Outfielder/Reliever Swap Omnibus: Rays, Cards, Giants, and Tigers Make Deals

Two of my favorite hobbies are getting incredibly interested in minor moves made by the Tampa Bay Rays and overrating Dylan Carlson. Boy, is today right up my alley, then: the Cardinals traded Carlson to the Rays in exchange for reliever Shawn Armstrong. Another of my favorite hobbies: teams buying and selling at the same time. The Giants got in on that by acquiring Mark Canha from the Tigers in exchange for Eric Silva. Three things I love at once? Let’s dive into the details and see what’s going on in this strange pair of trades.

It’s easy to identify the sides in the first trade. The Rays are continuing to pry apart their roster piece by piece, while the Cardinals are consolidating for a playoff push. Armstrong is a depth arm and occasional opener who can give you multiple innings at once. He’s recorded four or more outs in a game 11 times already this year, hardly your average single-inning reliever. Some of those outings have been inefficient – he has a 5.40 ERA and opponents are absolutely tattooing him when they put the ball in play. But he’s been a perfectly capable reliever for the last three years, and as we all know, single-season ERA/FIP gaps are hardly predictive.

In other words, Armstrong is going to slot into a playoff bullpen in a way that most relievers do: He’ll get some outs, but he’ll give you some heartburn while he’s at it. He throws a bizarre pitch mix – basically an even split between four-seamers, sinkers, and cutters, with a tiny pinch of a sweeping slider for seasoning. When he’s on, he disrupts hitters’ timing by delivering pitches that diverge by just a bit from their initially identical tunnels. If they’re all thrown with the same initial trajectory, his sinker ends up an average of 10.6 inches down and arm-side of his four-seamer, and 10.8 inches arm-side of his cutter. Meanwhile, his cutter ends up 9.8 inches down and glove-side of his four-seamer. In other words, it’s a fastball triangle, and you never know which vertex you should swing at.

That sounds bizarre. It is bizarre. This is not a normal pitch mix for an effective reliever. Armstrong’s outings are full of awkward swings and just-missed-it contact. He’s a great fit for the Cardinals, who play in a cavernous stadium with plenty of elite defenders to corral the mishits. He’s also going to surrender some home runs that make you say, “I could pitch better than that.” In other words, he’s a middle reliever.

Armstrong is a nice combination of inning filler and mid-leverage option for a St. Louis team that’s been dipping into minor league depth all year to fill relief innings. Chris Roycroft has nasty stuff and Kyle Leahy’s slider is no joke, but they’re probably stretched as key bullpen members. Armstrong will take a bit of pressure off of those guys, and make the team more resistant to injury by allowing Andre Pallante to float between the rotation and the bullpen based on need. This is something of a luxury pickup to me – I don’t think he’s one of their best three relievers – but despite their best efforts to get more length out of the rotation, the Cardinals will need to lean heavily on their bullpen down the stretch, so they decided to fortify it now, even while there wasn’t an obvious need.

The cost would have sounded ridiculous a few years ago. Carlson was a consensus Top 100 prospect who put up a solid season at age 22, then backed it up with another good year curtailed by injury. Then he turned to clay. Over 393 plate appearances since the start of 2023, he’s hitting .212/.303/.300 and playing poor outfield defense. The Cardinals have had outfield injury issues all year, so they’ve given Carlson every chance to succeed. It just hasn’t worked out.

Carlson does fit one Rays archetype: He’s a great platoon player. He swings harder and squares the ball up more frequently when hitting righty, and he’s done far better against lefty pitching in his career. That role wasn’t available on the Cardinals, who have been chock full of good righty hitters in recent years and just acquired Tommy Pham, but the Rays have some platoon options available right away.

Carlson is headed into his second year of arbitration next year, though I imagine he won’t command much of a raise, if any, given his rough season. That gives Tampa Bay about a year to figure out what they have in him. He still shows flashes of the potential that helped him tear through the minors. He plays a solid outfield. He has a solid approach and, until this year, made contact at an above-average rate. A change of scenery might do him good; clearly, things just weren’t working out in St. Louis.

All in all, that makes this trade pretty easy to parse, even though I was ready to dive deep into the weeds to figure it out. The Cardinals didn’t need a short-side platoon outfielder who wasn’t performing, and they did need a reliever who can handle bulk. The Rays would rather experiment with a platoon outfielder than get nothing for Armstrong. Sometimes it’s just as easy as that.

The Giants, on the other hand, are giving off all kinds of confusing signals, and this trade is another strange one. The rumor mill had been alight with talk of Blake Snell leaving town. The team sent out offseason acquisition Jorge Soler and the rehabbing Alex Cobb. They looked for all the world like they were in the process of retooling. Then they turned around and acquired Bay Area favorite Mark Canha in exchange for minor league reliever Eric Silva.

I’m not sure whether calling Canha the Shawn Armstrong of hitters is mean to Canha, mean to Armstrong, or just accurate. He’s a solid professional hitter headed into the twilight of his career. A brutal June – .186/.287/.221 with no homers – has made his decline feel steep indeed, but he bounced back with a typically Canhaian July, and projection systems like him to deliver his normal offense – 10% or so above average, heavy on the OBP – the rest of the way.

Canha makes a lot more sense to me in San Francisco with Soler out of the picture. The team is light on righty bats – they’re platooning both Derek Hill and Casey Schmitt right now, and they’re counting on Marco Luciano to come up from Triple-A and handle DH duties even then. Wilmer Flores and Thairo Estrada have dealt with injuries all year. The Giants have struggled offensively this season, and they traded away a top-of-the-lineup hitter while dealing with a rash of injuries. They needed to do something if they wanted to field reasonable lineups, and I think that adding Canha mostly accomplishes that. At the very least, he’s going to slot into some combination of the Flores and Austin Slater roles, and his defensive versatility and ability to hit same-handed pitching in a pinch means Bob Melvin can use him creatively.

I’m trying to think of all the possibilities here because the shape of the roster leaves plenty of options. The truth is, though, the Giants are mainly getting Canha because he’s a solid hitter and many of the players getting pressed into service in San Francisco this year just aren’t. We only project him for half a win above replacement the rest of the year, but we’re projecting the guys he’ll take at-bats from for zero. The roster is dangerously thin and platoon-y, and Canha should help to relieve at least a little bit of that pressure.

As for Detroit, the decision to trade Canha feels straightforward. They’ve fallen out of the playoff race, but they didn’t want to trade Tarik Skubal (rightfully so, in my opinion). That means the only thing left to do is send out players on expiring contracts and get whatever you can for them. Canha fits that bill, and he was never going to command a huge haul, so they took what they could and moved on.

Silva is an interesting prospect, though his value is capped thanks to a switch to the bullpen last year. He needed it; a high-effort delivery means he can touch the upper 90s despite a diminutive frame, but he struggled with strike throwing in A-ball. He’s a full-time reliever in Double-A this year, and while his walk rates still aren’t pretty, he’s striking out 30% of opponents to make up for it. He has good secondary stuff and is still only 21. He might be a whiff-reliant multi-inning reliever in the majors; he was logging two-inning stints fairly often for the Giants. He’s somewhere on the 35+/40 FV borderline.

In the end, there’s nothing that wild about either of these trades. Sure, the Cardinals are selling low on a former top prospect. Sure, the Giants are adding after subtracting earlier in the week, but they’re doing it because their previous transactions created a clear need. The Tigers and Rays? They’re just stacking up a little bit of value where they can. I think that I’d make both of these trades from either side of the table.