The Dodgers lineup has been hit hard by injuries, particularly their infield, which in recent weeks has lost shortstop Mookie Betts, third baseman Max Muncy, and multipositional backups Miguel Rojas and Chris Taylor. On Monday, the team made a move to shore that up, acquiring versatile former Gold Glove winner Tommy Edman — who himself has yet to play a major league game this season after undergoing offseason wrist surgery — from the Cardinals as part of a three-team, 10-player trade that also involved the White Sox.

In the full deal, both the NL West-leading Dodgers (63-44) and the Wild Card-chasing Cardinals (54-51) acquired one player for their lineup and one for their pitching staff, while the White Sox (27-81) loaded up on young infielders. The head count for the deal includes two players to be named later, though the teams could instead exchange cash. Here’s how it all shakes out:

Dodgers get:

• INF/OF Tommy Edman (from Cardinals)
• RHP Michael Kopech (from White Sox)
• RHP Oliver Gonzalez (from Cardinals)

Cardinals get:

• RHP Erick Fedde (from White Sox)
• OF Tommy Pham (from White Sox)
• Cash (from White Sox)
• Player to be named later or cash (from Dodgers)

White Sox get:

• 2B/OF Miguel Vargas (from Dodgers)
• 3B Alexander Albertus (from Dodgers)
• 2B Jeral Perez (from Dodgers)
• Player to be named later or cash (from Dodgers)

Edman, a 29-year-old switch-hitter who historically has been stronger against lefties (117 wRC+) than righties (93 wRC+), is a contact-oriented hitter who doesn’t walk much but who has some pop to go with his speed. He batted .248/.307/.399 (92 wRC+) last year for the Cardinals while hitting 13 homers and stealing 27 bases; for his career, he’s hit .265/.319/.408 (99 wRC+). In 2023, he split his time between shortstop (46 starts), second base (40 starts), center field (37 starts) and right field (six starts), continuing a career-long trend of never staying pinned to one position for very long. He played more third base than anywhere else in as a rookie in 2019 and in ’20 as well, and has dabbled in left field here and there. In 2021, the year he won the NL Gold Glove for second basemen, he made 35 starts in right field and three at shortstop as well as 115 at the keystone. When he’s healthy, he should fit right into a Dodgers roster that has a lot of moving parts, but his health is a question mark, and beyond his ability to steal a base — something the Dodgers besides Shohei Ohtani haven’t done much of — he doesn’t have a lot of upside offensively.

Edman missed three weeks last July due to right wrist inflammation, and the injury hampered him through the end of the season. He actually hit for a higher wRC+ after the injury than before (98 versus 89), though he did slump just prior to being sidelined. He underwent surgery on the wrist in October, but by early March it was clear he hadn’t recovered enough to be ready for Opening Day, as he was still experiencing lingering pain due to inflammation. A planned rehab stint in late June was forestalled by a right ankle sprain. He finally returned to action on July 9 with Double-A Springfield, but played just four games before reinjuring the ankle just before the All-Star break. Though Edman has been able to return to hitting, he’s been limited to DH duty, hitting a thin .207/.294/.241 in 34 PA spread over eight games. The lack of defensive work means that he’ll need to continue his rehab assignment for at least a few more games.

Update: Shortly after this article was published, the Dodgers reacquired utilityman Amed Rosario from the Rays in exchange for Triple-A righthander Michael Flynn, a move I’m shoehorning into this analysis post-publication as it may affect how (and when) they’ll deploy Edman. Rosario, a righty-swinging 28-year-old, split last season between the Guardians (where he played himself off of regular shortstop duty with woefully bad defense) and Dodgers, then signed a one-year, $1.5 million deal with Tampa Bay. He’s hit .307/.331/.417 (115 wRC+) with a career-high 4.6% barrel rate but just a 2.5% walk rate, though his real appeal is as a lefty-masher: He owns a 121 wRC+ in 455 PA against southpaws since the start of 2022, and a 92 wRC+ against righties in 1,035 PA over that same span. Defensively, he’s made 18 starts in right field, 17 at second, and 10 apiece at short and third. His metrics are brutal (-5 DRS and -3 FRV in center, -5 DRS and -4 FRV at the three infield positions), but the samples are small; he hasn’t played more than 153.1 innings at any position — probably for a good reason.

Assuming Edman returns in a timely fashion, the Dodgers will probably slot him at shortstop initially; until then, they may opt for Rosario over Nick Ahmed, who debuted for the team on July 24 but could be on the bubble, roster-wise. Betts — who’s played 65 games at the position after playing 16 games there last year — has been out since an errant fastball fractured a metacarpal in his left hand on June 16. Cleared to swing a bat last week, he could be about two weeks away from returning to the Dodgers lineup. Once he returns, the Dodgers could deploy Edman at third base, as Muncy’s progress in his return from a strained oblique suffered in mid-May has been “stagnant,” per manager Dave Roberts. The Dodgers were 29-16 when Muncy last played, but they’ve gone just 34-28 since, with their third basemen hitting a combined .169/.253/.263 (52 wRC+) in a lineup that’s distinctly lacking in length. Enrique Hernández, Taylor, and Cavan Biggio have done most of the damage in Muncy’s absence; none of them has hit well at any position, with Biggio posting an 86 wRC+ overall with Toronto and Los Angeles, and both Hernández (70 wRC+) and Taylor (62 wRC+) even less productive.

If the Dodgers ever approach full strength, Edman or Rosario could share time at second with the lefty-swinging Gavin Lux, who’s hit for just a 33 wRC+ against lefties this year (94 vs. righties). Edman could also find time in center field, where the Dodgers have netted -0.1 WAR with a 73 wRC+, mainly from Andy Pages, a righty-swinging rookie, and James Outman, a lefty whose struggles have sent him shuttling between L.A. and Oklahoma City.

Both Edman and Kopech are under control though 2025. Edman is making $7 million this year and is signed for $9.5 million next year; he’s also got awards-based bonuses in his deal. Kopech — who moved to the bullpen after a dreadful 2023 season spent in Chicago’s rotation — is making $3 million this year and will be arbitration eligible one more time. The 28-year-old righty is renowned for having thrown a 105-mph fastball as a minor leaguer back in 2016. He still averages 98.6 mph with his four-seamer, and is viewed as having fantastic stuff by our two pitch-modeling systems (he throws his cutter slightly more often to lefties and his slider slightly more often to righties). However, his command is an issue; in addition to striking out 30.6% of hitters, he’s walking 12.6% (both improvements compared to last year), and he’s also served up 1.65 homers per nine, so he has a gaudy 4.74 ERA and 4.82 FIP in 43.2 innings:

Kopech has saved nine games and generally has a late-inning profile, but he’s going to be a bit of a project for pitching coach Mark Prior and company. The Dodgers bullpen ranks fourth in the NL with a 3.64 ERA, but it’s 13th in FIP, and it’s been downright terrible since the start of July, posting a 5.77 ERA and 4.74 FIP in 93.2 innings, tied for the second-highest total in the majors; relatedly, their banged-up rotation has a 5.10 ERA and 5.47 FIP in 100.2 innings this month, the majors’ second-lowest total. Righty Evan Phillips leads the team with 15 saves, but he has just two over the past five weeks, as Roberts has more often turned to righty Daniel Hudson, who has four saves since July 12 and seven overall; lefty Alex Vesia has five saves, and both Blake Treinen and Brent Honeywell have one apiece.

As for the Cardinals, their big addition is Fedde. A first-round pick by the Nationals in 2014, he spent parts of six seasons (2017-22) with Washington, getting knocked around for a 5.41 ERA and 5.17 FIP in 454.1 innings. Upon being non-tendered in November 2022, he spent a year pitching for the KBO’s NC Dinos, where he flat-out dominated, going 20-6 with a 2.00 ERA and 2.38 FIP in 180.1 inning. His performance earned him All-Star and MVP honors as well as the Choi Dong-won Award as the league’s top pitcher, and it rekindled interest in him stateside. The White Sox signed Fedde to a two-year, $15 million deal last December.

As Eric Longenhagen detailed when Fedde signed with Chicago, he improved primarily by raising his arm slot, boosting his changeup usage, and reshaping his slider (Statcast classifies it as a sweeper). On a team whose current .250 winning percentage is level with that of the 1962 Mets, Fedde posted a more-than-respectable 3.11 ERA and 3.76 FIP in 121.2 innings — a performance far better than he ever managed with the Nationals. With his sinker/cutter/sweeper/changeup mix, he’s striking out a modest 21.5% of hitters but walking just 6.8%, and generating a healthy 44.8% groundball rate:

It’s a command-over-stuff profile, but then, this is the Cardinals. After a 91-loss 2023 season in which their starters were lit for a 5.08 ERA and 4.61 FIP, they spent this past winter reshaping their rotation by signing free agents Sonny Gray, Kyle Gibson, and Lance Lynn. All three have been solid but unspectacular, with Gray the best (3.79 ERA, 2.85 FIP) as expected, but the unit nonetheless ranks 12th in the NL with a 4.44 ERA and 10th with a 4.09 FIP. Andre Pallante, a 25-year-old righty, has spent the past two months as the fifth starter, succeeding where the likes of Matthew Liberatore and the now-inured Steven Matz have scuffled. His 3.42 ERA and 3.78 FIP in 47.1 innings over nine starts is, uh, miles beyond the work of Miles Mikolas (4.99 ERA, 4.25 FIP). Thanks to Gray’s backloaded deal, Mikolas is currently the team’s highest-paid pitcher, however, so it would be a surprise if he ends up in the bullpen, whereas Pallante pitched in that capacity for the Cardinals for the first few weeks of the season.

In Pham, the Cardinals are getting a familiar face, as the now-36-year-old outfielder was drafted by the team out of high school in the 16th round in 2006 and spent parts of five seasons in St. Louis from ’14-18, when he was dealt to the Rays for three prospects (Génesis Cabrera, Roel Ramírez and Justin Williams) just ahead of the trade deadline. The White Sox, with whom he signed a split deal for a $3 million salary in mid-April, were the sixth team for which he’s played since then. In 297 PA with them, he’s hit .266/.330/.380 (102 wRC+) with five homers and six steals.

Pham isn’t hitting the ball as hard as usual. His 90.5 mph average exit velocity, which places him in the 75th percentile, is nonetheless down 1.6 mph from last year, when he was in the 93rd percentile, and both his 7.2% barrel rate and 39.9% hard-hit rate are in the 40s, percentile-wise; last year, they were in the 69th and 89th percentiles, respectively. He’s still an effective lefty-masher, with a 141 wRC+ in 61 PA against southpaws this year, and a 118 in 392 PA since the start of 2022, compared to a 93 wRC+ (in 1,008 PA) against righties. Dreadful defense (-13 DRS, -6 FRV, and -2.5 UZR, all in 570.2 innings spread across the three outfield positions) has offset the modest value of his offense. He’s got no business in center field, though that’s one of the positions where the Cardinals landed on my recent Replacement Level Killers list, and there is at least a natural platoon fit. In Edman’s absence, rookie Victor Scott II started the year in center but went just 5-for-59 before being sent down. Michael Siani, a lefty-swinging 25-year-old rookie, has done the bulk of the work since, hitting a meek .245/.284/.319 (73 wRC+) but playing stellar defense (12 FRV, 8 DRS, 6.1 UZR including his brief time at both outfield corners). He’s hit for a 44 wRC+ in 80 PA against lefties, so letting Pham take some starts there may not be the worst thing, defense be damned.

Trading Edman was reportedly part of the Cardinals’ attempt to remain payroll-neutral. In dealing him, however, they’ll miss the chance to shore up not only center field but also second base, where Nolan Gorman struggled to the point of making the Killers list.

In a separate post, Longenhagen has analysis of Gonzalez, a 17-year-old righty who’s currently in the Dominican Summer League, and goes into detail regarding the White Sox’s return, but here’s a thumbnail guide. The 24-year-old Vargas, who placed 48th on our Top 100 Prospects list in 2023, fizzled in half a season as a rookie last year before being exiled to Triple-A Oklahoma City. He’s hit .239/.313/.423 (108 wRC+) in 80 PA since returning from the minors in late May; where he played mainly second base last year, he’s been almost exclusively a left fielder this time around. The 19-year-old Albertus ranks 16th on the updated White Sox list as a 40-FV prospect. The 19-year-old Perez, meanwhile, has been reevaluated since he went unranked on the Dodgers Top Prospects list back in March, though he was included in the “Contact-Driven Profiles” section of the honorable mentions. He now carries a 40+ FV grade and is 12th on the updated White Sox list. Initial reports of the trade also included 21-year-old shortstop Noah Miller, but he was not actually part of the deal.

With less than 24 hours to go before the July 30 deadline, the odds are the none of the three teams in this trade are done. The Dodgers have taken a reasonable step to patching up an injury-created weakness while also find a successor for the Hernández/Taylor multiposition role (it’s tough to imagine either of those players on next year’s roster given their struggles); if Edman can provide league-average offense, he’s a boost. They’re still hunting for “an impact-type arm,” with the White Sox’s Garrett Crochet one pitcher who could fit the bill. The Cardinals are looking to improve their bullpen, as is every other contender. The White Sox still have Crochet and Luis Robert Jr. as big-ticket players to restock their system. We’ll see what awaits.

I updated the Top 100 Prospects list today. This post goes through the pitchers and why they stack the way they do. Here’s a link directly to the list, and here’s a link to the post with a little more detail regarding farm system and prospect stuff and the trade deadline. It might be best for you to open a second tab and follow along, so here are the Top 100 pitchers isolated away from the bats. Let’s get to it.
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Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

With just four (!!!) days to go until the July 30 trade deadline, let’s round up some more news and developments from the last few days and discuss how these nuggets might affect what happens over the next 96-plus hours. Here’s the latest:

Miller Trade Could Be off the Table Following Injury

All-Star closer Mason Miller, the most tantalizing reliever on the market this deadline season, went down with an unfortunate injury this week, making it more likely that he’ll remain with the A’s for the rest of the year.

After pitching a 1-2-3 inning on Monday night, Miller fractured the fifth metacarpal in his left hand. According to A’s manager Mark Kotsay, Miller was getting treatment when “he was reminded that he had a postgame lift to get in. Out of a little bit of frustration, he just kind of pounded his fist down on a padded training table.” Miller was placed on the IL on Thursday, and there is no timeline for his return. While this is certainly better if he hurt his pitching hand, the injury surely depresses his trade value because he won’t be pitching for at least a few weeks. As a result, Oakland would be wise not to move trade this season; he is under club control through the 2029 season, and the A’s were going to move him only if they were blown away by the return package. Now that his trade value is down, the organization would be better off holding onto him and then shopping him around in the offseason, after his suitors have seen him come back healthy. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) this week. This is a strange week for the column. The All-Star break cut into the number of games available to watch; mathematically speaking, fewer games means fewer chances for weird things to happen. I took a weekend trip and didn’t watch any MLB games on Friday or Saturday. I’m also hard at work on the upcoming trade value series, which comes out between the All-Star game and the deadline every year – check back Monday for that annual exercise’s kickoff. In any case, that means this is a hodgepodge list: some stuff from this week, sure, but also plays and series that got left out last week, and some low-level baseball to boot. Thanks, as always, to ESPN’s Zach Lowe for the format idea. And two quick programming notes: I won’t be doing my regular Monday chat or Five Things next week; instead, I’ll be doing a jumbo-sized chat Friday morning.

1. The New Derby Format
The modern swing-happy Home Run Derby has been a great success, at least as far as I’m concerned. It’s more fun to see sluggers launch as many home runs as they possibly can than it is to see them agonize over every single swing. The format wasn’t perfect, though. I’m not trying to be a grump about it – is it even possible to be a grump about the Home Run Derby? – but there was one downside to the timed-round format: not enough drama.
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Let’s start with a riddle: Team A and Team B have both played 98 games this season. Due to the vagaries of extra innings and unplayed bottoms of ninths, Team A’s pitchers have thrown four more innings than Team B’s pitchers. However, Team B’s pitchers have faced 259 more batters than Team A. How is this possible?

OK, yeah, so this was actually a pretty easy riddle. The answer is that Team B’s pitchers stink, while Team A’s pitchers are very good. Team A gets a higher percentage of batters out, which means that it faces fewer batters per inning. Let’s put some names and numbers to our hypothetical, shall we? Allow me to introduce you to the Mariners and the White Sox.

The Mariners have better pitchers and a better defense behind them. Consequently, the White Sox have allowed a whopping 130 more runs. But take a look at the last row of that table. The White Sox have thrown the most pitches in baseball, while the Mariners have thrown the second fewest. Having good pitching and good defense has allowed them to throw 1,477 fewer pitches than the South Siders. The average team throws 146 pitches per game, so we’re talking about 10 entire games’ worth of pitches. Ten games! That is a huge number, and these teams still have 64 games left to go. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the fun things about baseball (that’s also one of the fun things about life in general) is that at any moment you can look for and find something that you alone are seeing, that you alone are paying enough attention to notice, that you alone care about. Last Wednesday, the Twins finally lost to the White Sox. The Twins had won their first eight matchups with the South Siders, and they would beat the Sox again later that day. In fact, if not for the opportunity to pummel the White Sox at frequent intervals, Minnesota’s first half would look much different and much darker. But just this once, in the first game of Wednesday’s doubleheader, the Twins lost to the White Sox.

The bird showed up sometime during the first inning. It wasn’t there when Carlos Correa slapped the 11th pitch of the game through the right side for a single, but in the bottom of the inning, when Andrew Vaughn grounded into a 5-4-3 double play and the camera whipped around the horn to follow the ball, there it was — perched on a steel cable right above the on-deck circle as if it had been there forever.

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FanGraphs was at the Futures Game in Arlington on Saturday. In total, 16 pitchers appeared in the seven-inning game. The following are some quick notes on every pitcher who toed the rubber during All-Star weekend’s premier prospect event. Obviously one game isn’t enough on its own to move the needle significantly for any of these guys — they all have a large body of work that can better inform our evaluations — but it’s useful to see whose stuff ticks up when they’re in an environment like the Futures Game and get to let it eat in a shorter burst than they’re accustomed to. Read the rest of this entry »

Dylan Cease was one of my interview targets when the San Diego Padres visited Fenway Park last weekend, and as part of my preparation I looked back at what I’d previously written about him here at FanGraphs. What I found were three articles partially derived from conversations I had with the right-hander when he was in the Chicago White Sox organization. One, from 2020, was on how he was trying to remove unwanted cut from his fastball. A second, from 2019, was on how he’d learned and developed his curveball. The third, from 2018, included Cease’s citing “body awareness and putting your hand and arm in the right spot” as keys to his executing pitches consistently.

And then there was something from November 2017 that didn’t include quotes from the hurler himself. Rather, it featured plaudits for his performances down on the farm. In a piece titled Broadcaster’s View: Who Were the Top Players in the Midwest League, Cease was mentioned several times. Chris Vosters, who was then calling games for the Great Lakes Loons and more recently was the voice of the NHL’s Chicago Blackhawks, described a high-90s fastball, a quality curveball, and an ability to mix his pitches well. Jesse Goldberg-Strassler (Lansing Lugnuts) and Dan Hasty (West Michigan Whitecaps) were others impressed by the then-promising prospect’s potential.

With that article in mind, I went off the beaten path and asked Cease about something that flies well under the radar of most fans: What is the relationship between players and broadcasters, particularly in the minor leagues? Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. The parenthetical part of the title is largely just a nod to Zach Lowe, whose ESPN basketball column inspired this one. He occasionally mentions flaws or foibles holding a particular team or player back, in lovingly GIF’ed up detail. I’m more of a rah-rah type, and plenty of weeks I don’t have a single Didn’t Like in the column at all. This week, though, I can’t help it; mental lapses, baserunning errors, and overall sloppiness are all over the column. That’s not to say I don’t love watching it, because part of what’s fun about baseball is when a theoretically staid game gets messy, but let’s be clear: A lot of these plays are not good plays. We’ve got superstars getting confused, on-field collisions, and absolute howlers. Let’s get started.

1. The Profligate Nationals
The Nats are one of the unheralded fun stories of the baseball season. They’re hanging around .500 and playing like better days are ahead. CJ Abrams and MacKenzie Gore look like franchise mainstays. James Wood, another part of the return from the Juan Soto trade, isn’t far off. Mitchell Parker and Jake Irvin might be mid-rotation starters. Jacob Young is an elite defender. They have plenty of interesting role players, and the whole team plays with reckless and joyful abandon.

That’s particularly true on the basepaths, where the Nats rank third in steals but only 11th in total baserunning value. They’re always angling for how to advance another base, whatever the costs. Sometimes that ends in tears. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not as stridently anti-tanking as some people — in my youth, I was a Sixers blogger during The Process, so I can say from experience that rooting for a historically bad team has its moments — but there is one thing that bugs me about the Orioles and Astros and so on from the 2010s. They’ve broken the curve for bad teams.

Back in my day, it took some doing to lose 100 games. Teams that bad were special. Now, we don’t blink at having multiple 100-loss teams in the same season, and 110-loss teams or worse are pretty common. It takes an increasingly rare brand of ineptitude to catch our attention nowadays.

Enter the 2024 Chicago White Sox. Read the rest of this entry »