The 2019 trade deadline has passed and, with it, dozens of prospects have begun a new journey toward the major leagues with a different organization. We have all of the prospects who have been traded since the Nick Solak/Peter Fairbanks deal ranked below, with brief scouting snippets for each of them. Most of the deals these prospects were a part of were analyzed at length on this site. Those pieces can be found here, or by clicking the hyperlink in the “From” column below. We’ve moved all of the players below to their new orgs over on THE BOARD, so you can see where they rank among their new teammates; our farm rankings, which now update live, also reflect these changes, so you can see where teams’ systems stack up post-deadline. Thanks to the scouts, analysts, and executives who helped us compile notes on players we didn’t know about.
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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 »

Zack Britton bought himself an Edgertronic earlier this month. He’s pondering purchasing a Rapsodo, as well. The Yankees southpaw boasts a 2.57 ERA — and MLB’s highest ground-ball rate, to boot — but that doesn’t mean he’s satisfied. Once the offseason rolls around, Britton plans to fine-tune his arsenal even more.

If you’re a hitter chagrined by this news, blame his nerdiest teammate.

“I bought all the [Edgertronic] equipment, and wired it up in my house,” Britton told me yesterday. “Talking with Adam Ottavino about what he’s been doing the last two off-seasons is what really piqued my interest. It’s a way to keep up with how we’re being evaluated now, and it allows us to make adjustments faster.”

While a primary driver, Ottavino’s influence wasn’t the sole selling point. Britton hasn’t had a chance to put his new purchase to use, but the 31-year-old former Oriole has thrown in front of an Edgertronic before.

“The Yankees have high-speed cameras at the Stadium,” explained Britton. “I’ve noticed differences with both my breaking ball and my sinker. I can see where my hand position is when I throw a good pitch. Rather than just feeling my way through an adjustment, I can get instant feedback on the adjustments I need to make.”

Britton had the winter months in mind when he went shopping. While details still need to be worked out, the plan is to link his Edgertronic — and perhaps a Rapsodo — with ones used by the Yankees.

“We can communicate back and forth during the offseason,” said Britton. “[Pitching coach] Larry Rothschild can see the numbers and know the things I’m doing. And if there’s anything they want to see, I can try it and then send them the data. We have the technology to where we can do that.” Read the rest of this entry »

Getting traded has long been a part of the game. Players move from team to team on the whims and wishes of general managers looking to make their clubs better — be it in the near term, for a pennant push, or down the road. Sometimes these deals happen during the winter months. Other times they happen in-season, most commonly at the July trade deadline. Either way — and regardless of whether the player is happy with the change of address — more than the name on the front of uniform is going to be different. To varying degrees, getting dealt impacts the day-to-day lives of players, particularly those who have families.

With this year’s deadline fast approaching, I went in search of interesting trade stories. With a broader perspective in mind, I talked not only to current players, but also to former players, a coach who managed in the minors for nine seasons, and a couple of broadcasters. All of these conversations took place last week when the Red Sox hosted the Blue Jays at Fenway Park.

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Trent Thornton, Blue Jays pitcher

On November 17, 2018, the Houston Astros traded Thornton to the Toronto Blue Jays in exchange for Aledmys Diaz.

“I got a call from one of the front office guys with the Astros, Armando Velasco. I’d just gotten back from the [Arizona] Fall League, so I thought they were putting me on the 40-man roster. Instead, it was, ‘Hey, you were just traded to the Toronto Blue Jays.’ I almost blacked out. I kind of just said, ‘OK, thanks,’ then went in to tell my parents.

“I ended up calling [Valasco] back about five minutes later, because I hadn’t really heard anything he’d said. He was like, ‘Yeah, someone from the Blue Jays will be calling you in about 15 minutes. He’ll give you a little rundown of what’s going on.’

“About 15 minutes later, someone does call. I’m having this conversation with the guy and he’s saying, ‘We’re super excited to have you,’ blah blah blah. At the end of the conversation, I said, ‘Who are you again?’ I’d never caught his name. He goes, ‘Ross Atkins.’ I go, ‘Oh, OK.’ Then I hung up the phone. Read the rest of this entry »

A few bumpy outings aside, Shaun Anderson has had a solid rookie season with the San Francisco Giants. Since debuting in mid-May, the 24-year-old right-hander has won three of five decisions, and on six occasions he’s gone at least five innings while allowing just a pair of runs. Overall, he has a 4.87 ERA and a 4.37 FIP in 12 starts.

Anderson is comfortable on a big stage. He pitched in the College World Series while at the University of Florida, and last summer he took the mound in the All-Star Futures Game. The former Gator came into this year ranked eighth on our Giants Top Prospects list.

He was originally Red Sox property. A third-round pick in 2016, Anderson was shipped to San Francisco thirteen months later, along with now-19-year-old righty Gregory Santos, in exchange for Eduardo Nunez. The days-before-the-trade-deadline deal brought Boston a player who helped them win a World Series — Nunez has since been DFA’d — while San Francisco got an up-and-comer who doesn’t fit a conventional mold.

College relievers rarely become big-league starters, and this is an era where pitchers typically pump gas and miss a lot of bats. Anderson is an anomaly in both respects. The erstwhile closer has a pedestrian 92/93mph heater, and he’s punching out just 5.7 batters per nine innings.

Asked about his approach, Anderson described it as “attack.” Undaunted by big-league hitters in the box, he’s all about mixing and matching, and working down in the zone. Read the rest of this entry »

The Boston Red Sox and the Baltimore Orioles completed a trade over the weekend, with Baltimore sending pitcher Andrew Cashner to Boston in return for center fielder Elio Prado and third baseman Noelberth Romero.

At 28-65, the Orioles appear likely to be eliminated from the playoff race sometime in August. Andrew Cashner is a free agent at the end of the season, and even if Baltimore had a less implausible shot at the playoffs, it makes a lot of sense to get something in return for the right-hander while the getting is good. In this case, the getting is two very deep dives into the Red Sox organization. Prado and Romero are both 17 year-olds out of Venezuela. Neither player is anywhere near the top of the prospect radar at this point. To grab a couple of lottery picks, the Orioles agreed to pay half of Cashner’s salary to the Red Sox, a figure just a bit under $2 million. If either prospect works out, it won’t be a new experience for Cashner, who has been swapped for Anthony Rizzo and Luis Castillo in previous trades.

Cashner has had a decent season on paper, but the Orioles’ return suggests that there is a good deal of skepticism surrounding his 3.83 ERA and 4.25 FIP. The bump in Cashner’s peripherals in 2019 is at least enough for ZiPS to think of him as a one-win player. That’s par for the course for a fifth starter, and it just so happens that’s exactly what the Red Sox were in the market for. It isn’t something that will show up well in playoff projections, but remember that teams can no longer pick up major league-caliber fourth and fifth starter types in August, which means that teams ought to take more care to prepare for emergencies now. And pitchers famously have lots of emergencies. Brian Johnson is currently out due to an intestinal issue, and given that he’s been out for weeks, it seems to be something a good bit more serious than overindulging in spicy chili. He has thrown a couple of bullpens, but his trip to the IL creates some uncertainty, which isn’t a good state of being for a contending team. And Cashner is likely a safer below-average pitcher than Hector Velazquez. Read the rest of this entry »

Nathan Eovaldi hasn’t pitched in a major league game since April 17, and he won’t until sometime after the All-Star break, but this week, before even beginning a rehab assignment, he’s been cast as a potential solution for one of the Red Sox’s biggest weaknesses: their bullpen. On Tuesday, in the aftermath of the team’s drubbing by the Yankees in the two-game London Series — during which that bullpen was torched for 21 runs and 23 hits in 12.1 innings — manager Alex Cora and president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski announced plans to use Eovaldi as their closer, a job the 29-year-old righty has never held before.

Eovaldi, who is recovering from arthroscopic surgery to remove loose bodies in his right elbow, struggled with his command and control while making just four starts in April, getting hit to the tune of a 6.00 ERA and 7.12 FIP. That comes after last year’s strong rebound from his second Tommy John surgery, during which he threw 111 innings with a 3.81 ERA, 3.60 FIP, and 2.2 WAR. Integrating a relatively new cut fastball into his arsenal, he set career bests with a 22.2% strikeout rate and 4.4% walk rate. As Jeff Sullivan pointed out last November, his penchant for pounding the strike zone with such precision is rare among pitchers with such high velocity — and oh, can he bring it. According to Pitch Info, his average fastball velo of 97.4 was tied for third among all starters with at least 50 innings.

Eovaldi has rarely pitched out of the bullpen during his eight-year major league career, not only never notching a save in eight regular season relief appearances — four with the Dodgers as a rookie in 2011, three with the Yankees in an exile from the rotation in 2016, and one last year — but never even pitching in a save situation.

That said, he shined amid his crash course in high-leverage relief work last October, making four appearances during Boston’s championship run, two of them in save situations and one in extra innings. He threw 1.1 scoreless innings in front of Craig Kimbrel in the ALCS Game 5 clincher against the Astros, two days after making a strong six-inning start, then added scoreless innings in Games 1 and 2 of the World Series against the Dodgers, and pitched the final six innings of the 18-inning epic Game 3, taking the loss when he served up a solo homer to Max Muncy but winning the hearts of New England for his gutsy, 97-pitch effort. That was the only earned run he allowed in 9.1 relief innings; he yielded four hits and walked one while striking out seven.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tyler Clippard got top billing in this column nine months ago. A Toronto Blue Jay at the time, he boasted a 3.17 ERA, and had allowed just 6.5 hits per nine innings over 696 career appearances. Thanks in part to a lack of save opportunities, he was one of the most-underrated relievers in the game.

Twisting a familiar phrase, the more things remain the same, the more they change. Clippard is now a Cleveland Indian, and while he’s still gobbling up outs — his 3.05 ERA and 5.2 H/9 are proof in the pudding — he’s getting them in a new way. At age 34, having lost an inch or two off his fastball, the under-the-radar righty has pulled an old pitch out of his back pocket.

“Toward the end of last season, I started to incorporate a two-seamer,” said Clippard, who’d scrapped the pitch after transitioning to the bullpen in 2009. The new role wasn’t the primary driver, though. As he explained, “I mostly got rid of it because it wasn’t necessarily sinking. I thought, ‘If it’s not sinking, why should I throw it?’”

A decade later, a reason for throwing it emerged.

“Traditionally, I’ve been a fly-ball pitcher and have given up home runs,” said Clippard, who has surrendered 99 of them at baseball’s highest level. “In the overall scheme of things, I have’t been too concerned about that. There was a year, 2011, when I gave up 11 home runs — which is a lot for a reliever — but I had a 1.83 [ERA]. I can give up home runs and still be fine. At the same time, if I can keep the ball in the ballpark a little bit more, that’s obviously going to benefit me.”

Hence the reintroduction of a two-seamer… this despite the fact that it isn’t diving any more now than it did a decade ago. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers —Colten Brewer, David Hernandez, and Ryan Yarbrough — on how they learned and developed their cutters.

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Colten Brewer, Boston Red Sox

“It started happening in the [2016] offseason that I got Rule-5’ed to the Yankees. When I got to spring training, they said, ‘Hey, the reason we got you is that we noticed some cut on your fastball; we like that.’ I was like, ‘Oh, really?’ I’d been five years with the Pirates, and they didn’t really use that analytical side to baseball. As a result, I didn’t really know much about myself until I got with the Yankees.

“That offseason I’d worked out at a place called APEC, in Tyler, Texas. They were using a Driveline system. Going to a new team, I wanted to show up in spring training in the best shape possible, so I spent a month and half there. That’s where the wheels started turning.

“In the spring, I started throwing more balls in to lefties, and was watching the ball work. From then on I started having natural cut on my fastball. I said, ‘I’m going to use this.’ With the Pirates I’d been more of a sinker guy — I thought arm-side run was better — but after I got to the Yankees I started ripping fastballs as hard as I could, and they were cutting. Read the rest of this entry »

When Xander Bogaerts played in the 2013 World Series as a 20-year-old rookie, it was easy to see the start of a promising career: he was a glove-first shortstop (though he played mainly third base in 2013, ceding short to Stephen Drew) with enough pop and size to eventually be an impact bat. Over the next four years of his career, though, that promise of power remained tantalizingly out of reach. At the end of 2017, Bogaerts’ career line was nearly exactly average (101 wRC+), but the extra-base hits never quite developed as projected. His .127 ISO was in the 19th percentile of batters with at least 2000 PA over that time period, and his slugging was hardly better (.409, 28th percentile).

Now, a league average bat at shortstop is still tremendously valuable. Bogaerts was worth 12.9 WAR over those four-plus years, a 3 WAR/600 PA pace that would make him a starter on virtually every team. Still, you could look at the promise of a 20-year-old Bogaerts, a 6-foot-1 live wire getting important at-bats on the biggest stage, and wonder why he hadn’t tapped into more offense. It had been four years, after all. Surely if he was going to fill out and add power, it would have already happened.

Two years later, that 2017 endpoint looks awfully conveniently timed to fit a narrative. Since the start of the 2018 season, Bogaerts has found another gear. He’s batting a scintillating .291/.366/.526, good for a 134 wRC+, and the power has miraculously appeared, with his .235 ISO ranking in the 84th percentile among qualifying batters. Still only 26, Bogaerts now looks like one of the best players in the game, full stop. The player fans and scouts saw glimpses of in 2013 is finally here.

What did Bogaerts do to tap into his enormous potential? Well, given that his power numbers have spiked across the board while his strikeout and walk numbers have barely budged (18.5% strikeouts and 7.2% walks 2013-2017 versus 18.1% and 10.2% thereafter), it would be easy to say he just started hitting the ball harder. He always looked like he had the potential to do that. A few pounds of muscle here, a little physical maturation there, a smattering of juiced baseball, and warning track power becomes home run trots. Take a look at Bogaerts’ average exit velocity from 2015 (the first year of Statcast data) to now, on all batted balls and also balls he hit in the air: Read the rest of this entry »