It’s been awhile since we’ve seen the Royals act like contenders, but given that they entered the morning of the trade deadline with a one-game lead for the third AL Wild Card spot, the behavior is merited. On Monday they added righty starter Michael Lorenzen in a deal with the Rangers, and on Tuesday afternoon they swung deals for A’s reliever Lucas Erceg and White Sox infielder Paul DeJong. None of them are blockbusters, but they all fortify Kansas City’s roster, with the DeJong move a step to address a particularly weak bench.

The Royals acquired the 30-year-old DeJong, who’s making $1.75 million this year and has another $250,000 in bonuses within reach for attaining the 400- and 500-plate appearance thresholds, in exchange for 21-year-old righty Jarold Rosado, a reliever with the Royals’ A-level Columbia affiliate. The trade took place about four hours before the Royals were set to play the White Sox at Guaranteed Rate Field, so DeJong joined his new club — his fourth since the start of the 2023 season — by walking from one dugout to the other.

Paul DeJong has walked over to the other dugout pic.twitter.com/Olm4BoirNH

— James Fegan (@JRFegan) July 30, 2024

Drafted and developed by the Cardinals, DeJong was once considered a foundational player. Coming off a 25-homer 2017 season in which he was the runner-up in the NL Rookie of the Year voting, he signed a six-year, $26 million extension, a record at the time for a player with less than one year of service time. He hit 30 home runs and made the NL All-Star team in 2019, but by May ’22, in the midst of his second consecutive season with a sub-.200 batting average, the Cardinals optioned him to Triple-A Memphis to revamp his swing. His performance rebounded, though not to his 2017–19 level, and so on August 1, 2023, he was traded to the Blue Jays. He went an unfathomable 3-for-44 for the Jays before drawing his release three weeks later, and then just 9-for-49 after being picked up by the Giants. For the season, he hit .207/.258/.355 (66 wRC+). Read the rest of this entry »

Being Mets-y has been an insult for years, a description of a team combining bad execution and bad luck to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It’s the kind of thing that describes poor decisions but also poor circumstances. Kodai Senga spraining his calf in his first game all year and missing the remainder of the season? That’s Mets-y. Trading a huge haul to replace him and then getting nothing from the big name replacement? That’d be Mets-y too, but things have changed in Queens. Instead of splashing out prospects for Yusei Kikuchi or going after a toolsy young arm, as the Orioles did for Trevor Rogers, the Mets are doing the MLB equivalent of shopping at Costco. They acquired Paul Blackburn from the A’s in exchange for Kade Morris, their 17th-best prospect, as Will Sammon reported.

Blackburn is definitely not a name you’d put on a marquee. He’s pitched to a 4.83 ERA and 4.36 FIP in his major league career. You know how Yu Darvish is so fun because he throws seven pitches and they’re all above average? Blackburn is like that – only all of his pitches are below average. He has six different options, but our stuff models think that only his slider and cutter are even decent. He makes up for that lack of raw juice with command and with the willingness to throw any pitch in any count.
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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. Read the rest of this entry »

The Pirates have made three trade in the last two days. Yesterday, they swapped post-hype prospects with the Red Sox — struggling right-handed pitcher Quinn Priester for Triple-A 2B/LF Nick Yorke — and added veteran southpaw Jalen Beeks from the Rockies in exchange for minor league lefty Luis Peralta. Then, earlier today, Pittsburgh acquired 29-year-old lefty Josh Walker from the Mets for DSL pitcher Nicolas Carreno. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a trade article, as the Diamondbacks acquired Josh Bell from the Marlins today in exchange for cash considerations. It’s also an injury article, sadly. Christian Walker departed last night’s D-backs/Nationals game with an oblique injury, and was due for an MRI this morning. The results haven’t been made public yet, but trading for Bell is a statement in and of itself, so let’s walk through the trade and injury in combination.

Walker has quietly been the second-best first baseman in the game over the past three years. I don’t mean that hyperbolically; he’s second only to Freddie Freeman in WAR over that time period. He’s done it with good offense and outrageous, comically good first base defense. I don’t think I’m selling this enough. Per Statcast, Walker has been 38 outs above average over that time period. Carlos Santana is second… with 17. DRS scores it 33-20 in Walker’s favor, with Matt Olson at 21. However you look at it, Walker is head and shoulders above everyone else at the position. Last night, he made a standard-for-him, spectacular-for-most play on a foul ball:

After that inning, he came back to the dugout and departed the game. Now we and the Diamondbacks can only wait to hear the injury news. Read the rest of this entry »

The struggling Atlanta Braves made a deadline move on Monday, acquiring DH/OF Jorge Soler and right-handed reliever Luke Jackson from the San Francisco Giants in exchange for left-handed reliever Tyler Matzek and minor league infielder Sabin Ceballos.

Theodor Reik, an Austrian psychoanalyst, is believed to be the original source of what (with slight modification) has become the saying “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” That’s the case here, as both Soler and Jackson were key contributors on the Braves team that won the World Series in 2021. If we were to set our time machine to travel back a rather unambitious three years in the past, we would see a similar deadline tale. When Soler was acquired by Atlanta back then (from the Royals for minor league reliever Kasey Kalich), the Braves were a struggling team (51-54) that was grappling with the season-ending loss of Ronald Acuña Jr. to a torn ACL. Today, the Braves are a struggling team (56-49, but 37-40 since the end of April) that is grappling with the season-ending loss of Ronald Acuña Jr. to a torn ACL. It would be wrong to say that Soler was the reason the Braves turned their season around in 2021, but his efforts (a .269/.358/.524 line and 14 homers in two months) proved to be a crucial part of that team push. Jackson has had an up-and-down career, but 2021 was his apogee, with a 1.98 ERA and 3.66 FIP for those Braves. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite trading ace Corbin Burnes, losing two members of their planned starting five to Tommy John surgery and then two others to injuries that have cost them more than half a season, the Brewers are riding high atop the NL Central, holding a seven-game lead over the Cardinals and Pirates entering the morning of the trade deadline. They’ve already used a club-record 16 starters this year, including righty Aaron Civale, whom they acquired from the Rays earlier this month. On Monday they added the man who’ll likely be no. 17, righty Frankie Montas, whom they acquired from the Reds in a rare intradivisional swap in exchange for outfielder Joey Wiemer and righty reliever Jakob Junis.

Beyond the fact that Montas was healthy enough for the Brewers to move forward with the deal — his 15-day stint on the injured list earlier this year was for a forearm contusion caused by a line drive — and can take the ball every five or six days, it’s not clear yet what the Brewers see in the 31-year-old righty. His performance has fallen off considerably since he finished sixth in the AL Cy Young voting in 2021 on the strength of a 3.37 ERA, 207 strikeouts, and 4.0 WAR for the A’s. Dealt to the Yankees as part of a six-player trade on August 1, 2022, he pitched poorly down the stretch before being sidelined by shoulder inflammation, and after undergoing arthroscopic shoulder surgery in February 2023, was limited to a 1.1-inning cameo in last season’s penultimate game.

When Montas hit free agency, the Reds took a flier, signing him for a $16 million guarantee in December, with a $14 million salary this year, a $2 million buyout on a $20 million mutual option for 2025, and some small performance and award bonuses tacked on as well. There are no bad one-year deals, it is often said, but this one for Montas — with his 5.01 ERA and 4.91 FIP in 93.1 innings — rates as a disappointment. Play the arbitrary endpoint game, and you can find a pretty decent stretch: From May 29 through July 4, in seven starts totaling 36.1 innings, he posted a 3.72 ERA and 4.20 FIP. But since then, he’s been lit for 16 runs in 16 innings over three starts. Only twice all season has he put together back-to-back quality starts (six or more innings, three or fewer earned runs). Read the rest of this entry »

Randy Arozarena is a Mariner! Tommy Edman is a Dodger! The trade deadline is today at 6 p.m. ET, but plenty of players have already found new homes. To help you keep track of all the activity, I’ve rounded up all of our deadline pieces in one place. You’ll find the broader preview and summary pieces listed first, followed by a team-by-team listing of the transaction breakdowns that involve your favorite squad, either as buyers or sellers. In instances where we dissected a transaction across multiple pieces, you’ll see them grouped together. I’ll update the roundup as deadline analysis goes live today and throughout the week.

As always, all of the pieces linked below are free to read, but they took time and resources to produce. If you enjoy our coverage of the trade deadline and are in a position to do so, we hope you’ll sign up for a FanGraphs Membership. It’s the best way to both support our work and experience the site. Now, on to the roundup! Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been pondering Yusei Kikuchi’s trade deadline fate for months. That sounds overly specific – there are so many players that get traded every year. Why wonder about this one guy? He has a 4.75 ERA this year and a 4.72 mark for his career. He’ll be a free agent at year’s end. Months? Shouldn’t I have been doing something more useful with my time? Probably. But hey, now I’m in a better position to write about this particularly astounding deadline transaction: Last night, the Blue Jays traded Kikuchi to the Astros in exchange for a bountiful crop of young players: Jake Bloss, Joey Loperfido, and Will Wagner.

Kikuchi turns analysts like me into Fox Mulder: We want to believe. We’re talking about a guy with one of the prettiest fastballs in baseball, period. It has great shape. He throws hard, sitting 94-96 mph and topping out around 99. Stuff models love it. PitchingBot thinks it’s the nastiest fastball thrown by a starter, and tied for the overall best (with Sonny Gray’s fastball) after considering location. Stuff+ is skeptical, relatively speaking – it thinks the fastball is the third-best among starters, behind the heaters of Kutter Crawford and Zack Wheeler.

Kikuchi throws a nice slider to complement the fastball, 88-90 mph and with sharp bite for a gyro slider. He rounds out his arsenal with a hard, two-plane curveball and a bizarre slider that seems to float and fade simultaneously. He does it from a funky arm slot and with a deceptive delivery. When Kikuchi is on, he’s capable of torching opposing lineups singlehandedly. His first 10 starts of this season were phenomenal: 2.64 ERA, 2.61 FIP, a 26% strikeout rate, and a minuscule 5.5% walk rate. He’d been steadily improving in Toronto, and this year looked like his breakout.
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Around the time of the Austin Hays trade last week, Chelsea Janes of The Washington Post reported that even though Hays and Lane Thomas were both best suited to a platoon corner role on a contender, the Nationals were determined to sell Thomas only if a suitor were willing to pay a starter’s return for him.

“Good luck,” I thought to myself. Thomas is a good player — a 3.1 WAR guy with 28 homers last year. This season, he’s nearly doubled his walk rate and has 28 stolen bases. That’s the third-most in baseball, more than Corbin Carroll and Byron Buxton put together. Thomas is on his second straight season of a wRC+ bumping up against 110 — this is a good player. But it’s also a guy who’s hitting .224/.299/.364 against right-handed pitching, which is most of the pitchers in the league.

Well, we have not because we ask not. Nats GM Mike Rizzo had a weekend to play with before the deadline, and it only takes one team to meet his price. And I’ll be darned, Big Rizz actually pulled it off. Read the rest of this entry »