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.
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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
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
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 landmark10-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.
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:
Last week, Marco Gonzales got traded twice in three days: First from Seattle to Atlanta in the Jarred Kelenic deal, then up the Denny Neagle Highway to Pittsburgh. No one has ever been more traded. You want to know how traded Gonzales is? The only other player he’s ever been traded for, Tyler O’Neill, just got traded too.
The St. Louis Cardinals, sitting on a surfeit of corner outfield types, have sent O’Neill to Boston for pitchers Nick Robertson and Victor Santos. This is not as exciting a trade as it would’ve been two years ago, when O’Neill was coming off a 5.5 WAR season, but it allows the Cardinals to turn a player they probably weren’t going to use into pitching depth. The Red Sox gain some temporary goodwill from the small subset of locals who’ll scan a headline and think that former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill has returned from the dead. Moreover, they’ve added some right-handed power to a pool of outfielders that could use some. Read the rest of this entry »
Shouldered with the needle-threading task of simultaneously cutting payroll and rebuilding a pitching staff thinned out by the departure of several key free agents, the Padres traded superstar Juan Soto and Gold Glove-caliber center fielder Trent Grisham to the Yankees on Wednesday in exchange for three big league arms — righties Michael King, Randy Vásquez, and Jhony Brito — as well as a fourth who is nearly ready for primetime in prospect Drew Thorpe and backup catcher Kyle Higashioka. Ben Clemens did a full analysis on the impact that the 25-year-old Soto, one of baseball’s best hitters, will have on the Yankees. I’m going to dive deeper into the arms headed to the Gaslamp District and talk about how the Padres might go about finishing their offseason to-do list.
Most readers are probably aware that a mandate to shed payroll was a driving factor for this trade from San Diego’s perspective. The club’s sudden shift in financial direction occurred in the wake of the death of owner Peter Seidler. The trade also addresses a large portion of the Padres on-field baseball needs, though it also creates massive new holes in their lineup and defensive alignment where Soto and Grisham used to be. The Friars will need to fill or upgrade at least two or three spots of their currently-projected lineup if they want to compete with the defending NL champion Diamondbacks and reigning division-winning Dodgers in 2024, and they probably also need another starting pitcher or two to round out their rotation. Shedding Soto’s salary likely created some space to do so, but given the Padres’ financial constraints, perhaps not enough to solve all of these problems via free agency. There may be internal candidates, especially on the position player side, who can contribute at the league minimum salary in 2024; I’ll get to those prospects later.
Let’s start with who came back to San Diego and how they fit into an overhauled pitching staff. Prior to the trade, our Padres rotation projection looked rough. Joe Musgrove and Yu Darvish were fortified by 27-year-old knuckleballer Matt Waldron, and walk-prone MLB virgin Jay Groome. The free-agent departures of Nick Martinez, Seth Lugo, Michael Wacha, and reigning Cy Young winner Blake Snell, who pitched a combined 570 innings in 2023, left the Padres in dire need of impact and depth to have a functional and competitive pitching staff in 2024. Even if one believes (as I do) that prospect Jairo Iriarte is talented enough to make a meaningful near-term impact, the Padres still badly needed to add several pitchers to their big league staff. This trade gets them most of the way there, as all four of the pitchers acquired for Soto could reasonably be expected to pitch in the big leagues next season. Read the rest of this entry »
