The Oakland-for-now Athletics had themselves a roster shuffle on Friday, bolstering their pitching staff by adding right-hander Ross Stripling and officially announcing the addition of lefty Alex Wood. Wood joined the A’s on a one-year contract worth $8.5 million (with another million’s worth of incentives) after three years with the Giants. Now Stripling, too, is headed east across the bay, in a deal sending minor league outfielder Jonah Cox west to San Francisco (To make room for the pair, Oakland outrighted lefty Francisco Pérez and designated infielder Jonah Bride for assignment).

Wood and Stripling, who might have said something like “It’s not goodbye; it’s see you later” while packing up their lockers after the 2023 season, will be teammates for the fourth separate stint on three different California teams. They spent from 2016 to 2018 together on the Dodgers before Wood was dealt to the Reds, were reunited back in Los Angeles for the start of the pandemic-shortened 2020 season until Stripling was traded to Toronto, and then signed nearly identical two-year, $25 million free agent contracts with San Francisco a year apart from one another. Now, they’ll pair up again in Oakland and figure to factor into a starting rotation that was worth a league-worst combined 1.8 WAR in last season.

Both pitchers were available at a modest cost to the A’s after floundering in their only year together with the Giants. As Kyle Kishimoto wrote last week, Wood struggled to get hitters to swing at bad pitches and to miss whenever they did swing, falling to the 13th percentile in chase percentage and the 17th in whiff percentage. As a result, he struck out a lot fewer hitters and walked a whole bunch more. He also failed to stay healthy, with strains in his left hamstring and lower back sidelining him for the bulk of two months, and by late July, he was relegated to bullpen work as a sort of piggybacker and long relief option. He pitched better in this role, but it was far from what he and the Giants had hoped for when he signed his deal before the 2022 season. Still, Wood brings 10 years of big league service and a not-too-shabby 18.1 career WAR to Oakland, where he’ll try to right the ship. Read the rest of this entry »

Late last night, the Milwaukee Brewers sent Corbin Burnes to the Baltimore Orioles for two 25-year-old players – left-handed pitcher DL Hall and infielder Joey Ortiz – as well as a Competitive Balance Round A pick in the 2024 draft (pick no. 34 overall). Milwaukee’s active roster is worse today without Burnes, who has been one of the best pitchers in baseball since moving into the rotation full-time in 2021. But the player portion of return for one year of Burnes, who is slated to hit free agency after the season, succeeds in threading the small market needle by providing both short- and long-term reinforcement to the big league club, as both players are major league ready and also under club control for the next six seasons. Burnes was unlikely to re-sign with Milwaukee, and the Brewers get a comp pick similar to the one they would have received had they extended him a qualifying offer after the 2024 season, plus two good, young players.

Let’s talk about those players, starting with Ortiz. A fourth rounder in 2019, Ortiz has a career .286/.357/.449 line in the minors and reached the big leagues in 2023. With so many other infielders, chiefly Gunnar Henderson and Jackson Holliday, also in the upper-level mix for playing time, the Orioles had a surplus of players like this in their system. Ortiz was a top 100 prospect last offseason and ended the 2023 season as my 57th overall prospect. His profile was initially rooted in his plus combination of defense and feel for contact, but in 2023, he traded some of that contact for meaningfully more power. Ortiz’s underlying contact quality took a leap across the board, most notably his hard-hit rate, which rose from 31% in 2022 to 46% in 2023. This was coupled with a noticeable shift in his physicality, as Ortiz looked bigger and stronger. Ortiz’s contact rates, both overall and in-zone, dropped a tad compared to 2022 and he’s a bit chase-prone, but his well-rounded offensive output should clear the relatively low bar for middle infielders. Read the rest of this entry »

It just didn’t make sense. There was no way that the Orioles were really planning on heading into the 2024 season with so little top-end pitching. I’m not saying Kyle Bradish, Grayson Rodriguez, and company are bad, but they were on the lighter side of potential playoff rotations, and that made very little sense to me given the composition of the rest of the team. It’s not every day that I take a team to task for something they didn’t do, but this one was just too illogical.

It turns out that the Orioles agreed with me on that one. Thursday night, they acquired Corbin Burnes from the Brewers in exchange for DL Hall, Joey Ortiz, and a Competitive Balance Round A pick, as Ken Rosenthal, Jeff Passan, and Mark Feinsand first reported. You know it’s a big trade when all the news-breakers are sharing it. Read the rest of this entry »

Are you, or have you ever been, in a position to make decisions about major league team personnel? Do you like trading? Have you ever held a dime and wished it were two nickels, or vice versa? If so, stay where you are, remain calm, and Jerry Dipoto will be calling you soon to make some deals. Like this one:

MLB righties Anthony DeSclafani and Justin Topa along with prospects OF Gabriel Gonzalez and RHP Darren Bowen is the four player return for Polanco, per sources. Believe cash is also involved. https://t.co/GQDKtwaogh

— Kiley McDaniel (@kileymcd) January 30, 2024

Prospects! Relievers! Reclamation projects! Everyday regulars! This one has a little bit of everything. But it’s more complicated than that, because it’s not your standard offseason trade, where one team is downgrading to look for the future while the other builds for today. Both of these teams have playoff hopes this year, and they’re each using this trade to improve their chances. It’s a weird one.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Mariners and Rays had a busy Friday last week, combining to make three trades involving seven players. Seattle got things started with a three-player swap with the San Francisco Giants, shipping Robbie Ray to the Bay Area in exchange for Mitch Haniger, Anthony DeSclafani, and cash considerations. Then the M’s and the Rays exchanged José Caballero and Luke Raley, before Tampa Bay finished off the day by sending Andrew Kittredge to St. Louis for Richie Palacios. Both the Mariners and Rays dealt from areas of strength to address areas of need, giving both teams greater roster clarity as the offseason moves towards spring training.

Just two years ago, the three players involved in the first trade of the day would have garnered much bigger headlines. In 2021, Ray, Haniger, and DeSclafani combined to accumulate 9.4 WAR, with Ray winning the American League Cy Young award. In the two seasons since then, however, the trio has combined for just 3.3 WAR, largely thanks to a litany of injuries. Ray was completely healthy in 2022, but he wasn’t able to replicate his award-winning performance in his first season in Seattle and then made just a single start in 2023 before needing Tommy John surgery. Haniger has never been a model of health — he’s played just two full seasons in his seven-year career — and missed time with ankle, back, oblique, and forearm injuries the past two seasons. DeSclafani managed just five starts in 2022 thanks to a recurring ankle injury, then wore down towards the end of last year with shoulder fatigue and forearm inflammation. Read the rest of this entry »

On December 26, the New York Yankees sent 26-year-old outfielder Estevan Florial to the Cleveland Guardians in exchange for 27-year-old reliever Cody Morris.

Florial has appeared in parts of four big league seasons but has never had more than 71 plate appearances in any one of them. He’s accumulated enough playing time to lose rookie eligibility but not enough to evaluate him based on his big league performance; he’s still more or less an older prospect. I considered Florial to be one of the Yankees’ best couple of prospects in the 2018-19 window, but his strikeouts became excessive at the upper levels (usually hovering around 30%) and, especially after the pandemic season, I began to move off of him. After a rough introduction to Triple-A in 2021, Florial has had two really solid seasons, with a wRC+ in the 124-130 range each of the last two years. He experienced a substantial uptick in his power output as a 25-year-old at Triple-A Scranton in 2023, as Florial clubbed 25 homers in just 101 games, matching his combined Triple-A total from 2022 and 2021 across 180 games. Read the rest of this entry »

With nearly every trade, you can expect fans of one side or the other to come away wondering where their GM went wrong. You can probably hear the complaints in your head, because you’ve almost certainly made them at one point or another yourself. We gave up those guys? For this one? Was there something else in it for us? What was he thinking?!?

It’s much rarer for both sides to have that reaction, because usually conventional wisdom tilts one way or the other. But the Braves and Red Sox might have accomplished it this past week:

BREAKING: The Atlanta Braves are acquiring seven-time All-Star Chris Sale in a trade with the Boston Red Sox, sources tell ESPN. Well-regarded infield prospect Vaughn Grissom is the return to Boston, which will send money with Sale, who waived his no-trade clause to join Atlanta

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) December 30, 2023

So in honor of sports talk radio and breathless questions about what could possibly be going through people’s heads, let’s examine both sides through the same lens. Read the rest of this entry »

For the past decade, the joke around Mets pitchers has been that they spend more time injured than active. There’s no shortage of examples; Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard spring to my mind first, but Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander dealt with injuries in their time in Queens, too. Edwin Díaz just missed the 2023 season. Zack Wheeler never quite lived up to his potential when he was there, and injuries were a key reason why. Matt Harvey, Seth Lugo, Steven Matz — heck, here’s a story from 2017 about the Mets’ injury woes, which were already a trope before their recent woes.

In that sense, Coleman Crow is the platonic ideal of a Mets pitcher. He joined the organization in June, part of the package the Angels sent to New York in exchange for Eduardo Escobar. At the time, he hadn’t pitched since late April thanks to an elbow injury. His first notable decision as a Met was to get Tommy John surgery for that elbow; he’s now tracking for a return at the very end of next year, or potentially in 2025. He’s been a Met for roughly six months and thrown exactly zero pitches for them in that time.

Or maybe I should have said: he was a Met for roughly six months. On Wednesday, the Mets traded him to the Brewers in exchange for Adrian Houser and Tyrone Taylor, ending his tenure with the team. You think Harvey was often injured? Crow dialed it up to an entirely different level, albeit in the minors. It’s the kind of performance we might not see again for a while. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend, the Dodgers hit the motherlode, signing Shohei Ohtani to a landmark 10-year contract. Turns out, though, MLB didn’t award them the 2024 World Series just for doing that. There’s still baseball to be played, and while the Dodgers certainly aren’t short on tremendous hitters, they do need some serious help on the pitching side. Enter the Rays:

BREAKING: The Los Angeles Dodgers and Tampa Bay Rays are in agreement on a trade to send RHP Tyler Glasnow and OF Manuel Margot to the Dodgers for RHP Ryan Pepiot and OF Jonny Deluca — contingent on Glasnow signing an extension with L.A., which is expected, sources tell ESPN.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) December 15, 2023

I’m not sure that I’m making a strong enough statement. The Dodgers need help on the pitching side, and they need it badly. Before this trade, their depth chart looked like this:

That’s dire. It’s a mixture of injury risk, light workloads, unproven arms, and pitchers who check multiple of those boxes at once. Ohtani obviously won’t pitch next year. Walker Buehler hasn’t pitched since June 2022, looked bad in that 2022 season, and is their nominal ace. Bobby Miller is the only other guy the team seems to trust, and they’ll need plenty of volume from him, but he made 26 starts last year to get to his 138.2 innings, so it’s not like there’s a ton more in the tank. If the Dodgers’ lineup is Boardwalk and Park Place, their rotation looks more like Mediterranean and Baltic Avenues. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball trades are at their most interesting when they involve players with notable skill sets and teams with widely varying needs. Here, take my Luis Arraez, and I’ll take your Pablo López in return. Your Zac Gallen for my Jazz Chisholm. I suppose the Marlins are, in this way at least, my platonic ideal of a baseball team. But not all trades are like that. Some trades barely care about the skillsets of the players involved and instead depend to an annoying amount on their contracts. Take this one, a trade from last week’s Winter Meetings:

Mariners Get:

• Jackson Kowar
• Cole Phillips

Braves Get:

• Jarred Kelenic
• Evan White
• Marco Gonzales

Read the rest of this entry »