It’s been awhile since we’ve seen the Royals act like contenders, but given that they entered the morning of the trade deadline with a one-game lead for the third AL Wild Card spot, the behavior is merited. On Monday they added righty starter Michael Lorenzen in a deal with the Rangers, and on Tuesday afternoon they swung deals for A’s reliever Lucas Erceg and White Sox infielder Paul DeJong. None of them are blockbusters, but they all fortify Kansas City’s roster, with the DeJong move a step to address a particularly weak bench.
The Royals acquired the 30-year-old DeJong, who’s making $1.75 million this year and has another $250,000 in bonuses within reach for attaining the 400- and 500-plate appearance thresholds, in exchange for 21-year-old righty Jarold Rosado, a reliever with the Royals’ A-level Columbia affiliate. The trade took place about four hours before the Royals were set to play the White Sox at Guaranteed Rate Field, so DeJong joined his new club — his fourth since the start of the 2023 season — by walking from one dugout to the other.
Drafted and developed by the Cardinals, DeJong was once considered a foundational player. Coming off a 25-homer 2017 season in which he was the runner-up in the NL Rookie of the Year voting, he signed a six-year, $26 million extension, a record at the time for a player with less than one year of service time. He hit 30 home runs and made the NL All-Star team in 2019, but by May ’22, in the midst of his second consecutive season with a sub-.200 batting average, the Cardinals optioned him to Triple-A Memphis to revamp his swing. His performance rebounded, though not to his 2017–19 level, and so on August 1, 2023, he was traded to the Blue Jays. He went an unfathomable 3-for-44 for the Jays before drawing his release three weeks later, and then just 9-for-49 after being picked up by the Giants. For the season, he hit .207/.258/.355 (66 wRC+). Read the rest of this entry »
Being Mets-y has been an insult for years, a description of a team combining bad execution and bad luck to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It’s the kind of thing that describes poor decisions but also poor circumstances. Kodai Senga spraining his calf in his first game all year and missing the remainder of the season? That’s Mets-y. Trading a huge haul to replace him and then getting nothing from the big name replacement? That’d be Mets-y too, but things have changed in Queens. Instead of splashing out prospects for Yusei Kikuchi or going after a toolsy young arm, as the Orioles did for Trevor Rogers, the Mets are doing the MLB equivalent of shopping at Costco. They acquired Paul Blackburn from the A’s in exchange for Kade Morris, their 17th-best prospect, as Will Sammon reported.
Blackburn is definitely not a name you’d put on a marquee. He’s pitched to a 4.83 ERA and 4.36 FIP in his major league career. You know how Yu Darvish is so fun because he throws seven pitches and they’re all above average? Blackburn is like that – only all of his pitches are below average. He has six different options, but our stuff models think that only his slider and cutter are even decent. He makes up for that lack of raw juice with command and with the willingness to throw any pitch in any count. Read the rest of this entry »
The Cleveland Guardians continued their busy deadline period Tuesday afternoon with the acquisition of veteran right-hander Alex Cobb. Pitching prospect Jacob Bresnahan and a player to be named later are heading west to San Francisco in return.
The Pirates have made three trade in the last two days. Yesterday, they swapped post-hype prospects with the Red Sox — struggling right-handed pitcher Quinn Priester for Triple-A 2B/LF Nick Yorke — and added veteran southpaw Jalen Beeks from the Rockies in exchange for minor league lefty Luis Peralta. Then, earlier today, Pittsburgh acquired 29-year-old lefty Josh Walker from the Mets for DSL pitcher Nicolas Carreno. Read the rest of this entry »
This is a trade article, as the Diamondbacks acquired Josh Bell from the Marlins today in exchange for cash considerations. It’s also an injury article, sadly. Christian Walker departed last night’s D-backs/Nationals game with an oblique injury, and was due for an MRI this morning. The results haven’t been made public yet, but trading for Bell is a statement in and of itself, so let’s walk through the trade and injury in combination.
Walker has quietly been the second-best first baseman in the game over the past three years. I don’t mean that hyperbolically; he’s second only to Freddie Freeman in WAR over that time period. He’s done it with good offense and outrageous, comically good first base defense. I don’t think I’m selling this enough. Per Statcast, Walker has been 38 outs above average over that time period. Carlos Santana is second… with 17. DRS scores it 33-20 in Walker’s favor, with Matt Olson at 21. However you look at it, Walker is head and shoulders above everyone else at the position. Last night, he made a standard-for-him, spectacular-for-most play on a foul ball:
After that inning, he came back to the dugout and departed the game. Now we and the Diamondbacks can only wait to hear the injury news. Read the rest of this entry »
The struggling Atlanta Braves made a deadline move on Monday, acquiring DH/OF Jorge Soler and right-handed reliever Luke Jackson from the San Francisco Giants in exchange for left-handed reliever Tyler Matzek and minor league infielder Sabin Ceballos.
Theodor Reik, an Austrian psychoanalyst, is believed to be the original source of what (with slight modification) has become the saying “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” That’s the case here, as both Soler and Jackson were key contributors on the Braves team that won the World Series in 2021. If we were to set our time machine to travel back a rather unambitious three years in the past, we would see a similar deadline tale. When Soler was acquired by Atlanta back then (from the Royals for minor league reliever Kasey Kalich), the Braves were a struggling team (51-54) that was grappling with the season-ending loss of Ronald Acuña Jr. to a torn ACL. Today, the Braves are a struggling team (56-49, but 37-40 since the end of April) that is grappling with the season-ending loss of Ronald Acuña Jr. to a torn ACL. It would be wrong to say that Soler was the reason the Braves turned their season around in 2021, but his efforts (a .269/.358/.524 line and 14 homers in two months) proved to be a crucial part of that team push. Jackson has had an up-and-down career, but 2021 was his apogee, with a 1.98 ERA and 3.66 FIP for those Braves. Read the rest of this entry »
Despite trading ace Corbin Burnes, losing two members of their planned starting five to Tommy John surgery and then two others to injuries that have cost them more than half a season, the Brewers are riding high atop the NL Central, holding a seven-game lead over the Cardinals and Pirates entering the morning of the trade deadline. They’ve already used a club-record 16 starters this year, including righty Aaron Civale, whom they acquired from the Rays earlier this month. On Monday they added the man who’ll likely be no. 17, righty Frankie Montas, whom they acquired from the Reds in a rare intradivisional swap in exchange for outfielder Joey Wiemer and righty reliever Jakob Junis.
Beyond the fact that Montas was healthy enough for the Brewers to move forward with the deal — his 15-day stint on the injured list earlier this year was for a forearm contusion caused by a line drive — and can take the ball every five or six days, it’s not clear yet what the Brewers see in the 31-year-old righty. His performance has fallen off considerably since he finished sixth in the AL Cy Young voting in 2021 on the strength of a 3.37 ERA, 207 strikeouts, and 4.0 WAR for the A’s. Dealt to the Yankees as part of a six-player trade on August 1, 2022, he pitched poorly down the stretch before being sidelined by shoulder inflammation, and after undergoing arthroscopic shoulder surgery in February 2023, was limited to a 1.1-inning cameo in last season’s penultimate game.
When Montas hit free agency, the Reds took a flier, signing him for a $16 million guarantee in December, with a $14 million salary this year, a $2 million buyout on a $20 million mutual option for 2025, and some small performance and award bonuses tacked on as well. There are no bad one-year deals, it is often said, but this one for Montas — with his 5.01 ERA and 4.91 FIP in 93.1 innings — rates as a disappointment. Play the arbitrary endpoint game, and you can find a pretty decent stretch: From May 29 through July 4, in seven starts totaling 36.1 innings, he posted a 3.72 ERA and 4.20 FIP. But since then, he’s been lit for 16 runs in 16 innings over three starts. Only twice all season has he put together back-to-back quality starts (six or more innings, three or fewer earned runs). Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been pondering Yusei Kikuchi’s trade deadline fate for months. That sounds overly specific – there are so many players that get traded every year. Why wonder about this one guy? He has a 4.75 ERA this year and a 4.72 mark for his career. He’ll be a free agent at year’s end. Months? Shouldn’t I have been doing something more useful with my time? Probably. But hey, now I’m in a better position to write about this particularly astounding deadline transaction: Last night, the Blue Jays traded Kikuchi to the Astros in exchange for a bountiful crop of young players: Jake Bloss, Joey Loperfido, and Will Wagner.
Kikuchi turns analysts like me into Fox Mulder: We want to believe. We’re talking about a guy with one of the prettiest fastballs in baseball, period. It has great shape. He throws hard, sitting 94-96 mph and topping out around 99. Stuff models love it. PitchingBot thinks it’s the nastiest fastball thrown by a starter, and tied for the overall best (with Sonny Gray’s fastball) after considering location. Stuff+ is skeptical, relatively speaking – it thinks the fastball is the third-best among starters, behind the heaters of Kutter Crawford and Zack Wheeler.
Kikuchi throws a nice slider to complement the fastball, 88-90 mph and with sharp bite for a gyro slider. He rounds out his arsenal with a hard, two-plane curveball and a bizarre slider that seems to float and fade simultaneously. He does it from a funky arm slot and with a deceptive delivery. When Kikuchi is on, he’s capable of torching opposing lineups singlehandedly. His first 10 starts of this season were phenomenal: 2.64 ERA, 2.61 FIP, a 26% strikeout rate, and a minuscule 5.5% walk rate. He’d been steadily improving in Toronto, and this year looked like his breakout. Read the rest of this entry »
“Good luck,” I thought to myself. Thomas is a good player — a 3.1 WAR guy with 28 homers last year. This season, he’s nearly doubled his walk rate and has 28 stolen bases. That’s the third-most in baseball, more than Corbin Carroll and Byron Buxton put together. Thomas is on his second straight season of a wRC+ bumping up against 110 — this is a good player. But it’s also a guy who’s hitting .224/.299/.364 against right-handed pitching, which is most of the pitchers in the league.
Well, we have not because we ask not. Nats GM Mike Rizzo had a weekend to play with before the deadline, and it only takes one team to meet his price. And I’ll be darned, Big Rizz actually pulled it off. Read the rest of this entry »
Today the White Sox made a three-team trade with the Cardinals and Dodgers that sent Erick Fedde and Tommy Pham to St. Louis and Tommy Edman to Los Angeles. In exchange for Edman, the Dodgers picked up the prospect tab in the deal, sending Miguel Vargas and teenage Low-A infielders Jeral Perez and Alexander Albertus to the other side of the Camelback Ranch complex. You can read about the Cardinals and Dodgers parts of the trade here.
The White Sox had mostly gotten pitching back in their previous trades made under new GM Chris Getz, but in this one they turned to hitting, receiving three batters whom I have been a little lower on than the prospect-watching consensus. I like all three players but don’t love any of them, though I think Vargas has a feasible shot to be a decent everyday player, and soon.
The seeds of this deal were planted when Chicago signed Fedde during the offseason. After a lackluster tenure in Washington, Fedde remade himself in a Scottsdale pitching lab and had an incredible 2023 season for the KBO’s NC Dinos, posting a 2.00 ERA in 180.1 innings while striking out 209 and walking just 35. He was named the KBO’s MVP and won their equivalent of the Cy Young. Getz and the White Sox bet a very modest amount ($15 million over two years) that Fedde’s improvements would translate to the big leagues, and they were right. Fedde has pitched well and turned into a prospect piñata. Pham’s salary was a little over $2 million. Essentially paying to acquire prospects (especially hitters) is exactly what a team like the White Sox should be doing, and over the course of about eight months they’ve executed that with Fedde and Pham.
A big part of the reason I was lower on prospect-era Miguel Vargas than my sources and peers was because I didn’t think he could play the infield well, if at all. That has turned out to be true and, after trying a few infield positions besides his native third base, Vargas moved to left field this season. This occurred even as the Dodgers had big league injuries on the dirt, which I think is telling. He isn’t great out in left either, but it’s conceivable he could improve as he continues to play there. I haven’t heard from anyone in the org as to whether the White Sox will revisit the infield with Vargas. If they do it would strike me as a 2025 spring training task rather than something they ask Vargas to do right away.
Vargas is lacking the raw power typical of a great left fielder. He’s not an especially explosive swinger and depends on his feel for sweet-spot contact to generate extra-base power. The combination of Vargas’ plate discipline and this slick barrel feel create enough offense for him to be a lower-impact everyday left fielder. Here’s how some of his performance and talent-indicating metrics compare to that of the average MLB left fielder:
Miguel Vargas Hit Data vs. MLB LF
Contact%
Z-Contact%
Avg EV
Hard Hit%
90th% EV
Chase%
Miguel Vargas
80%
86%
89.7
35%
102.4
20%
Avg All LF
76%
84%
89.2
40%
102.7
27%
Avg Top 30 LF
76%
85%
90.0
43%
103.9
27%
These are solid numbers that back up the visual scouting report that this is a skills-over-tools type of hitter. I think he will have produced close to 20th at the position (give or take) when we look back at all the left fielders across the league five years from now. The outfielders in front of Vargas in Los Angeles blocked him from the big league playing time that his minor league performance merited for most of the last two seasons, and he should be given a big league opportunity immediately in Chicago. Andrew Benintendi is under contract until… (checking Roster Resource… holy shnikes) until 2027, and so the White Sox have to figure out what they’re going to do about that. Benintendi is not playing well enough to block Vargas.
The other two infielders in the trade, Alexander Albertus and Jeral Perez, were both playing at Low-A Rancho Cucamonga until Albertus was diagnosed with a lower leg fracture a little over a week ago and put on the IL. Albertus’ name has been bandied about each of the last couple trade deadlines because he does stuff that appeals to both scouts and analysts. The soon-to-be 20-year-old infielder is a career .303/.449/.415 hitter (mostly at the rookie level) who puts the bat on the ball and controls the strike zone. He takes a hellacious cut and has been athletic enough to do so while maintaining strikeout rates down in the 14-18% range the last two seasons (MLB average is 22%). As hard as he swings, Albertus doesn’t generate a ton of power and his swing path runs downhill. He’s a much cleaner defensive fit at third base than at shortstop, and he might end up being quite good there. (He’s played all three non-1B infield spots the last couple of seasons.) This is the Yandy Díaz branch of the infield prospect tree (OBP and contact skills, third base fit, less power than you want) where Díaz is what happens when the athlete becomes very, very strong deep into his twenties. Paths to an everyday role will probably require that of Albertus. He is more likely to be a utility guy.
If you want evidence of Albertus’ shot to get strong, look no further than Jeral Perez. Perez has already become much more physical than I would have guessed having watched him a ton in Arizona last year when he was a compact Others of Note-type player in the Dodgers system. He now has average big league raw power at age 19 and, physically, looks maxed out. Perez’s compact build and strong top hand through contact allow him to be on time with regularity, but his feel for moving the barrel around is not great. Though he’s posted above-average contact rates so far, I do worry that he is a candidate to be exposed by better fastballs in the upper minors, ones located on the upper-and-outer quadrant of the strike zone. Perez is a similarly a mixed bag on defense; he has acrobatic actions and can really turn it around once he’s secured the baseball, but he too often struggles to do that. He has flub-prone hands (which will probably get better) and mediocre range (which likely will not as he ages). This is the sort of second baseman who lacks range but who is great around the bag and basically average overall. I like his chances of getting to power enough that I have a priority grade on Perez (a 40+ FV is like a mid-to-late second round prospect in a typical draft), but I consider his profile to have a good amount of risk and variance. This is not the type of athlete who ends up with defensive versatility, so he’s going to have to keep hitting.
You can see how these guys stack in the White Sox system here.
In addition to Edman, the Dodgers also picked up 17-year-old DSL pitcher Oliver Gonzalez in this trade. He had worked 21.1 innings in a piggyback role before the deal. He’s a very projectable 6-foot-4 or so, and his fastball currently sits 89-93 mph with around 20 inches of induced vertical break and just over 7 feet of extension. His curveball has a nice foundation of depth and shape, but he doesn’t have feel for locating it. It’s a pretty good starting spot for any teenage pitching prospect. Again, the draft is a nice way to gauge the way we should think about Gonzalez, who would probably get about $750,000 to $1 million in bonus money. He has been added toward the bottom of the Dodgers list.
