Raise your hand if you’ve thought about Luke Weaver in the past month. Anyone? No? Okay. As luck would have it, he did cross my mind recently. After Luis Castillo got shipped to Seattle, I joked on Twitter that the Merrill Kelly sweepstakes would commence, and a reply led me to compare Weaver to Kelly to Castillo:

Luke 'Merrill "Luis Castillo" Kelly' Weaver

— Justin Choi ?? (@justinochoi) July 30, 2022

Not exactly A-list material, I know. But the point is that Weaver shares similarities, albeit superficial, with the two other pitchers. Castillo and Kelly are both fastball-changeup guys; Weaver is also a fastball-changeup guy. So in sum, the Royals have acquired a bargain bin version of Kelly, who’s a bargain bin version of Castillo, at the modest price of sending infielder Emmanuel Rivera to the Diamondbacks.

Despite promising stuff and command as a prospect, Weaver’s career so far has been marred by inconsistency and poor health. He made his big league debut in 2016, spent most of ‘17 bouncing between Triple-A and the majors, became a permanent fixture of the rotation to open ‘18 before being demoted to the bullpen, and struggled with injuries in ‘19, making only a dozen starts. Nothing occurred health-wise in the shortened ‘20 season, but a right shoulder strain kept him off the mound for a majority of ‘21. He’s been healthy this season, thankfully, with his low innings total explained by the fact that he is now a full-time reliever.

That doesn’t sound all too exciting, but if you look closely enough, there’s still a good amount of potential left in Weaver. He’s quietly remodeled his changeup, and it looks better than ever. The table below shows how the pitch has progressed over the past three seasons:

The biggest difference: the changeup is getting way more drop than it used to, along with extra arm-side fade. (Here, a lower vertical movement number equals more drop.) Despite a small sample, we can tell this is a genuine development because of the physical properties of the changeup; it’s spinning on a different axis than before and seems to be benefiting from more seam-shifted wake. That explains why stuff models like Cameron Grove’s are appreciative of Weaver’s efforts, viewing the new and improved changeup as a plus offering. He has always been able to command the slow ball; this is the first time he’s backed that up with enhanced movement. Read the rest of this entry »

When Tommy Pham signed with the Reds during the offseason on a one-year, $7.5 million contact, the writing was already on the wall. By the deadline, he’d be sent to a contending team, presumably one that had an outfield weakness. And so here we are, with Pham departing Cincinnati for Boston in exchange for either a player to be named later or cash considerations. But it’s a deal that leaves me furrowing my brow, mainly because it’s made unclear what the broader plan is for the Red Sox.

Before that, though, let’s talk about the player himself. We’ve been so swept away by the unbelievable saga of slap-tastic fantasy football, I think, that we haven’t really paid attention to how Pham has fared in real-life games. He’s been… fine. In a year that’s lighter on offense, his .238/.320/.374 triple slash equates to a 92 wRC+. That’s serviceable, though certainly not up to his usual standards; even in 2021, which many considered a “down” year, Pham still mustered a 102 wRC+.

Back when he signed, I wrote about how Pham had been one of the unluckiest hitters around for the past two seasons, and that a one-year deal guaranteeing him playing time and a hitter-friendly home park could reverse his fortunes. But his underperformance is no longer the product of rotten luck. His .312 xwOBA this season is only a smidge higher than his .308 wOBA, and in case you missed it, Baseball Savant re-centered its expected metrics to the current offensive environment. There’s reason to believe he isn’t the same player he once was, in other words. Read the rest of this entry »

Oakland fetched a sizable return in the trade that sent the potent combination of Frankie Montas and Lou Trivino to the Yankees on Monday afternoon. The deal is headlined by two top 100 prospects, lefty Ken Waldichuk and righty Luis Medina, and is supplemented by near-ready backend starter JP Sears and fleet-footed A-ball second baseman Cooper Bowman. All three pitchers are essentially big league-ready, with Medina and Sears already on the 40-man roster, and Waldichuk a lock to be added after the season and likely to debut next year.

The youngest of that trio is Medina, a 23-year-old flamethrower who has been a prospect of import for over half a decade, walking the starter/reliever balance beam all the while. Now at Triple-A Scranton Wilkes-Barre, he has made 17 starts (he typically works four to five innings at a time and has maxed out at six twice this season) while posting a 3.38 ERA, his third consecutive level where he has posted a sub-4.00 ERA. While he’s historically struggled with walks (he’s been at least a five walks per nine guy his entire career) and overall consistency, Medina’s stuff makes him tough to square up and induces lots of groundballs (50% GB%). His fastball has been in the mid-to-upper-90s his entire career and is parked in the 94-98 mph range again this season, peaking at 102. Read the rest of this entry »

The Padres pulled off a blockbuster on Monday afternoon, though it wasn’t the Juan Soto trade that so much of the industry expects. Instead, San Diego sent a four-player package headlined by closer Taylor Rogers, an All-Star last year, to Milwaukee in exchange for closer Josh Hader, an All-Star in four of the past five seasons, including this year.

On the surface, this appears to be something of a challenge trade: a pair of contenders swapping southpaws whose holds on the ninth inning had loosened due to shaky performances over the past month, sending their ERAs north of 4.00:

But there’s more to the deal when it comes to its respective impacts on the two teams’ 40-man rosters and payrolls, all of which is worth bearing in mind as Tuesday’s deadline approaches. Read the rest of this entry »

Ah, the trade deadline. It’s the best time of the year for baseball chaos, rumor-mongering reporting, and of course, the main event: a million trades featuring relievers you’ve heard of but don’t know a ton about. The difference between a blown lead in the seventh inning of a playoff game and an uneventful 4-2 win might be one of these unheralded arms. Heck, they could be a better option but still give up a three-run shot in a crushing loss. Or they could be a worse option! There are no guarantees in baseball. Still, here are some relievers who contending teams think enough of to trade for and plug into their bullpens.

Yankees Acquire Scott Effross
Scott Effross wasn’t supposed to amount to anything in the big leagues. A 15th-round pick in the 2015 draft, he kicked around the Cubs system for years, frequently old for his level and rarely posting knockout numbers. Then in 2019, on the suggestion of pitching coach Ron Villone, he started throwing sidearm. Three years later, he’s carving through hitters in the majors.

“Carving” might undersell it. Since his 2021 debut, Effross has been one of the best relievers in the game. In 57.1 innings, he’s compiled a 2.98 ERA and 2.45 FIP. He’s striking out 29% of opposing batters and hardly walking anyone. With his new low arm slot, he’s adopted what I like to think of as the sidearmer’s basic arsenal: a sinker, a slider, and a break-glass-in-case-of-lefty changeup. Read the rest of this entry »

The Red Sox dealing free agent-to-be Christian Vázquez by the trade deadline felt inevitable after the team went 8–19 in July, and that parting came to pass on Monday evening, when the 31-year-old catcher was sent to the Astros in exchange for prospects Wilyer Abreu and Enmanuel Valdez. It was a bittersweet moment for both player and club; Boston’s ninth-round pick in the 2008 draft, Vázquez, a product of the Puerto Rico Baseball Academy, was the organization’s longest-tenured player.

Vázquez represents a meaningful offensive upgrade for the postseason-bound Astros. The contact-oriented right-handed hitter is slashing .282/.327/.432 with eight home runs and a 111 wRC+ in 318 plate appearances. Martín Maldonado, Houston’s primary catcher to this point in the season, is slashing just .173/.239/.342 with 10 home runs and a 66 wRC+ in 262 plate appearances. As good as Maldonado is defensively, an upgrade was in order.

Experience on the big stage augments the new arrival’s resume. Vázquez has played in 25 postseason games, including four in the 2018 World Series and 11 last year. His most impactful October moment came in Game 3 of the 2021 ALDS, when he walked off the Rays with an 11th-inning, Monster-clearing home run. Read the rest of this entry »

Frankie Montas needed to be set free. When the A’s began their selloff in earnest this offsesaon, he looked like a lock to end up elsewhere. Sean Manaea and Chris Bassitt, fellow rotation stalwarts, were gone. Matt Chapman and Matt Olson were shipped out. Montas (along with Sean Murphy and Ramón Laureano) seemed likely to be next, but then the season started, and there he was, still atop the Oakland rotation.

He’s done everything Oakland could possibly ask of him this season, to the tune of a 3.18 ERA in 19 starts. Meanwhile, the A’s have the second-worst record in baseball, ahead of only the woeful Nationals. Montas will reach free agency after the 2023 season, another year in which the A’s will likely be far from the playoff conversation. He had a brief injury scare, missing two turns with shoulder inflammation, but he’s returned to the field and made two starts without incident. One way or another, the A’s were going to move him.

The Yankees, for their part, stormed to the best record in baseball but would still like starting pitching help. Gerrit Cole is great and Nestor Cortes has been a revelation this year, but the group of pitchers behind them has been uneven. Jordan Montgomery started strong, but he’s been homer-prone of late. Jameson Taillon is steady but a step below Montas results-wise, and will be a free agent after this year. Luis Severino just hit the 60-day IL, pushing a potential return even deeper into September. The aggregate results have been solid, but you can see why the team wants more certainty given the difficulty of cleanly upgrading their lineup. Read the rest of this entry »

The Astros shook up their first base situation on Monday, acquiring 1B/DH Trey Mancini from the Orioles as part of a three-way trade that also included the Rays. Mancini, the longest-tenured player on Baltimore’s roster, was having a solid, if not spectacular, season, hitting .268/.347/.404 with 10 homers and 1.2 WAR in 92 games, with most of his playing time this season split between first base and designated hitter and an occasional appearance in a corner outfield role. He’ll be a free agent at the end of the season, though there is a $10 million mutual option. To land Mancini, the Astros sent outfielder Jose Siri to the Rays and pitcher Chayce McDermott to the O’s, with Tampa shipping pitcher Seth Johnson to Baltimore and Jayden Murray to Houston.

To look at this trade more easily, let’s separate it into three different transactions.

The Baltimore Orioles acquire pitchers Seth Johnson and Chayce McDermott for 1B/DH Trey Mancini

From a PR standpoint, there will likely be some sharp elbows thrown at the Orioles locally. Baltimore is having its first even marginally playoff-relevant season in a long while, and Mancini has been with the team through the entire process. As its veteran rebuild survivor, he played a similar role that Freddie Freeman did for the Braves while they went through their own painful renovations. His battle with colon cancer, diagnosed on his 28th birthday, and subsequent grand return after surgery and six months of chemotherapy only served to make him more beloved in town.

Basically, the on-field case for keeping Mancini and letting him walk at the end of the season involved a very “now” outlook for the team. It does make the Orioles a bit weaker over the next two months, but it’s only a major loss if you look at the consequences in a very binary fashion, in that Baltimore is in the wild card race with Mancini and out of it without him. Once you move past that, the calculus for whether a trade like this is a good idea comes out very differently. Read the rest of this entry »

With their outfield (and whole roster, really) hit hard by injuries, the Rays acquired 34-year-old left fielder David Peralta from the Diamondbacks for 19-year-old catching prospect Christian Cerda on Sunday. The Freight Train is hitting .248/.315/.457, good for a 109 wRC+, which is in line with his career norm (111 wRC+), even though the shape of his production has totally changed.

Before we get into how that came to be, though, let’s take a moment to appreciate Peralta’s remarkable path here. Originally a left-handed pitcher in the Cardinals organization, he was released amid shoulder issues and played outfield in Independent ball for a couple of years before signing with the Diamondbacks in 2013. It’s borderline offensive to cram that stretch of Peralta’s career into one sentence. Indy ball isn’t exactly glamorous, and Peralta was broke and worked at McDonalds while waiting for the Diamondbacks, who he knew wanted to sign him, to free up the minor league roster space to do so. After he finally signed, it took only about a year for him to reach the big leagues, and Peralta has had one hell of a now nine-year MLB career, during which he’s been one of the better left field defenders in baseball (and has one Gold Glove), won a Silver Slugger during his peak year in 2018 (.293/.352/.516 with 30 bombs), led the league in triples twice, and endured wrist and shoulder surgeries while becoming a cult hero in Arizona. From a baseball role standpoint, the Rays are getting a platoon stick (.268/.325/.496 versus righties this year) and plus defender in a corner spot, but Peralta also brings the parts of himself that helped him grind through injury and Indy ball. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve ever played the game 2048, you know the deep satisfaction of sliding things around and making everything look cleaner. Two 2’s become a 4, two 4’s become an 8, and pretty soon you’ve slid your way into a gratifying relaxation. What does that have to do with baseball? The Phillies made a 2048-style trade this weekend, and I can’t wait to tell you about it.

The baseball version of that slide-and-combine game is all about defense. If you acquire a defensive wizard at shortstop, you can slide your existing shortstop to third, your third baseman to first, your first baseman to DH – you get the idea. You can do the same in the outfield. Add a Gold Glove center fielder, and your average center fielder becomes a great right fielder. Your solid right fielder can take over for the guy in left field you’d rather have DH. Adding one defender and sliding can turn a blah defense into a good one. Deeply satisfying, just like 2048.

The Phillies and their porous defense would seem like a perfect candidate for such satisfying sliding, but before the season, they couldn’t actually do it. There were some pesky pieces blocking their natural ability to slide down the defensive spectrum. With essentially three DHs – Kyle Schwarber, Rhys Hoskins, and Nick Castellanos – and only two landing spots between them, the “slide someone to DH” part of the equation wouldn’t work. When Bryce Harper injured his elbow, he couldn’t play the field, which further jammed up the works. Read the rest of this entry »