average, which is part of why we have him projected to left) and whose combination of speed and ball/strike recognition will likely make him a dynamic offensive catalyst at the top of a lineup. Read the rest of this entry »

A year ago, Jesús Aguilar took the starting first base job in Milwaukee away from Eric Thames, hitting 35 homers and posting a 135 wRC+ as the Brewers rolled to a division title. This year, Aguilar’s struggles opened the job back up for Thames; Aguilar has been relegated to the weak side of a platoon. A strong month of July in part-time duty wasn’t enough to play him back into a starting role with the Brewers, but it was enough to get the Tampa Bay Rays interested and willing to part with a pitcher the Brewers can use for their own pennant drive. As first reported by Jeff Passan:

Brewers Receive

• RHP Jake Faria

Rays Receive

• 1B Jesús Aguilar

For the Rays, the need for a right-handed bat is obvious. The left-handed Austin Meadows and Nathaniel Lowe have been getting starts at first base and designated hitter against lefties, with Ji-Man Choi only playing against righties and catcher Travis D’Arnaud getting time at first as well. Aguilar and his righty bat should be able to relieve some of the poor matchups the Rays have found themselves in. Aguilar has bad splits against lefties this season, but that’s more likely a product of generally hitting poorly and some randomness than weird reverse platoon splits. And while his 2019 performance has been wanting, with an 82 wRC+, he’s shown some signs of putting things together over the last month, as the rolling wRC+ graph shows.

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In a trade that may or may not dissolve Coldplay, the Braves cushioned their bullpen on Tuesday night by acquiring right-handed reliever Chris Martin. Per The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal, the Braves obtained Martin from the Rangers in exchange for Triple-A lefty Kolby Allard.

The Braves currently have a fairly large lead over the Nationals atop the NL East, and we have them as the favorite (68.5%) to win the division. To this point, the bullpen has been one of Atlanta’s few weaknesses. Braves relievers have posted a 4.75 FIP and accrued -0.1 WAR this season, the sixth worst total in baseball. Walks have been particularly problematic for this crew, as they’ve allowed an 11% walk rate, the second worst mark in the league. A high strand rate has masked the issue somewhat — the ‘pen has notched a 4.03 ERA — but Atlanta needs reinforcements.

Martin should help. After dominating in the NPB — he posted a 91-to-13 K/BB in 88.1 IP back in 2017 — he’s pitched well since returning stateside the following year. In 2019, he’s been fantastic, and he sports a 3.08 ERA (62 ERA-) in 38 innings. His 26.5% K-BB rate is the 15th-highest among the 182 relievers with at least 30 IP, and he recently went nearly two months without walking a batter. He’s also pitched in plenty of stressful situations: Among Braves relievers, only Luke Jackson has a higher average leverage index this year than Martin. Read the rest of this entry »

When we talk about teams not taking advantage of the best seasons of their stars, there’s no better example than Mike Trout and the Angels. You could make a 90-win team by simply building a .500 team around Trout, and yet the Angels have been able to do this only once with their center fielder. But they’re hardly the only team to fritter away the prime of top talent. Enter the Colorado Rockies.

The Rockies can hardly be called a grand failure on the field, having won 87 and 91 games in 2017 and ’18, making the playoffs in consecutive years for the first time in franchise history. But you could also argue that it’s a team that you can say underperformed those win totals, especially last year. The 2018 Rockies won 91 games, but that was with two legitimate Cy Young and MVP contenders; after successfully doing the hard part and finding legitimate stars, they’ve repeatedly failed to put a halfway competent team around those stars.

To illustrate this, here is team WAR from 2017, 2018, and 2019 (through July 29) outside of a team’s top two position players and top two hitters. As noted above, the Rockies have done as good job finding high-end talent as any team in baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cold A/C League needed a bit of recharging, with Marcus Stroman’s move to the Mets the only major trade so far this deadline. With only 18 hours to go, the Indians provided a big one, sending pitcher Trevor Bauer to the Cincinnati Reds in a three-way trade that included the San Diego Padres. I like to approach three-way trades as three individual trades to keep things from getting confusing, like a Westerosi family tree.

Cincinnati Reds acquire P Trevor Bauer in return for OF Yasiel Puig, OF Taylor Trammell, and P Scott Moss

Cincinnati made aggressive, short-term moves to improve the team last winter, acquiring Puig, Sonny Gray, Tanner Roark, and Alex Wood in an attempt to jump-start their transition from rebuilder to contender, much the Braves and Phillies did in 2018. While not everything went according to plan — Wood has been injured and Puig got off to a slow start — it’s hard to say the moves were a failure. If the playoffs were determined by Pythagorean record, the Reds would be in the thick of the Wild Card mêlée, in third place and two games behind the Washington Nationals (as of the moment this trade hit the wires).

Alas, the playoffs are not determined by Pythagorean record.

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Tampa Bay’s pre-deadline activity — trading bat-first prospect Nick Solak for electric reliever Peter Fairbanks, then moving recently-DFA’d reliever Ian Gibaut for a Player to be Named, and sending reliever Hunter Wood and injured post-prospect infielder Christian Arroyo to Cleveland for international bonus space and outfielder Ruben Cardenas, a recent late-round pick who was overachieving at Low-A — got us thinking about how teams’ anticipation of the fall 40-man deadline might impact their activity and the way they value individual prospects, especially for contending teams.

In November, teams will need to decide which minor league players to expose to other teams through the Rule 5 Draft, or protect from the Draft by adding them to their 40-man roster. Deciding who to expose means evaluating players, sure, but it also means considering factors like player redundancy (like Tampa seemed to when they moved Solak) and whether a prospect is too raw to be a realistic Rule 5 target, as well as other little variables such as the number of option years a player has left, whether he’s making the league minimum or in arbitration, and if there are other, freely available alternatives to a team’s current talent (which happens a lot to slugging first base types).

Teams with an especially high number of rostered players under contract for 2020 and with many prospects who would need to be added to the 40-man in the offseason have what is often called a “40-man crunch,” “spillover,” or “churn,” meaning that that team has incentive to clear the overflow of players away via trade for something they can keep — pool space, comp picks, or typically younger players whose 40-man clocks are further from midnight — rather than do nothing, and later lose players on waivers or in the Rule 5 draft.

As we sat twiddling our thumbs, waiting for it to rain trades or not, we compiled quick breakdowns of contending teams’ 40-man situations, using the Roster Resource pages to see who has the biggest crunch coming and might behave differently in the trade market because of it. The Rays, in adding Fairbanks and rental second baseman Eric Sogard while trading Solak, Arroyo, etc., filled a short-term need at second with a really good player and upgraded a relief spot while thinning out their 40-man in preparation for injured pitchers Anthony Banda and Tyler Glasnow to come off the 60-day IL and rejoin the roster. These sorts of considerations probably impacted how the Cubs valued Thomas Hatch in today’s acquisition of David Phelps from Toronto, as Hatch will need to be Rule 5 protected this fall.

For this exercise, we used contenders with 40% or higher playoff odds, which gives us the Astros, Yankees, Twins, Indians, Red Sox, and Rays in the AL and the Dodgers, Braves, Nationals, Cubs, and Cardinals in the NL, with the Brewers, Phillies, and A’s as the teams just missing the cut. Read the rest of this entry »

Blake Parker, who signed with the Phillies as a free agent today for terms not yet disclosed, struck out 33.9% of the batters he faced as an Angel in 2017 and walked just 6.3%. That performance earned him two consecutive one-year, $1.8 million deals: one with the Angels, for 2018, and one with the Twins for this year. Parker wasn’t all that effective in Minnesota, though, posting a 5.35 FIP over 36.1 innings pitched, and he lost Rocco Baldelli’s confidence in July, earning just six appearances after getting 12 in June. Now he’s a Phillie, after the Twins designated him for assignment on July 24 and he cleared waivers three days later.

The problem in 2019 appears on the surface to be velocity, especially on the fastball. That pitch was averaging 93.9 mph just two years ago, then dropped down to 92.8 last year and 92 so far this year. Parker can succeed without a fastball at 94 — he posted a 2.90 FIP over 46 innings with the Cubs in 2013 while it sat at 92.8 — but he threw his curveball nearly a third of the time back then, and that pitch has never been particularly effective. In late 2018, he added a cut fastball that he now throws about 7% of the time, almost entirely at the expense of his four-seamer, but the overall package just hasn’t come together. His strikeout rate and swinging strike rate are both down even as contact against him is up:

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The Cubs and Blue Jays agreed to a trade this afternoon, sending David Phelps to the North Siders in exchange for pitching prospect Thomas Hatch. The Cubs are locked in a tight divisional race with the Cardinals and the Brewers, tied for first place entering today’s play. They are the favorites to win the division (we have their division odds at 56.8%), but they have been hampered by a weak bullpen all year. The Phelps trade is an attempt to shore their biggest weakness up.

The Cubs relief corps is a motley assortment of over-30 stalwarts (Steve Cishek, Brandon Kintzler, Brad Brach, and Pedro Strop), converted starters (Tyler Chatwood and new addition Derek Holland), and Craig Kimbrels (Craig Kimbrel). Out of the entire bullpen, only Kyle Ryan, Rowan Wick, and Kintzler have provided even 10 innings of sub-4 FIP performance, which explains the group’s collective 4.22 ERA, 4.66 FIP, and 0.1 WAR. While some of that dicey performance was traded (Mike Montgomery) or optioned to Triple-A (Carl Edwards Jr.), it’s still a position of need.

Can Phelps fulfill that need? It’s an interesting question, and Phelps is about as interesting as you can get for a journeyman reliever with 0 WAR on the year. As recently as 2016, Phelps was a dominant reliever (in his first year after converting from starting), throwing 86.2 innings and amassing a 2.28 ERA and 2.8 FIP. In the middle of a strong 2017, he was traded, as all players must eventually be, to the Mariners, where he promptly had elbow problems. A bone spur in his throwing arm cut that season short, and if that sounds ominous to you, it should: he subsequently tore his UCL in spring training, and missed all of 2018 and the start of 2019 recovering.

Before his injury, Phelps was a prototypical bullpen arm. He sat 94-95 with a sinker/four-seam combination and occasionally touched 98. The velocity hasn’t come back, at least not completely; he’s closer to 92-93 in his 17 appearances with the Blue Jays this year. To compensate for that lost velocity, he’s featured a cutter much more since returning (32.3% of his pitches this year). He also boasts a swooping curveball that he uses mainly as a change of pace. Read the rest of this entry »

A glimpse at Robbie Ray might look like an ace at work. Four times this season, Ray has struck out at least 10 batters while walking one hitter or fewer. Only Gerrit Cole, Chris Sale, and Max Scherzer have more matching games. Since the beginning of the 2016 season, Ray has struck out 31% of batters faced; among the 183 starters with at least 200 innings, only Scherzer and Sale have higher strikeout rates. The strikeouts are great, but Ray’s walk rates and inability to pitch deep into games has long held him back. While he has continued to work to get better, the changes have continued to lead Ray back to being the generally above-average pitcher he’s always been.

Ray’s first full season with the Diamondbacks in 2015 was a solid one, with a 22% strikeout rate, a 9% walk rate, and an ERA and FIP both in the mid-threes, about 10% better than average. Ray tried to get better by changing his delivery slightly, as he told David Laurila in 2016, and become a “strikeout madman”, as August Fagerstrom detailed. His strikeouts went way up, but so did his homers, though his 3.76 FIP was again about 10% better than average. Some bad luck on balls in play meant an ugly 4.90 ERA and the questions began about Ray’s ability to pitch deep into games and limit hard contact.

In 2017, Ray ditched his changeup as well as his sinker and used his curve much more, as Eno Sarris wrote at the beginning of the season. Ray increased his strikeout rate even more, though his walk rate climbed a bit as well and he still gave up his fair share of homers on the way to a 3.72 FIP that was 15% better than league average. It was Ray’s best season and whatever bad luck he had from 2016 turned itself around in 2017, to the tune of a 2.89 ERA and a handful of down-ballot Cy Young votes. Last year was a disappointing one, as Ray missed two months with an oblique injury and posted his first below-average FIP in Arizona. His walk rate surged, though after a rough start to open the second half, he closed the season well with a 3.78 FIP that was about 10% better than average and a 2.83 ERA thanks to a very low BABIP. Read the rest of this entry »

Early in the season, Luis Castillo was the pitcher drawing eyeballs in the Cincinnati Reds rotation. After showing flashes of elite potential in his first two seasons in the big leagues, the right-hander had reached new heights with his ridiculous change-up, and the numbers he posted over the first six weeks of the season had him getting serious attention as a Cy Young favorite. After years of abysmal pitching staffs, the Reds finally looked like they had an ace on their hands.

A couple of months later, however, Castillo’s been surpassed in WAR by a teammate who once garnered ace buzz at a similar age. In 21 starts, Sonny Gray has been worth 2.7 WAR, thanks to a solid 3.51 FIP to go with a 3.47 xFIP. Castillo has had trouble with walks as the season has progressed, but overall, his numbers remain fairly strong, and optimism surrounding him is deservedly high. Quietly, though, Gray has been every bit as good.

While Castillo entered the 2019 season with the expectation that his best years were ahead of him, Gray faced the question of what he had left to offer. He picked up 7.4 WAR from 2014-15 with the Oakland A’s, finishing third in Cy Young voting in the second of those seasons. His ERA ballooned to 5.69 in 2016, but he returned to approach another 3 WAR season between Oakland and New York the following year. That paved the way for a truly head-scratching 2018 season in which his home-road splits reached absurd levels, and he failed to stick in the rotation, allowing a 5.26 ERA in 23 starts. Viewing him as a lost cause, the Yankees were determined to trade him last offseason, and found a match with Cincinnati in January. Read the rest of this entry »