Cleveland Takes a Risk that Could Be Highway Cobbery
The Cleveland Guardians continued their busy deadline period Tuesday afternoon with the acquisition of veteran right-hander Alex Cobb. Pitching prospect Jacob Bresnahan and a player to be named later are heading west to San Francisco in return.
The Guardians, having already traded for Lane Thomas the night before, picked up a veteran rental to bolster a rotation that, in the absence of Shane Bieber, would’ve undermined the entire enterprise once Cleveland hit the playoffs.
Let’s start with the source of the need. It’s a little disconcerting that a team with such a good bullpen — the Guardians could lose all-world closer Emmanuel Clase and still probably have one of the top relief corps in the league — has a rotation that’s struggled so much. Here’s how each Cleveland pitching unit compares to the rest of the league in various key categories:
Unit | IP | ERA- | FIP- | K% | K-BB% | WPA | WAR |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Rotation | 26th | 25th | 27th | 15th | 18th | 26th | 29th |
Bullpen | 10th | 1st | 1st | 2nd | 1st | 1st | 1st |
Yes, the bullpen takes on outsize importance in the postseason, and yes, the Guardians have four guys with an ERA under 2.00 who can pick up the last four innings of a playoff game. But getting there was going to be tricky. Tanner Bibee and Ben Lively have been good this year, but you know the old saying: Bibee, Lively, pray for… poison ivy? We’ll work on that.
Triston McKenzie and Logan Allen have both been demoted after posting ERAs over 5.00. Carlos Carrasco, now 37 years old, also has an ERA in that range but remains in the rotation because, well, somebody’s got to eat those innings. Gavin Williams, the Guardians’ 2021 first-round pick, had an impressive rookie season, with a 3.29 ERA in 16 starts, but missed the first half of the 2024 with elbow soreness. Things have gone OK since his return at the start of July; Williams’ ERA is 4.50 in five starts, but if you take out a nightmarish season debut, it’s down to 3.15.
Even in an optimistic scenario, where the inexperienced and walk-prone Williams and the soft-tossing Lively pitch their best in October (I have no similar easy criticism to throw at Bibee, so let’s assume he’ll be fine), the Guardians would still have the weaker rotation in a series against any other American League playoff team. Oh and by the way, none of Lively, Bibee, or Williams has ever thrown a pitch in a major league postseason game.
Cobb has, though it’s been a minute — he made two starts in the playoffs for the 2013 Rays. Two current major league GMs, Sam Fuld and Craig Breslow, played in Cobb’s last postseason start. (Technically, one GM and one Chief Baseball Officer. We love title inflation here in baseball.) Cobb also played alongside his new manager, Stephen Vogt, during Vogt’s rookie year with Tampa Bay.
So Cobb is old. And he’s missed the first half of the season while recovering from surgery to correct a hip impingement. But he’s close to returning — Cobb has already made a handful of rehab starts, the last of which was curtailed when a blister on his right index finger exploded. (Gross.) Once that heals up, Cobb should be ready to join Cleveland’s rotation.
The last time we saw Cobb pitch, he was quite good. Since 2020, he has a 3.85 ERA with a 3.48 FIP and a 57.6% groundball rate. You know all this about Cobb by now — he’s the splitter guy. He throws a bowling ball up there and gets a ton of grounders.
Despite his long list of injuries, he was relatively durable during his first two seasons in San Francisco, making 28 starts in each of the past two seasons. This is the last year of Cobb’s contract, and given his age and injury history, this could be his last season anywhere. Having joined the Guardians, the rare first-place team with dire need of assistance in the rotation, he seems like a mortal lock to end the year with a postseason start.
So what of the Giants? They’re not as out of it as a team that’s under .500 at the deadline should be (17.8% odds to make the playoffs as of this writing), but they’re still under .500 at the deadline. Appropriately enough, San Francisco is treading water, dumping Jorge Soler’s contract but declining to pay down Blake Snell’s deal enough to facilitate a trade.
I think there’s an argument to be made for keeping Cobb, remote as the Giants’ postseason odds are. But with him and Robbie Ray both returning to action after long absences, there would be a bit of a logjam in the rotation if the Giants decided to promote one of their high-minors arms for the remainder of the season.
It takes some maneuvering to get anything at the deadline for a 36-year-old who hasn’t thrown a competitive pitch so far this year. But the Giants didn’t get much. Bresnahan was an over-slot signee out of high school last year, which usually portends a lot of talent. But the over-slot deal was for $375,000 and Bresnahan was picked in the 13th round of the draft. He’s a 6-foot-4-inch left-hander with low-90s velocity on a fastball with vertical movement, plus a promising slider and changeup. There isn’t much more physical projection on his frame, so that might be it in terms of velocity, but you never know.
Trading for, again, a 36-year-old who’ll make his season debut sometime in August, is a risk. Especially for a team that needs another trustworthy playoff starter as badly as Cleveland does. But if Cobb is anything like the pitcher he was last year, the Guardians might’ve pulled off a steal here. The price of pitching on this trade market is extortionate, even for rentals. And unless the player to be named later ends up being the biggest name in the deal, Cleveland has picked up a quality starter for next to nothing.
Unless the blister doesn’t heal, or his hip acts up again, or it turns out Cobb has lost his fastball. (It’s always fun to use that ubiquitous idiom in its original context.) That’s a real risk, but a fair one given how little Cleveland is giving up. Besides: nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Michael is a writer at FanGraphs. Previously, he was a staff writer at The Ringer and D1Baseball, and his work has appeared at Grantland, Baseball Prospectus, The Atlantic, ESPN.com, and various ill-remembered Phillies blogs. Follow him on Twitter, if you must, @MichaelBaumann.
Between the Cobb and Edman trades I’m having a hard time understanding Strider and McClanahan being left off the trade value series.