The Cubs and Blue Jays agreed to a trade this afternoon, sending David Phelps to the North Siders in exchange for pitching prospect Thomas Hatch. The Cubs are locked in a tight divisional race with the Cardinals and the Brewers, tied for first place entering today’s play. They are the favorites to win the division (we have their division odds at 56.8%), but they have been hampered by a weak bullpen all year. The Phelps trade is an attempt to shore their biggest weakness up.

The Cubs relief corps is a motley assortment of over-30 stalwarts (Steve Cishek, Brandon Kintzler, Brad Brach, and Pedro Strop), converted starters (Tyler Chatwood and new addition Derek Holland), and Craig Kimbrels (Craig Kimbrel). Out of the entire bullpen, only Kyle Ryan, Rowan Wick, and Kintzler have provided even 10 innings of sub-4 FIP performance, which explains the group’s collective 4.22 ERA, 4.66 FIP, and 0.1 WAR. While some of that dicey performance was traded (Mike Montgomery) or optioned to Triple-A (Carl Edwards Jr.), it’s still a position of need.

Can Phelps fulfill that need? It’s an interesting question, and Phelps is about as interesting as you can get for a journeyman reliever with 0 WAR on the year. As recently as 2016, Phelps was a dominant reliever (in his first year after converting from starting), throwing 86.2 innings and amassing a 2.28 ERA and 2.8 FIP. In the middle of a strong 2017, he was traded, as all players must eventually be, to the Mariners, where he promptly had elbow problems. A bone spur in his throwing arm cut that season short, and if that sounds ominous to you, it should: he subsequently tore his UCL in spring training, and missed all of 2018 and the start of 2019 recovering.

Before his injury, Phelps was a prototypical bullpen arm. He sat 94-95 with a sinker/four-seam combination and occasionally touched 98. The velocity hasn’t come back, at least not completely; he’s closer to 92-93 in his 17 appearances with the Blue Jays this year. To compensate for that lost velocity, he’s featured a cutter much more since returning (32.3% of his pitches this year). He also boasts a swooping curveball that he uses mainly as a change of pace. Read the rest of this entry »

The Phillies have bolstered the back-end of a flagging rotation, which by some measures ranks among the National League’s worst. What’s more, they’ve done so through an upgrade obtained from within the division, namely the Mets’ Jason Vargas. The 36-year-old southpaw doesn’t light up radar guns or dominate hitters, but he does give a youngish rotation a left-handed presence with playoff experience — and at a negligible cost to boot. His being dealt by the Mets was highly anticipated, not only given Sunday’s acquisition of Marcus Stroman, but also because he angered the Mets’ brass with his involvement in a clubhouse altercation with a beat reporter in June.

Philadelphia gets:

LHP Jason Vargas
Cash considerations

New York gets:

C Austin Bossart

Vargas, who is now in his 14th major league season, has rebounded from a dreadful, injury-wracked 2018, during which he was torched for a 5.77 ERA and 5.02 FIP in just 92 innings, and an ugly beginning to this year when he yielded 10 runs in his first 6.1 innings and failed to last five innings in three of his first four starts. Overall, he’s pitched to a 4.01 ERA and 4.71 FIP, and since returning from a mid-May left hamstring strain that cost him 19 days, he’s turned in a 3.34 ERA and 4.01 FIP.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Brewers and Pirates agreed to a minor trade on the Trade Deadline’s Eve-Eve, with Jordan Lyles heading to the Milwaukee Brewers for Double-A starter-turned-reliever Cody Ponce.

There’s little question that the Brewers are sorely in need of an additional starting pitcher for the stretch run. The rotation wasn’t exactly a source of strength for the team even before losing Jhoulys Chacin and Brandon Woodruff to abdominal injuries over the last week. With those two not expected to return quickly — Chacin isn’t expected until mid-August and it may take Woodruff into September — and the trade deadline approaching, the Brewers don’t have much margin for error. It would have been a phenomenal risk for the team to hope that the respective rehab stints of Brent Suter and Jimmy Nelson go extremely well, allowing them to arrive dramatically like Marshal Blücher at Waterloo.

Now, is Jordan Lyles the pitcher you want to bring in as your emergency replacement? That I’m less sure of. But I’m not as instantly dismissive as I normally would be of a pitcher sporting a 5.36 ERA. Lyles was actually quite effective for most of the season, his ERA not rising over four until his first start in July. His pummeling has been largely limited to three atrocious starts in which he allowed a total of 19 runs over 6 1/3 innings. He’s been bitten by both home runs (eight homers in four starts) and by BABIP (.556) and while he’s no doubt pitched poorly, he’s been that combination of lousy and unlucky. I’m not sure batters would have a .556 BABIP off a five-year-old pitching with the wrong hand.

For the season, Lyles has a 4.38 xFIP and ZiPS, which doesn’t just assume high home run totals are a fluke but looks at the detailed hit data, thinks he has allowed five more home runs than he ought to have based on those stats. StatCast’s data agrees with this, giving Lyles an xSLG against of .438, well below his actual .514. Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday, the Marlins and Twins pulled off a pre-deadline swap.

First, the trade:

Miami gets:

1B Lewin Diaz

Minnesota gets:

RHP Sergio Romo
RHP Chris Vallimont
Player to be Named Later

This deal’s immediate big league relevance centers around 36-year-old Romo, who has had an incredible career for a reliever, especially one who throws as hard as he does. Romo’s fastball has never averaged more than even 90 mph, topping out at 89.9 mph during his rookie year, while average relief fastballs now hum in at 93.6 mph. His 9.8 WAR ranks 15th among relievers since he debuted in 2008, and splitter wizard Koji Uehara is the only other soft-tosser ahead of him.

Most of our readers have probably seen enough of Romo over the last decade to know that he’s been exceptional because of his ability to locate, and change the speed and shape of, his trademark slider. Hitters know that slider is coming — he’s thrown it roughly 53% of the time during his career, second most to Carlos Marmol among all pitchers with 400 or more innings since Romo debuted — and yet Romo’s surgical placement of the pitch just off the plate, equal parts enticing and unhittable, has had big league hitters flailing away at it across more than a decade now. Read the rest of this entry »

While it might not be a surprise that the Blue Jays’ Marcus Stroman is the first big-name player to be traded in advance of the coming July 31 deadline, the team on the other end of the transaction has raised some eyebrows. At 50-55, the Mets are running fourth in the National League East (11 1/2 games out of first place), and seventh in the NL Wild Card race (six games out). Acquiring the 28-year-old righty, who has one more year of club control remaining, in exchange for a pair of pitching prospects appears to be both a prelude to another deal involving a Mets starting pitcher and a signal that the team intends to contend next season rather than plunge itself into a more substantial rebuild. The alternative — that first-year general manager Brodie Van Wagenen is doubling down on a disappointing team whose playoff odds are just 11.2% (10.5% for the Wild Card) — well, that would be quite the four-dimensional chess move.

New York gets:

RHP Marcus Stroman
Cash considerations

Toronto gets:

LHP Anthony Kay
RHP Simeon Woods-Richardson

Stroman has pitched far better than his 6-11 won-loss record indicates. Entering Sunday, his 2.96 ERA ranks fifth in the AL, his 3.52 FIP sixth, his 2.9 WAR 10th. In a season where home runs are more common than ever before (1.38 per team per game), he owns the league’s third-lowest rate per nine innings (0.72), in part because he’s excelled at keeping the ball on the ground; his 56.3% groundball rate is the Junior Circuit’s highest. Read the rest of this entry »

Teams have been smiling at each another and making their fair share of prolonged eye contact, but the trade deadline tension had yielded little in the way of actual consummation until Saturday’s A’s and Royals trade that sent veteran lefty reliever Jake Diekman to Oakland for two prospects. Here’s the deal:

Oakland gets:

LHP Jake Diekman

Kansas City gets:

RHP Ismael Aquino
CF Dairon Blanco

Diekman, who has struck out 33.5% of opposing hitters and has a 3.37 FIP across 41.2 innings this year, immediately becomes the best lefty in Oakland’s bullpen, surpassing cutter/curveball/command lefty Ryan Buchter (who was also acquired from Kansas City via trade last year), and strike-throwing Taiwanese depth piece, Wei-Chung Wang. That’s less a knock on either of those two, and more to do with Diekman, who has been good with uncommon consistency for a reliever throughout his seven-year big league career. Read the rest of this entry »

The Rays and Jays pulled off a minor trade on Sunday, sending utilityman Eric Sogard to Tampa Bay for a player or players to be named later, or a player or players to be named soon.

Sogard is a good example of a player who wrings the most out of limited physical tools. You won’t often see him crushing deep homers with drool-worthy exit velocities. Like David Fletcher of the Angels, Sogard’s game is a bit of a throwback to a more contact-oriented game. Of active players with at least 500 plate appearances, Sogard has been the second-best at making contact with pitches in the strike zone, behind only Michael Brantley.

Sogard’s .300/.363/.477 triple-slash line (and 123 wRC+) this season is surprising, though not nearly as surprising as the 10 homers he’s hit. While 10 homers doesn’t exactly put Sogard into Pete Alonso territory, it’s an impressive total through the end of July for a 33-year-old who entered the season with just 11 career round-trippers. He may be an example of a player who is getting the most out of MLB’s different-but-not-different-swears-Rob-Manfred baseball; Statcast’s xSLG number gives Sogard just a .346 slugging percentage. The culprit is that Sogard still isn’t hitting the ball hard, with an 84.4 mph exit velocity and only three barrels. Despite that, more of his balls than usual have snuck over the right field fence.

After knee surgery cost Sogard his 2016 season, he was forced to settle for a minor-league contract and the chance to compete for a bench spot with the Brewers in 2017. Sogard posted pleasantly surprising production while filling in for Jonathan Villar when the latter was dealing with back pain in June of that year; his .273/.393/.378 line was enough to get him a major league contract with the Brewers in 2018, but he played poorly and was released by Milwaukee in July.

Neither Steamer or ZiPS were excited about Sogard coming into 2019, projecting a wRC+ of 79 and 69 respectively. The rest of baseball wasn’t much more excited; Sogard signed a minor-league contract with the Blue Jays in December. The projection systems now see him as a .250-.260 hitter with an OBP around .330 and a high .300s slugging percentage, which is a promising enough line for him to have value for a contender looking for depth. Sogard is an excellent fit for the Rays; they don’t need him to play much shortstop, a position where Sogard is stretched, but with many of the team’s second and third base options currently injured (Brandon Lowe, Yandy Diaz, Daniel Robertson, Christian Arroyo), Tampa will find a lot of use for him in coming weeks. I might be inclined to promote Kean Wong from Triple-A Durham, but this is a short-term addition, and the Rays have good reason to pick the safer option in a pennant race.

The cost for adding Sogard is likely to be a minimal one. While there have been conflicting rumor-inations about the players in return, it strikes me that no matter who’s ultimately identified, it’s likely that we’re talking low-level organizational players. If there were prospects of significance involved, I suspect the Rays would have considered promoting Wong more seriously.

Sogard’s acquisition is a low-key signing, but he’ll provide value to the Rays for the next two months, and the trade seems likely to be reasonable for both sides. While I reserve the right to change my opinion if the Rays give up Wander Franco or Brendan McKay, they’re not going to give up Wander Franco or Brendan McKay.

We all know factors beyond talent — be it contract length or value, a team’s competitive window, or a player’s social fit within the org, among others — have an impact on how trades balance and are agreed upon. Just being mindful that these factors exist, and that we’re not always privy to them, can help us to square what we perceive to be a context-free gap in the talents exchanged. But can we bridge what is, based on our evaluations, a sizable gap in this weekend’s Rangers and Rays prospect-for-prospect trade?

Rangers get:

2B Nick Solak, 50 FV, No. 93 overall prospect

Rays get:

RHP Peter Fairbanks, 40 FV

This deal looks very good for Texas in a vacuum based on our evaluations. Kiley and I both think Solak, who is a career .290/.382/.453 hitter in the minors and has raked since his freshman year at Louisville, is going to be an average everyday second baseman, while Fairbanks is a 25-year-old reliever who has had two Tommy John surgeries, a demographic we rarely rank at all. 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 »

Homer Bailey woke up Sunday morning expecting to start a game between two teams going nowhere, but instead discovered that he would be joining a playoff chase. Kansas City shipped the righty to the Oakland A’s in exchange for 23-year-old shortstop Kevin Merrell.

Bailey, 33, has been a cromulent arm for KC this season, with a 4.80 ERA and 4.47 FIP in 90 innings. His 1.1 WAR is his best figure since 2014, while his 8.10 K/9 is his best mark since 2013.

Merrell, the 33rd overall pick back in 2017, ranked 20th on Eric and Kiley’s list of Oakland’s top farmhands before the season. Speed is Merrell’s calling card, but his 80-grade wheels haven’t had much chance to shine this year in Double-A, as he’s sporting a meager .246/.292/.339 line in 82 games.

Oakland will be Bailey’s fourth organization in the last eight months. After a 12-year stint with the Reds, he was shipped to the Dodgers in a seven-player swap that sent Yasiel Puig, Matt Kemp, Alex Wood and Kyle Farmer to Cincinnati in return for prospects Jeter Downs and Josiah Gray. Bailey’s inclusion in the deal was motivated entirely by finances, however, as the $22.45 million he was owed in 2019 was a close match with the $21.75 million owed to Kemp; the structure of Bailey’s contract made it more luxury tax-friendly to the Dodgers. One day after the trade was completed, Bailey was released by Los Angeles, and in February, he signed a minor league contract with the Royals.

While he rarely lived up to his billing as a top prospect, Bailey was a pretty good starter early in the decade, when he accrued 6.3 WAR from 2012-13 while throwing more than 200 innings each year. The Reds rewarded Bailey, then 27, with a six-year, $105 million contract extension. Twenty-three starts into what appeared to be another good season in 2014, he was shut down with an arm injury. He underwent Tommy John surgery, made just a combined eight starts from 2015-16, and in parts of four seasons following his injury, held a 6.25 ERA and 5.13 FIP in 231.2 innings.

It isn’t difficult to see why two playoff aspirants didn’t have room for Bailey. Just seven months later, however, another win-now team was willing to part with a top-20 prospect to add him to their rotation. What changed?

Well, for one, it’s always been somewhat difficult to differentiate between Good Bailey and Bad Bailey. His average fastball velocity in 2012 was 93.2 mph. In 2018, it was 93.0 mph. His chase rate in 2013 was 34.5%. In 2018, it was 33.0%. His swinging strike rate, pitch usage, and ground ball rates were consistent as well. And yet he’d gone from a solid No. 2 starter to nearly unemployed.

Bailey’s numbers in many of those areas haven’t changed much this season, either. His average four-seamer is 92.8 mph. His chase rate is just a couple ticks lower than last season. His groundball rate is up three points, and his swinging strike rate has climbed modestly as well.

There is, however, one big difference in Bailey’s repertoire. His career fastball percentage sits around 60%. In years after his surgery, it was 55%. This year, it’s down to 49.3%. His slider percentage, 17% a year ago, is down more than four points. Those missing fastballs and sliders have turned into splitters:

Bailey’s thrown his splitter on 27.3% of his offerings in 2019, more than eight points higher than any other season of his career. It’s a great pitch for him to lean on: According to Statcast, opponents have just a .195 xBA .250 xSLG against the split, and their actual numbers aren’t exceeding those estimates by much. Of the five pitches Bailey has used in 2019, three of them have an xwOBA above .350. Finding a pitch as reliable as the splitter has been vital for him, and as he’s thrown it more, he’s been more effective. In his last five starts, he’s thrown 29 innings and posted a 2.48 ERA.

That was good enough for Oakland to add him to its starting rotation. The A’s have weathered Frankie Montas’ suspension well, but they still need rotation help. Montas had a 2.70 ERA and 2.9 WAR in 90 innings before receiving an 80-game suspension on June 21. Since then, Oakland starters have accumulated 1.7 WAR, good for seventh-best in baseball, though their 4.85 xFIP suggests they’ve been a bit fortunate.

Mike Fiers, Brett Anderson and Chris Bassitt have been serviceable starters, but all three are outperforming their FIPs by a wide gap. Tanner Anderson and Daniel Mengden are passable options, but the rotation is clearly Oakland’s weakest part of the roster. Critically, Oakland’s internal prospective reinforcements all have question marks. Jharel Cotton and Sean Manaea are on track to rejoin the team in August, but they’re both returning from serious injuries: Manaea hasn’t pitched this year and Cotton has been out since 2017. The two top pitching prospects in the organization in A.J. Puk and Jesus Luzardo, meanwhile, have thrown only a handful of innings this season, and probably aren’t realistic options to contribute down the stretch. The A’s need an arm or two, and they got a cheap one in Bailey.

Because the Dodgers are paying $22.45 million in salary owed to Bailey for the 2019 season, Oakland is on the hook for just the remaining $250,000. As far as prospect cost, a top-20 prospect isn’t nothing, but Merrell has a long road ahead of him. As Eric and Kiley wrote back in March, a move to the outfield is likely in his future, and there isn’t much power at all in his bat. His speed makes him interesting, but he’ll need to take a big step forward to profile as a regular.

That’s all that it cost to bring Bailey to Oakland, an organization that has done well with similarly beleaguered pitchers recently. Last June, they signed Edwin Jackson — a pitcher who hadn’t posted an ERA under 5.00 since 2015 — and watched him spin 92 innings of 3.33 ERA ball the rest of the year. They also coaxed 110 splendid innings out of Trevor Cahill’s oft-injured and sporadically-effective right arm. The A’s have been a good home for pitchers who once seemed over the hill, and perhaps Bailey will continue the pattern. Just seven months ago, he was a cast-off. But in Kansas City, he showed he wasn’t done. Now, in Oakland, he can show how much more he has left.