Like a Bird on the Wire: Orioles Get Robert for Free
It’s easy to forget that the trade deadline isn’t actually the last chance for teams to reload before the postseason. Players can join a team through waivers as late as August 31 — Monday, for those of you who, like me, have trouble keeping track of the calendar — and still be eligible for the playoffs.
It’s common practice for teams to put expensive vets on the wire to see if anyone will bite and take the contract off their hands. The Angels famously flooded the waiver wire in 2023, as their last-ditch effort to load up for a playoff run with Shohei Ohtani left backfired in a matter of days. This year, the biggest name on the move was Luis Robert Jr., who’s bound for Baltimore.
In 2022, Robert peaked at no. 8 on the leaguewide trade value ranking, and stayed in the top 30 until 2024. By the end of August 2026, the Orioles were able to get him off waivers for nothing.
Well, “nothing” isn’t quite accurate. Robert’s seven-year, $68 million contract once represented a cheap deal for an early-20s star under long-term team control. La Pantera is now 29, three seasons removed from his last 2-WAR campaign, and into the most expensive guaranteed year of his contract.
The last month of that deal is worth a hair under $3 million, and Baltimore is now on the hook for either Robert’s $20 million team option for 2027 (don’t laugh) or a $2 million buyout. Plus, the Orioles have to pay to get him from Queens to the Inner Harbor, which is not cheap. Almost that entire drive is toll roads — two bridges, the Fort McHenry Tunnel, almost the entire length of the New Jersey Turnpike, and the stagecoach stickup job that is the Delaware Turnpike. That drive will cost about $50 these days in tolls alone.
The Mets are not only over the CBT threshold for the third straight year, they’ve also gone over the marker for the top tax bracket. Long story short, they’re paying a 110% tax on Robert’s salary, so by offloading their center fielder to Baltimore, they’re saving about $6.1 million before the buyout even enters the picture. That pays for a lot of trips up and down the Jersey Turnpike.
Not that anyone cares about the Mets’ finances; they have an offensively wealthy owner who lubricates his machines with buckets of lucre every year. By contrast, $5 million is a non-trivial amount of cash for the Orioles.
The O’s team that won 101 games in 2023 had a payroll of just $66 million. The purse strings have loosened up after control of the team passed from Kendall and Roman Angelos to David Rubenstein. Three free agents from this past offseason — Pete Alonso, Ryan Helsley, and Chris Bassitt — cost $53.5 million against the tax this year on their own. The Orioles have also extended Samuel Basallo, Kyle Bradish, Shane Baz, and Yennier Cano.
All told, Baltimore’s payroll is $162.8 million this year, including what’s owed to Robert. That’s nowhere near even the first luxury tax marker, but middle-third payroll teams don’t throw money around willy-nilly. What makes Robert worth the risk?
For starters, right-handed outfield help is hard to come by. Don’t believe me? Ask the Orioles themselves: They traded Grayson Rodriguez for one season of 32-year-old Taylor Ward last offseason.
Even at his nadir, Robert can play center field and provide some pop — Ward leads the AL in walks, but he hasn’t done either of those things. After hitting 36 home runs last year, Ward homered just seven times in 111 games for the Orioles before the deadline, which probably has something to do with why he’s a Seattle Mariner now. (To say nothing of the fact that the O’s are 14-11, which is white hot by the standards of the AL Wild Card race, since they traded Ward.)
The Orioles are in decent shape when it comes to left-handed outfield production, thanks to former first-rounders Dylan Beavers and Colton Cowser. But with the right-handed Tyler O’Neill, as ever, battling injury (a shoulder strain this time), this Baltimore outfield has far too much Leody Taveras for my comfort. An outfield with Beavers in a corner and one of Cowser or Robert in center, with the other in right, looks far more potent than what the O’s were working with before.
I mentioned Robert’s nadir a moment ago; to be clear, this isn’t it. He left Chicago just before the White Sox discovered the genie who turned Miguel Vargas into an All-Star and ensured that Munetaka Murakami would be Joey Gallo (complimentary) rather than Joey Gallo (derogatory). Pity Robert didn’t get a hit of any of that magic.
Nevertheless, Robert is running a career-high 10.6% walk rate and his best strikeout rate (24.3%), ISO (.176), and wRC+ (96) since at least 2023. After hitting 28 home runs in 210 combined games across 2024 and 2025, Robert has 10 dingers in just 58 games this year.
That 58-game total, it should be said, isn’t the result of platooning in the Mets’ loaded outfield. Robert has been hurt this year; he missed three months with a herniated disc in his back. (Millennial-and-older SportsCenter viewers may know this injury as Steve Levy Syndrome.)
Since his return, Robert’s average bat speed is 77.8 mph, which is seventh best among the 444 hitters with at least 100 swings in that time frame. He’s swinging harder than Jac Caglianone, Kyle Schwarber, and Nick Kurtz. Put another way, Robert is swinging harder than he has at any point since we got bat tracking data from Statcast, which includes his 5-WAR 2023 season.
Eight of Robert’s 10 home runs have come in the 34 games since his return. His batting average, power, and strikeout numbers leave much to be desired, but he’s slugging .454 since his back healed, despite a BABIP of just .242. That’ll do just fine for a waiver wire pickup.
This is obviously not the first time the Orioles have taken a flier on a muscular-but-down-on-his-luck former White Sox outfielder. There was the Eloy Jiménez trade of 2024, which didn’t work out great for Baltimore. (Though it arguably worked out better than the Albert Belle signing did.)
Impressed as I am with Robert’s bat speed since his return from injury, we are still looking at a player who hasn’t been healthy or good for a whole year since 2023. Even if his bat is kinda-sorta back, he isn’t stealing bases or defending as well as he did in his youth. There is a reason why he was available for free.
But this waiver claim gives the Orioles another credible option at a position of need. More than that, it’s opportunistic. Teams that want to survive in the highly Darwinistic AL East need to be opportunistic, especially if they aim to win without running a top-10 payroll. It’s good to see that the Orioles, who sold heavily at the deadline, are trying to stay in the fight.
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.
Ah yes, I remember the panic when Lucas Giolito and Randal Grichuk were going to completely upend the playoff picture.
I’m not sure how that backfired. What was their alternative? Zyhir Hope and 2 River Ryan’s?
It was mostly embarrassing. The Angels decided to go all in and it failed spectacularly, and then they gave up in an attempt to duck below the luxury tax. I do seem to recall it worked, but it seemed so unprofessional. I remember thinking “I hope they had already decided they weren’t resigning Ohtani after this, because who wants to be affiliated with these jokers?”
I was just bemused by all the people who convinced themselves that the availability of several decent-to-mediocre players on the waiver wire was a huge blow to competitive integrity, would make or break the acquiring teams’ stretch runs, etc. All that fuss over literally Matt Moore…
I’ll never forget The Onion headline…
“Shohei Ohtani Regrets Not Researching Which Teams Were Good Before Signing With Angels”
Still gets me to chuckle a decade-ish later.
They were supposedly the only one that wanted him to pitch and hit. NL had no DH then.
I don’t really know why no one would allow that. Seems like a low downside move.
He also only looked at west coast teams. It was either them or the Mariners iirc
Its funny how he had “no” value at the deadline with I assume the Mets offering to pay down some significant amount.
Anyway, I dont think this is a terrible deal to give you more flexibility for the offseason. Bader frequently got 1/20 and 1/10 deals, albeit hurt less/more productive, but without the potential upside. So, I think Robert would get 1/10ish or so too.
being picked up on waivers is basically no value
Of course, these are all nuances of “no” value. But it’s interesting, (I assume) the Orioles went from “we will not give a player even if you pick up his salary” to “yes, we will pick up his remaining salary” in the span of a few weeks.
The Orioles have also doubled their playoff odds since the trade deadline, so it makes sense that they’re more interested in adding a player now than they were then.
$5m is what the Orioles are paying. That’s a little value.
There was a rumor going around that they weren’t willing to pay down significant money in deals. I don’t know how correct that is, but it did seem really weird that they held on to him because then they would be responsible for the buyout. I guess that is irrelevant now.
It wasn’t a rumor. Stearns said the Mets wouldn’t pay down salary this deadline in an interview.
Stearns said in an interview that the Mets wouldn’t pay down any salaries in trades this year.
Roberts having an OPS north of 800 in the month of August while Baltimore is a bubble WC team is what changed the calculus.
Man, I was a pretty big fan of the Mets getting Robert Jr. this past offseason. I saw the cost as pretty low for a potentially very high reward if Robert Jr. could stay relatively healthy and regain his All-Star form. But Robert Jr. has been neither particularly healthy nor particularly effective this year.
It ultimately doesn’t even look like too bad a move even with this outcome, because the young guys traded to the White Sox haven’t done much and the Mets were able to get off some of the money owed to Robert here. But still, this is a depressing capper on what has been a dismal NYM season.
Yeah. It was actually a basically fine move on both ends for the Mets — the salary dumpee becoming the salary dumper — but it’s still emblematic of this season, as one of a dozen or so gambles that crapped out at the same time.
I remember thinking there was basically no downside to the deal, that if he was hurt the whole year it was still fine because they didn’t give up anything. And that is sort of what happened.
His WAR/600 is still around 3.5. He just has never been healthy. He has had 2 seasons where he played in 90% of the games and you need to round up a little to get him to meet that bar. One of those was 2020 and IIRC he wasn’t fully healthy at the end of that year either, just not bad enough to go on the IL.
If he’s not been healthy for 3 full seasons and still played enough to register 1000 PAs, it seems unlikely that he’ll ever be “fully healthy” again. Either he’s going to be banged up in perpetuity or this is just who he is now.
The crazy thing about this is that you could have written the exact line “he is never going to be healthy” after the 2022 season. I might have even done so.
But then he went out in 2023 and was mostly healthy, and the White Sox decided that rather than sell high on their star center fielder that they weren’t going to seriously consider trading him. I was convinced holding him was a mistake at the time because he had pitcher level injury risk and I didn’t think he was going to be healthy enough to contribute to the next good White Sox team. But even I don’t think I quite understood how quickly the injuries were going to sap his physical gifts.
This is a pretty nice move for the O’s, even if Robert is a non-factor. You’re taking a shot on a guy who clearly has talent for $2m + one month of salary + waiver fee, and you get the option to keep him for next year (if he’s actually, you know, good) for $18m without even having to give the Mets a warm body.
For the Mets, Robert was clearly surplus to requirements now, and they certainly weren’t going to pick up that option. Might as well save the few million, I guess?
Yeah there is basically no reason for the Orioles not to do this.
Exactly. I think they are serious about 2027 and want to kick the tires
Joey Gallo will never be a pejorative when used in any sentence of mine, thank you very much.
I am absolutely thrilled about this. I wanted the Orioles to trade for Robert over the winter and his recent performance has been very encouraging.
He’s a very good buy-low candidate when the only cost is money. Orioles have basically nothing to lose and everything to gain here.
He’s now their most talented OF. He has to play as often as he can health wise. Taveras becomes a lefty bat and 4th OF.
And Leonard Cohen.
Robert Money for Nothing?
Robert Money for Nothing?
Watch him his something like .260/.330/.540 in September and either get his option picked up or some poor team still offering him 1/20. This I foretell.
Forget the inner harbor. They got him all the way to Denver. So he could sit on the bench? The Orioles, after their loss last night, are toast. They are 1 1/2 back of the Guardians, tied with the Rangers, a game ahead of Toronto and only two ahead of the Twins! After today’s game at Coors, they play contenders the rest of the way, with six against the Yankees, four against the BoSox, three each against the Brewers and Guardians. The other six are against Toronto and if the Os are contenders so are the Jays, who play 12 of their remaining games against teams with no playoff hopes (not including the Os). Earlier this month the Os gave up. They traded Rutschman, Ward, Kremer and Wells (all but Ward under team control next season). A couple of good weeks from Robert and a slightly better than .500 record over a month caused them to do an about face and shell out over $5 million for a month of Robert for a longshot chance of making the third wild card? Rubenstein would have been equally well of throwing $5 million out a window. If he really wants to improve the team by spending money he should promptly eat the rest of Elias’ contract.