Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. August is a great time for reflection in the baseball world. The trade deadline has passed, which means what you see is pretty much what you get roster-wise. The playoff picture is generally clear, but no one has clinched yet. It’s too early to think about postseason rotations, but too late to think about turning the year around. The urgency mostly isn’t there – unless you’re a Mets fan trying to ward off 25 years of ghosts, of course. But the downtime of the baseball season has its own small delights, and even when you aren’t watching the brightest stars on the biggest stage, baseball is awesome. So thanks as always to Zach Lowe of The Ringer for the column format, and let’s get going.

1. Opportunity
The Twins might have traded away a ton of their major league roster at the deadline, but that doesn’t mean they’re filling up the lineup with replacement players they found at a local tryout. Seven of the nine everyday position players on the current squad were drafted by Minnesota in the first two rounds. The other two, Alan Roden and Kody Clemens, aren’t exactly nobodies – they’re both third round draft picks the Twins acquired this year, and of course Clemens’ dad is famous too.

It’s tough sledding for Quad-A players looking for a major league shot. But while the starters still look like your average major leaguer when it comes to their amateur pedigree, the bench is another matter. Mickey Gasper was a 27th rounder who didn’t debut until he was 28. But he’s only the second-most improbable Twin. Ryan Fitzgerald went undrafted in 2016, didn’t reach Triple-A until he was 27, and finally got his major league break earlier this year as a 30-year-old. He went 0-3 in a single game as an injury replacement, pinch-ran in another, and got sent back down. Sometimes life in the bigs is nasty, brutish, and short.
Read the rest of this entry »

I owe Luke Keaschall an apology. Last night, the 22-year-old second baseman put up the first oh-fer of his brief and brilliant major league career, the predictable result of my decision to write about him today. In the series opener in the Bronx, the Yankees beat the Twins, 6-2, and Keaschall watched from the on-deck circle with an 11-game hitting streak on the line as Ryan Jeffers struck out to end the game. This is my fault. I knew that by pitching an article about Keaschall, I was condemning him to this fate. I really do feel bad about jinxing him, but it was time to highlight just how impressive his start has been. Keaschall will turn 23 on Friday, which makes him exactly three years older than FanGraphs.

Permit me to exclude Monday’s stats momentarily for the sake of painting a picture. Through the first 12 games of his career, Keaschall ran a 234 wRC+, slashing .415/.500/.707, homering twice, and stealing five bases. He’s one of just 10 players in the last 30 years – a list that also includes his manager, Rocco Baldelli – to start his career with an 11-game hitting streak. Keaschall also started his career with a 12-game on-base streak. Yes, that is possible; I’ll explain in a moment. With a nice round 1.0 WAR (which dropped to 0.9 on Monday; again, I’m so sorry, Luke), he ranks eighth among Minnesota’s position players. He has five multi-hit games. He was just named AL Player of the Week in his second week as a big leaguer. On Sunday, he achieved his first three-hit game with a walk-off homer against the Royals in the 11th inning. Read the rest of this entry »

Now that the deadline dust has settled – or at least, started to settle – it’s time to start making sense of it. The Padres, Twins, and Orioles were everywhere. Top relievers flew off the board. Both New York teams spent all day adding. But who did well? Who did poorly? Who was so frenetic that they probably belong in both categories more than once? I tried to sort things out a little bit. This isn’t an exhaustive list. There were 36 trades on deadline day, a new record, and more than a dozen before it. Nearly every team changed its trajectory at least a little, and this is just a brief look into the chaos. Here are the trends that most stood out to me.

Winner: Teams Trading Top Pitchers
This year’s crop of rental players was lighter than usual, but deadline activity didn’t slow. Instead, it simply spilled over into relievers under contract for a while. Mason Miller, Jhoan Duran, Griffin Jax, and David Bednar are under contract for a combined nine more years after 2025. That drove the prospect price up on all four. Having long-term control of relievers might be less valuable than at other positions, but it’s still valuable.

Most of the best prospects who swapped teams at the deadline were involved in a trade for top pitching. Leo De Vries, the consensus best player of the 2024 international signing period, was the big name here, but both the Phillies and Yankees offered up multiple good minor leaguers in exchange for Duran and Bednar. Taj Bradley, whom the Twins got back for Jax, is a former top prospect who won’t be a free agent until 2030. Read the rest of this entry »

For Twins fans, the Louis Varland deal was something like the final straw. Parting with Willi Castro could be forgiven — his contract was up at the end of this season. Jhoan Duran and Griffin Jax — okay, they were under team control through 2027, but you could convince yourself that the deadline is the best time to part with a premium reliever, and look at the return. Dumping Carlos Correa and the majority of his contract on the Astros was definitely a feel-bad move, but it was also one that was requested by Correa himself after the Twins made clear that they were headed into a rebuilding phase, and the back half of that deal might look pretty bad from a production standpoint.

But giving up on Varland defied any reasonable explanation. He grew up in Minnesota, played his college ball there, and was brought into the Twins organization as a 15th rounder in the 2019 draft. From these humble hometown beginnings, he developed into a fire-breathing bullpen monster. Varland sits 98 mph on his four-seam fastball; he’s under team control until 2030, and wouldn’t even hit arbitration until 2027. If there was ever a perfect closer to bridge from one competitive Twins era to the next, it would’ve been Varland.

Instead, the front office sent him (along with Ty France) off to Toronto in exchange for outfielder Alan Roden and left-handed pitcher Kendry Rojas. On the merits, it’s a reasonable return; Roden can really rake, and Garcia is a legitimate pitching prospect close to the big leagues. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cubs approached the trade deadline with pitching as their top priority. They traded for Michael Soroka on Wednesday to shore up the starting rotation and added Andrew Kittredge to the bullpen later that night. That didn’t stop them from making a trade to improve their hitters: Getting in on the Twins’ Thursday fire sale, Chicago acquired utilityman Willi Castro for two pitching prospects, Ryan Gallagher and Sam Armstrong. And right before the buzzer, the Cubs also acquired left-handed reliever Taylor Rogers from the Pirates for outfield prospect Ivan Brethowr. This was the second swap Rogers was part of within a roughly 27-hour span, after he went from the Reds to the Pirates in Wednesday afternoon’s Ke’Bryan Hayes deal.

The Cubs have one of the best lineups in baseball. They lead the majors in runs scored and the National League in wRC+. So they didn’t necessarily need to upgrade their offense before the deadline. Castro’s calling card is his versatility, and that’s the primary reason they acquired him. Just this year, he’s played every position but catcher and first base. Defensively, he’s probably a little in over his head at either of the premium up-the-middle positions — his career FRV at shortstop is -3 and -2 in center field — but he’s perfectly acceptable as a second baseman (2 FRV) or in either outfield corner (5 in left, -2 in right). In previous years, he was also slightly above average at third (2 FRV) before taking a step back this season (-3), though small-sample caveats certainly apply for his defensive metrics at any specific position because of how much he’s moved around. Only once has he logged more than 500 innings at an individual position in a season, and that was back in 2021 when he played 713 2/3 innings at second base with the Tigers.

That said, he is way more than just a multi-positional backup. At the plate, Castro has been solidly above average since joining the Twins in 2023; during those first seasons in Minnesota, he posted a combined 107 wRC+ and accumulated 5.4 WAR. This season, his offensive production has been slightly better — .245/.335/.407, 109 wRC+ — than in recent years because he’s tapping into his power more. He’s already smacked 10 home runs in 344 plate appearances after hitting a career-high 12 last year across nearly 300 more trips to the plate. That he is a switch-hitter only adds to his flexibility. He has been platoon neutral for his career, but he’s hitting left-handed hurlers much better this year (131 wRC+) than he has righties (100). Castro has been worth 1.1 WAR this season, a step back from his last two years despite his offensive improvements because his defensive value has declined. Some of this is due to a dip in his defensive metrics — his only plus position this season by FRV is left field — but it also has to do with the positional adjustment, as he’s spent more innings this season at positions further down the defensive spectrum; after playing 465 2/3 innings at shortstop in 2024 and another 211 1/3 in center field, he’s logged just 26 at shortstop this year to go along with a one-inning cameo in center. Read the rest of this entry »

I was starting to get worried that Griffin Jax was going to be left behind in the Twins’ wholesale liquidation of their bullpen. Fear not; the hardest thrower in the Air Force Reserve is headed out after all. The Rays currently sit two games under .500 and 3 1/2 games out of a Wild Card spot, with a 9.9% chance of making the playoffs. That long-shot contender status did not dampen their enthusiasm for Jax in the slightest. Tampa Bay sent the talented but inconsistent starter Taj Bradley to Minnesota in exchange for Jax, who is under team control through 2027.

The Rays also sent infielder Curtis Mead and prospects Duncan Davitt and Ben Peoples to the White Sox in exchange for Adrian Houser, who will presumably take the rotation spot Bradley vacated. Read the rest of this entry »

On June 30, the Rangers lost to fall to 41-44, 10th place in the American League. Then they turned it on. Since the calendar flipped to July, they’ve gone 16-8 and rocketed into the playoff picture. They’re tied with the Mariners for the last AL Wild Card spot. With their sights now set on thriving in October, they needed to reinforce a pitching staff that has been quite good up top but got shakier as you went down the depth chart, and the Diamondbacks were happy to oblige. As Ken Rosenthal first reported, the Rangers are getting Merrill Kelly in exchange for Kohl Drake, Mitch Bratt, and David Hagaman. They also acquired Danny Coulombe and Phil Maton in separate deals to shore up the middle of their bullpen.

Texas has a famous starting rotation. The two stars, Jacob deGrom and Nathan Eovaldi, need no introduction. Second on the team in innings, slightly ahead of Eovaldi? That’d be World Series winner Patrick Corbin, famous both for his high highs and low lows. The back of the rotation? Jack Leiter and Kumar Rocker, famous college teammates before they were famous prospect teammates. But Leiter and Rocker have been flat this year, and Corbin was bad enough for long enough that I’d be a little scared of counting on him. Tyler Mahle, another celebrated Rangers starter, has been out since June. Jon Gray is headed for free agency and has perhaps been banished to the bullpen for the remainder of 2025. And it’s not like deGrom has been the paragon of health over the last few years.

Kelly lengthens the playoff-ready portion of Texas’s rotation immediately. His career 3.74 ERA and 3.97 FIP are accurate representations of his work, as are his 22% strikeout rate and 7.4% walk rate. In other words, he’s a perfect mid-rotation arm, better than average (he’s managed a 3.22 ERA and 3.53 FIP this season) but squarely short of an ace. He’s 36 and a free agent after this year, which limits his return somewhat, but he’s a dependable playoff starter and thus a very desirable deadline target. Read the rest of this entry »

I was a young baseball writer working in Houston when Carlos Correa came up with the Astros. At the time, I was convinced that this 6-foot-4 mountain of a man with a massive throwing arm but unimpressive foot speed would end up at third base before too long. A lot has happened since then. When fellow shortstop prospect Alex Bregman got promoted a year later, it was Bregman, not Correa, who slid over to third. From there, Correa developed into a Platinum Glove winner and a consistent plus-10 defender or better.

Then Correa left the Astros entirely and stayed away after a successful one-season audition with the Twins. Even after a reunion with Houston was mooted in the lead-up to the deadline, the scuttlebutt said it wasn’t happening and the Astros traded for Ramón Urías to fill the Isaac Paredes-shaped hole in the infield.

But after all those bumps in the road, and after 10 years of waiting, I turned out to be right after all: Correa is headed back to Houston, along with $33 million in cash, for minor league left-hander Matt Mikulski, and in accordance with my prediction, Correa is going to play third base.

Never abandon your takes, kids, you have no idea when the universe will decide to prove you right. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a big deadline for relief pitchers, even for teams that aren’t operating in the Mason Miller or Jhoan Duran tier. The Orioles bullpen continues to get picked over like a charcuterie board: Andrew Kittredge is Chicago-bound, with the Cubs sending Wilfri De La Cruz the other way.

The Tigers beefed up their bullpen by picking up Paul Sewald from the Guardians in exchange for a player to be named later or cash. A few hours later, Detroit sent minor league pitchers Josh Randall and R.J. Sales to Washington for Kyle Finnegan and added Codi Heuer from Texas for minor league depth. Finally, the Dodgers are bringing Brock Stewart back from Minnesota, with James Outman going in the other direction.

Let’s take those in order. Read the rest of this entry »

The Phillies have spent the first four months of the season battling the Mets for the top spot in the NL East despite getting almost no positive production from their outfield. All three positions landed on my annual Replacement-Level Killers lists, and at this writing, their outfielders’ net WAR of 0.6 is the third-lowest total in the majors, ahead of only the Guardians and Royals. Ahead of Thursday’s trade deadline, Philadelphia took a step to address that problem by trading two prospects to the Twins in exchange for Harrison Bader.

This could be more than just a typical two-month rental. Bader is making $6.25 million this season and has a $10 million mutual option with a $1.5 million buyout for 2026. The prospects heading to Minnesota are Hendry Mendez, a lefty-swinging 21-year-old outfielder from the Dominican Republic who’s spent this season at Double-A Reading, and Geremy Villoria, a 16-year-old righty from Venezuela who’s been pitching in the Dominican Summer League. Neither of them cracked the Phillies Top 30 Prospects list in late January, but things have changed in the past six months.

This is the third season out of four in which Bader has changed teams midseason. He was dealt from the Cardinals to the Yankees in exchange for Jordan Montgomery on August 2, 2022, and selected off waivers from the Yankees by the Reds on August 31, 2023; he spent all of last season with the Mets. Perhaps not coincidentally, he’s in the midst of his best season since 2021, when he hit for a 108 wRC+ with 16 home runs, nine stolen bases, and amassed 2.9 WAR in just 103 games (401 plate appearances) with the Cardinals. Read the rest of this entry »