Bryce Rainer is one of the game’s most promising prospects. Currently No. 25 on The Board and No. 3 in our Detroit Tigers rankings, the 21-year-old shortstop boasts elite bat speed — eye-opening exit velocities are part of his profile — as well as arm strength that Eric Longenhagen has described as “incredible.” Our lead prospect analyst’s preseason report elaborated that Rainer was “pumping mid-90s gas off the mound in high school.”

His pitching background is what I wanted to hear about when I sat down with Rainer last month. After beginning the campaign with a smattering of games at Low-A Lakeland, Rainer has put up a .267/.374/.455 slash line and a 118 wRC+ with the.High-A West Michigan Whitecaps. His left-handed stroke has produced a dozen home runs across 358 trips to the plate with Detroit’s Midwest League affiliate.

Just how good was the 11th-overall pick in the 2024 draft when he was toeing the rubber for North Hollywood’s Harvard-Westlake High School?

“I don’t really love talking about myself,” Rainer replied when posed that question. “That’s kind of how I was brought up when it comes to interviews, but now that I don’t pitch anymore, I will say that I enjoyed my time on the mound. It was fun. I threw pretty hard and was successful at it.”

Pressed for radar readings, the humble ex-hurler affirmed that he indeed sat mid-90s, adding that he would occasionally reach the upper 90s. Repertoire-wise, he was fastball/curveball/slider/changeup. As you’d expect, scouts for a multitude of MLB organizations were keeping close watch when he stood atop the bump. Read the rest of this entry »

With apologies to Tarik Skubal and the Dodgers, for my money the most eye-catching deal ahead of Monday’s trade deadline was the Red Sox acquiring Adley Rutschman in a six-player blockbuster with the Orioles. Not only did a switch-hitting All-Star catcher move from one Wild Card contender to another, but he did so within the same division — and he’s more than a rental, with one more year of arbitration eligibility before he reaches free agency. Though he’s currently on the injured list due to inflammation in his left wrist, Rutschman is reportedly nearing a rehab assignment, and once he returns, he should provide a substantial upgrade for a team whose catchers landed on my Replacement-Level Killers list a few weeks ago.

Rustchman wasn’t the only prominent catcher on the move to a contender on Monday, as the Marlins traded Liam Hicks to the Rays, but he’s a part-time backstop whose hitting makes him a useful DH and first base option as well. While the concurrence of his being dealt illustrates that trading for a catcher on the fly in the midst of a playoff race isn’t unheard of, such moves do stand out. They’re not to be undertaken lightly because of the weighty responsibility that falls on a catcher’s shoulders in terms of quickly having to build relationships with a new pitching staff to understand repertoires, situational preferences, and interpersonal dynamics. Odds are that those newcomers are also expected to provide more offense than the catchers they replaced, because offensive slumps often spur teams to make such changes. Read the rest of this entry »

I thought I’d left this life behind. I thought my We Tried tracking days were behind me. I spent the past week covering trades that happened. Real trades, where one player (or two players, or three players, or a theoretical pile of international bonus pool money) moved from one team to another in exchange for one other player (or two other players, or, well, you get it). But just when I thought I was out, the Brewers pulled me back in. Of all teams, the Brewers! I started tracking We Trieds following the 2024 season, and over two offseasons, Milwaukee put up two goose eggs. The Brewers never gave me a single We Tried to track. Now they’ve had such a dramatic We Tried that they’re dragging me kicking and screaming out of We Tried retirement. What a world. Oh, and the Red Sox roped me back in too, because of course they did. But let’s start in Milwaukee.

As you might have learned from Michael Baumann, the Brewers were considered a real contender to land Tarik Skubal. That alone does not a We Tried make, but on Tuesday, MLB.com’s Adam McCalvy spilled all sorts of beans about their ace chase. McCalvy talked to “multiple club officials” and found the Brewers uncharacteristically forthcoming. He learned that although top overall prospect Jesús Made was off limits, the Brewers offered shortstop Luis Peña, whom we have ranked 26th overall on our updated Top 100 Prospects list, and two other position player prospects. One of those other prospects was also a Top 100 talent, which, depending on whose top 100 you’re talking about, could mean Brady Ebel, Jett Williams, Josh Adamczewski, or Luis Lara (though probably not Lara, as the Brewers signed him to an extension in June). That’s quite a lot of specifics.

A friend sent this article to me within an hour of its publication. It hits all the We Tried hallmarks. It lays out the offer the Brewers made, speculates on the players included and the players the Dodgers would have liked them to include. As I read on, I couldn’t help myself. I knew I’d have to get back in the game. Read the rest of this entry »

You might have thought it was the Presidents Day Blowout Sale in San Francisco, as all 2026 models MUST GO, with 0% APR financing and additional dealer cash. All kidding aside — or maybe not, since this is a Szymborski piece — the Giants were one of deadline’s the most aggressive sellers and they continued the trend yesterday by trading two more veterans to contending teams. Heading to the Yankees is outfielder Heliot Ramos, who has hit .264/.304/.424 with nine homers in 74 games this season, good for 0.7 WAR, down numbers compared to his 2025 and especially his All-Star 2024 season. Elsewhere in the AL East, the Red Sox acquired lefty reliever Erik Miller, who has a 2.76 ERA and a 3.34 FIP, with 12 strikeouts per nine alongside six walks; Boston also picked up minor league outfielder Carlos Gutierrez. Of course, the Giants didn’t help restock these division rivals out of the goodness of their hearts: they received infielder Marcelo Mayer from the Red Sox, and pitcher Henry Lalane and infielder Kaeden Kent from the Yankees.

Over the weekend, I wrote about the Yankees trading for Luis García Jr. to help bolster their lineup until they get Aaron Judge, Cody Bellinger, and Giancarlo Stanton back healthy. Through the use of cry-laughing emojis in our company Slack, fellow FanGraphiér Jeff Zimmerman quite rightly noted my possible naïveté in having confidence that this particular result would actually come to pass. Whether or not the Yankees hacked my computer, received a telepathic message from Jeff, or (most likely) came to the same conclusion, they’ve hedged their bets on their veterans returning by picking up Ramos.

Early in his career, Ramos appeared to be a star in the making. That stardom seemed almost within reach in 2024, but his power didn’t continue to develop (just the opposite), and he turned out to be a rather middling defensive corner outfielder who couldn’t stick in center. Still, Ramos does do something well: He hits left-handed pitching. Indeed, even in a rather mediocre season, he’s gone after southpaws to the tune of a 127 wRC+. I think García was a necessary addition to the Yankees offense, but the team also needed someone who could tee off on lefties, which García doesn’t, and who has experience in the outfield. And while Ramos is certainly below average out there — his 2026 numbers have rebounded from his dreadful 2025, though they’re still slightly under water — he at least has experience playing in the outfield. In fact, if I’m being perfectly honest, he’s probably as valuable of a player overall as Stanton, albeit without the highlight reel, 120-mph home runs. Ramos isn’t a free agent until after the 2029 season, so unless he’s traded again, the Yankees will have him in the mix over the next few years, assuming they want to. Here’s his ZiPS projection:

If you told me six weeks ago that the Red Sox would be one of the hottest teams in baseball and would be buyers at the trade deadline, I would have been shocked beyond belief. After all, not only would you have had an actual time machine, but you would have been using it for the extremely unambitious task of telling me and my cats how teams played in July. The Red Sox went 21-4 last month, highlighted by a 15-game winning streak, the majors’ longest since the 2021 Cardinals rolled off 17 wins in a row. They entered Monday’s games with the second Wild Card spot in hand, a four-game cushion on the Guardians behind them, and a shopping list to improve the 2026 team. Their big move was acquiring Adley Rutschman from Baltimore, but that wasn’t all they did.

Boston’s bullpen certainly isn’t a weak spot; the relief corps currently leads baseball in both ERA and FIP. But as quesabirria should have shown you, great things can be made even greater. With Aroldis Chapman firmly reserved for the ninth inning, Jovani Morán was the only other lefty on the roster, and though I’m a fan of Tyler Samaniego as a relief option, there’s no question that a risk-averse playoff team would rather have Miller in October, even with the walks. Miller isn’t merely a rental, either; unless the free agency rules change this winter, the Red Sox have him cost-controlled for three more seasons after this one. Here’s the ZiPS:

Also going to Boston is Gutierrez, a smallish lefty outfielder who has the misfortune of being adequate in basically every way instead of having one standout tool to inspire scouts. He’ll draw a walk or two, and while his contact rate has dropped this year, he has generally displayed a pretty decent hit tool. He seems unlikely to really develop a whole lot of power, but he looks to me like a future fourth outfielder type. ZiPS throws out names like Jon Jay, Chris Duffy, Kerry Robinson, and Pookie Wilson (who is not related to Mookie Wilson, as far as I am aware) as comps. I kind of think of him as a poor man’s Steven Kwan. To the ZiPS!

As for the return, Marcelo Mayer sounds like a pretty big name to send to San Francisco in exchange for a solid-but-not-elite reliever. And it would have been… in 2024. However you choose to portion out the blame, Mayer has been hit with a number of injuries and, when healthy, has regressed from his 2024 form. While he’s still just 23 and could very well have a bright future, his phenom days are past, and if you suddenly gave him his prospect eligibility back by some weird authoritative fiat, he’d slot in far lower than the number-three ranking he earned on our updated 2024 Top 100. With Luis Arraez gone and Casey Schmitt almost certainly out until 2027, the path is clear for Mayer to take the second base job as soon as he’s recovered from the stress fracture in his forearm. His ZiPS:

In return for Ramos, the Giants picked up pitcher Henry Lalane and infielder Kaeden Kent.

Lalane is a big lefty with good offspeed stuff and a fastball with decent movement. The heater’s velocity has ticked up in recent months, going from the 93-95 mph range to 95-97 mph. He’s awfully old for a prospect in A-ball, but that’s due to shoulder problems that have kept him off the field. A lot of scouts see him as a future middle reliever, but I imagine that the Giants will wait to see if his breaking pitches develop further and how he fares at the upper levels. ZiPS broadly thinks Lalane has upside, though I don’t generally like publishing ZiPS seasonal lines for pitchers until they debut in Double-A since the error bars are so large.

Kent was a third-round pick for the Yankees in the 2025 draft who struggled in his professional debut, hitting .182/.217/.265 in 25 games last year. That wasn’t enough to keep him off our Yankees Top Prospects list, where he ranked 11th as a 40 FV. With the caveat that he’s a High-A repeater, he’s having a much better year in 2026, with a .302/.359/.433 slashline, good for a 107 wRC+. The Yankees have been playing him at shortstop, second, and third, so if he hits well after his high-stakes promotion to Double-A, he could at least enter the utility infield picture. A lefty hitter with a bit of power who can play anywhere on the infield is a useful role-player archetype to have. Kent’s ZiPS:

The Giants’ return for Ramos is less than what they got for Miller, but truth be told, there’s a good chance that Ramos was going to be a non-tender candidate before he hit free agency, barring a turnaround in his game.

Taken together, these trades form a tidy summary of the kind of move we typically see at the deadline. The days when you’d frequently see superstars with two months remaining on their deals fetch half a team’s farm system are now far off in the rearview mirror. Most deadline swaps make quiet-but-real incremental improvements, and that’s exactly what happened here. The Yankees get a useful outfielder who addresses a specific need. The Red Sox get a reliever who will be on their 2026 playoff roster in return for a player who was unlikely to be. And the Giants go about the yeoman’s work of converting a disappointing roster into younger players with plausible upside. None of the players acquired by the Giants are franchise-altering, but they didn’t have franchise-altering players on offer here. They accepted reality and acted accordingly, which is far better than sticking a giant inflatable gorilla on the roof and insisting that Ramos and Miller were only available at the dealership manager’s special price.

As we analyzed what various teams were likely to do at the deadline, the Orioles were one of the toughest teams to peg. Just a few games under .500 and within shouting distance of the final American League Wild Card spot, Baltimore had a lot of ways to approach the rest of their season. While the Dean Kremer and Taylor Ward deals signaled the club’s intention to sell, the decision to trade Adley Rutschman to Boston not only confirmed Baltimore’s direction for the rest of this season, but also arguably changed the course of the franchise. It’s the end of an era, and a bitter pill to swallow for a fan base barely a half decade removed from “playing badly for Adley.” Not surprisingly, Elias’s claim from exactly four years ago that the competitive window was open in Baltimore (“it’s liftoff from here“) has made the rounds again on social media today.

If it’s any consolation for O’s fans, the prospect package from the Red Sox is quite a haul. In exchange for Rutschman (along with catcher Jake Rogers and cash), the Orioles have acquired prospects Anthony Eyanson, Enddy Azocar, and Kyson Witherspoon, along with catcher Carlos Narváez and a player to be named later or cash. That’s two Top 100 prospects, including a guy in the top 30, and a pitcher who could enter that orbit as well. Let’s touch on each of them individually and then muse a bit about what this means for Baltimore’s system and the franchise overall. Read the rest of this entry »

The Baltimore Orioles have traded Adley Rutschman to the Boston Red Sox, along with Jake Rogers, for catcher Carlos Narváez, a PTBNL or cash, and three prospects: right-handed pitchers Anthony Eyanson and Kyson Witherspoon, and teenage center fielders Enddy Azocar.

Wow.

The first reaction to this deal can only be one of astonishment, on multiple levels. The trade itself is audacious, from both teams’ perspective. Even with his trade value and reputation at a low ebb, Rutschman’s talents are gigantic, and the return reflects that.

But this trade’s on-field impact pales in comparison to What It All Means. Rutschman, the no. 1 overall pick in the 2019 draft, was the Orioles’ franchise player as they emerged from nearly a decade in the wilderness to become (if only briefly) a power player in the AL East. Seeing Rutschman in any other team’s colors will be weird enough to inspire the heebie-jeebies. Read the rest of this entry »

What has Tarik Skubal been thinking about lately? The obvious answer is where he will be playing once the trade deadline passes, but that wasn’t how I posed the question to him a few weeks ago. What I was interested in were his thoughts on pitching as a whole.

“The evolution of the fastball,” replied Skubal, whom the Detroit Tigers dealt to the Los Angeles Dodgers late last night for a package of prospects. “What is a fastball and how guys pitch. In today’s game, more than ever, guys have two versions of the fastball. Maybe three. The cutter is still a fastball in my eyes, so cut-fastball, sinker, four-seamer. Lance Lynn was the guy who did it when I was first in the big leagues. He threw three fastballs. Now you see Cam Schlittler doing it, others guys doing it. The development of fastball offerings: just how much different it is now versus, say, 10 years ago? That’s something I would be interested to see.”

I dug up that info — more specifically, my colleague Jon Becker unearthed it for me — and we’ll get to that in a moment. First let’s hear more of what the always-insightful southpaw had to say.

“I think you almost have to have two different fastballs now, just to give them different looks,” Skubal told me. “Hitters are so good at covering one fastball, and if you give them two, that’s tough on them. I feel like that transition — multiple fastballs — is happening a lot right now.”

Skubal, whose arsenal is sans a cutter but includes an elite changeup, has thrown his four-seamer at a 36.5% clip this season, and his sinker at a 19.8% clip. The lesser used of his two fastballs isn’t great in a vacuum, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t an important weapon in his arsenal. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend, the Red Sox decided to go for it. They traded exciting young pitcher Connelly Early to Washington in exchange for less-exciting, less-young, but playing-very-well-right-now infielder Curtis Mead. The move elicited strong reactions. Early is a genuinely promising lefty starter who will be under team control until 2032. Mead is only one year older with one less year of team control. He’s had a wonderful breakout season at the plate, and his offensive profile fits Fenway Park beautifully. But he’s a poor defender whose track record of success at the plate is extremely short. Even Boston’s chief baseball officer Craig Breslow went out of his way to spell out exactly why the team pulled the trigger, telling reporters, “Our goal wasn’t to win the trade. It was to make the team better.”

I had my own strong reaction to the deal, but that was mainly because I really wanted to be the one to write it up so I could title the article, “Red Sox Go For It Now by Giving Up Early.” But the reactions to the deal are now more or less irrelevant. Mead did make the team better, but for a very, very short time. He struck out in his first plate appearance with the Red Sox, then got hit by a pitch and broke his wrist in his second. According to Baseball Prospectus’ Recovery Dashboard, the average recovery time for a fractured wrist is 52 days and the median is 47. Mead may or may not return before the regular season ends, but he’s certainly not going to be powering the Red Sox down the stretch, and they’re already out looking for more infield help.

You have to feel for Mead. He was in the midst of a true breakout season. After putting up a combined 0.1 WAR in his first three major league seasons, he was already at 1.6 this year. He was traded to a contender that also happened to be the hottest team in baseball. What an exciting time for the 25-year-old, and then one pitch took it all away.

You can also imagine how Boston’s front office must feel after putting in all the work to make this trade happen. Breslow stuck his neck out for this high-risk, win-now move, and just like that, it’s gone. I don’t think there’s much I could do to cheer up Mead right now, but I can take a crack at cheering up Breslow. I’d like to remind him that although this may seem like the worst case scenario for his bold challenge trade, things could have gone much, much worse. In order to see that, you just have to look at things like a chief baseball officer, removing the human element and focusing solely on pure, unadulterated on-field production. Let’s lift our spirits by acting like soulless robots. Read the rest of this entry »

Will Middlebrooks didn’t have an especially accomplished career. Hampered by injuries, the slugging third baseman saw action in just 347 big league games — the bulk of them with the Boston Red Sox — before hanging up his spikes shortly after his 29th birthday. But there were memorable moments along the way, and he has good stories to go with them. Now a broadcast analyst for the Red Sox, Middlebrooks shared several of them in the latest installment of our Challenging Career Quiz series.

I began by asking which pitcher he faced the most times.

“I had the most success against Mark Buehrle, and it could have been him,” replied Middlebrooks, who logged 262 hits, including 43 home runs, while playing from 2012-2017. “I know I faced him a lot. Was it Buerhle?”

Nope. Middlebrooks stood in the box against the longtime Chicago White Sox southpaw 19 times, going 8-for-18 with a pair of doubles and a hit-by-pitch, but it’s another hurler who has the honor. Asking Middlebrooks if he had any other guesses prompted a good exchange. Read the rest of this entry »

Caleb Durbin had a brutal first few months of the 2026 season. One week into June, the Boston Red Sox third baseman had come to the plate 208 times to the tune of a .190/.254/.288 slash line and a 47 wRC+. Despite his pull-oriented right-handed stroke seemingly being a good fit for the Green Monster, he had also gone deep just once — in a road game, no less. Understandably, the Fenway faithful weren’t exactly enamored with the player who had come East in February as a part of the multi-player deal that sent high-performing southpaw Kyle Harrison to Milwaukee.

Then things turned around. Since June 9, Durbin has slashed a robust .298/.363/.532 with a 145 wRC+ over 158 plate appearances. Moreover, he has homered nine times, with four of the blasts clearing Fenway’s fabled left-field wall. The most recent of the bunch was an eighth-inning game-decider that lifted the Red Sox to the 14th of their franchise-record-tying 15 consecutive wins.

What exactly did Durbin do to rebound from his disappointing early-season results? I asked him that question in the days leading up to the All-Star break, but before doing so, a related inquiry was in order: How does the present-day Durbin compare to the then-23-year-old New York Yankees prospect I spoke to in May 2023? Read the rest of this entry »