Marlins Add Andrew Cashner, Colin Rea for Stretch Run

One need only glance at the Marlins’ projected starters over the next few days to determine where the team could use an upgrade. Jose Urena, a hard-throwing right-hander whose stuff hasn’t translated to strikeouts out of the bullpen or in the rotation, will pitch tonight’s game. Tomorrow, Jarred Cosart is scheduled to pitch — and he has a 15% strikeout rate and 11% walk rate over his career. The Marlins apparently didn’t like the look of that situation going forward, especially if Jose Fernandez’s innings need to be managed and/or if Wei-Yin Chen is unable to return from the disabled list soon.

So, they’ve conducted a trade, which reportedly includes the following pieces (arranged in approximate order of name-recognition):

The Marlins get:

• Andrew Cashner
• Colin Rea
• Tayron Guerrero

The Padres get:

• Jarred Cosart
• Carter Capps
• Josh Naylor
• Luis Castillo

As for the Marlins, they receive an immediate boost from adding Cashner to the rotation. While his season numbers (which include a 4.76 ERA and 4.94 FIP) look pretty ugly, Cashner seemed to have boosted his trade value over the last few weeks. As August Fagerstrom noted recently, he’s been much better since coming off the disabled list:

Cashner’s picked up a half-tick on his average fastball. Pre-disabled list, 15% of his fastballs went 96 or harder. These last four starts, he’s reached that upper-tier of velocity on 21% of fastballs. The walks are down from a bit over 9% to a bit under 6%. The strikeouts are way up, from 15% to 28%, because Cashner is missing plenty more bats. He’s missing more bats inside the zone, perhaps due in part to the added life on the heater, and he’s missing more bats outside the zone, and that’s because of the slider. The slider is really what this is all about.

Cashner’s slider has been more effective of late, and if he can maintain his current run, he should be able to hit his roughly league-average projections and represent an improvement over where the team stands right now. If the playoffs started today, the Marlins would be in, playing in a one-game playoff with the Cardinals for the right to play the Dodgers in another one-game playoff to qualify for the divisional series.

However, the projections see the Cardinals as the better team going forward. They actually see the same for the Mets, who are a game and a half behind the Marlins and Cardinals. The chart below shows the playoff odds before the trade for the teams that look to be in the hunt for the second wild card. The Marlins are in orange, essentially in a dead heat with the Mets and behind the Cardinals.

The assumptions above included Wei-Yin Chen coming back with reasonable health. Following the trade, and making the reasonable assumption that Chen’s innings will be limited the rest of the way, we put Cashner and Rea in the rotation. Here are the updated playoff odds. (Interactive version here.)

Looks pretty much the same, right? Halving Chen’s innings, giving all of them to Cashner, plus allocating some more innings from the bottom of the barrel to Cashner does little to actually change the Marlins’ playoff odds. If Chen were to come back and meet expectations, the odds would increase some. In reality, though, it seems that the Marlins needed this move — not to move them forward in the race, but to have a reasonable shot of remaining in it.

Pinning your hopes on Andrew Cashner isn’t really a great idea, but the Marlins don’t have a lot in their farm system, and getting a guy with some relative upside was likely their best bet. Colin Rea is cost-controlled, older than most prospects, and won’t move the needle for the team’s chances this year, but he can provide potentially much-needed innings for the team and, as Dan Farnsworth noted before the season, he does have a bit of upside as a back-end starter.

He’s no super young, hard-throwing hurler who will buckle knees and light up radar guns, but he has advanced pitchability and command of at least his best three pitches. Give him another year and he could be a late-blooming mid-rotation starter with even more upside. He has a clean delivery and great arm action, so despite pushing 26 years old, Rea could end up being the best pitching prospect coming out of the Padres’ system over the next couple years.

The Marlins’ other piece, Tayron Guerrero, is more of a lottery ticket as a potential reliever. He’s massive with a big fastball, but has yet to consistently get batters out or throw in the strike zone.

As for the Padres, they continue selling, and the major piece here is Naylor, the 12th-overall pick in the 2015 draft. Naylor made the very end of Baseball America’s top-100 list at mid-season, and Chris Mitchell’s KATOH system agreed with that assessment, ranking him 80th overall. The lefty has shown decent contact, power and speed at Low-A this year, but has a ways to go to become an impact player. The 19-year-old joins a group of young players the Padres have acquired recently following trades of Drew Pomeranz and Melvin Upton Jr. — and, as with those, the main piece here is a teenager. Along with their incredible haul during the current international signing period, the Padres have transformed their system almost overnight.

The Padres also acquired Jarred Cosart, who has yet to distinguish himself against major leaguers after 57 starts. He’s heading to his fourth organization and would have been arbitration-eligible after this season, but his time in the minors this year leaves that in some doubt. He is still just 26 years old, the same age as Rea, but should not be considered a major part of this deal. Luis Castillo, a 23-year-old right-handed starter, is having a fantastic year in High-A, with a 2.25 ERA and a 2.33 FIP, having given up just two home runs in 100 innings. Carter Capps is out for the year and will be headed for his second year of arbitration after the season. His unusual hop-motion confounded hitters in 2015 — leading to 58 strikeouts of just 118 batters faced — and he could be a decent reliever at some point next year, although that’s more of a long-term play, perhaps as another trade asset for the Padres next season.

While the Marlins are definitely in the wild-card hunt, they face a tough task ahead of them with multiple competitive teams. This trade keeps them in that race, though it doesn’t do much to separate themselves from the rest of the contenders. They gave up a player with a decent future but still a long ways to go before he reaches his potential. The Padres continue to stockpile young players in the hopes of building a contender down the line.