Frankie Montas needed to be set free. When the A’s began their selloff in earnest this offsesaon, he looked like a lock to end up elsewhere. Sean Manaea and Chris Bassitt, fellow rotation stalwarts, were gone. Matt Chapman and Matt Olson were shipped out. Montas (along with Sean Murphy and Ramón Laureano) seemed likely to be next, but then the season started, and there he was, still atop the Oakland rotation.

He’s done everything Oakland could possibly ask of him this season, to the tune of a 3.18 ERA in 19 starts. Meanwhile, the A’s have the second-worst record in baseball, ahead of only the woeful Nationals. Montas will reach free agency after the 2023 season, another year in which the A’s will likely be far from the playoff conversation. He had a brief injury scare, missing two turns with shoulder inflammation, but he’s returned to the field and made two starts without incident. One way or another, the A’s were going to move him.

The Yankees, for their part, stormed to the best record in baseball but would still like starting pitching help. Gerrit Cole is great and Nestor Cortes has been a revelation this year, but the group of pitchers behind them has been uneven. Jordan Montgomery started strong, but he’s been homer-prone of late. Jameson Taillon is steady but a step below Montas results-wise, and will be a free agent after this year. Luis Severino just hit the 60-day IL, pushing a potential return even deeper into September. The aggregate results have been solid, but you can see why the team wants more certainty given the difficulty of cleanly upgrading their lineup. Read the rest of this entry »

The Astros shook up their first base situation on Monday, acquiring 1B/DH Trey Mancini from the Orioles as part of a three-way trade that also included the Rays. Mancini, the longest-tenured player on Baltimore’s roster, was having a solid, if not spectacular, season, hitting .268/.347/.404 with 10 homers and 1.2 WAR in 92 games, with most of his playing time this season split between first base and designated hitter and an occasional appearance in a corner outfield role. He’ll be a free agent at the end of the season, though there is a $10 million mutual option. To land Mancini, the Astros sent outfielder Jose Siri to the Rays and pitcher Chayce McDermott to the O’s, with Tampa shipping pitcher Seth Johnson to Baltimore and Jayden Murray to Houston.

To look at this trade more easily, let’s separate it into three different transactions.

The Baltimore Orioles acquire pitchers Seth Johnson and Chayce McDermott for 1B/DH Trey Mancini

From a PR standpoint, there will likely be some sharp elbows thrown at the Orioles locally. Baltimore is having its first even marginally playoff-relevant season in a long while, and Mancini has been with the team through the entire process. As its veteran rebuild survivor, he played a similar role that Freddie Freeman did for the Braves while they went through their own painful renovations. His battle with colon cancer, diagnosed on his 28th birthday, and subsequent grand return after surgery and six months of chemotherapy only served to make him more beloved in town.

Basically, the on-field case for keeping Mancini and letting him walk at the end of the season involved a very “now” outlook for the team. It does make the Orioles a bit weaker over the next two months, but it’s only a major loss if you look at the consequences in a very binary fashion, in that Baltimore is in the wild card race with Mancini and out of it without him. Once you move past that, the calculus for whether a trade like this is a good idea comes out very differently. Read the rest of this entry »

With their outfield (and whole roster, really) hit hard by injuries, the Rays acquired 34-year-old left fielder David Peralta from the Diamondbacks for 19-year-old catching prospect Christian Cerda on Sunday. The Freight Train is hitting .248/.315/.457, good for a 109 wRC+, which is in line with his career norm (111 wRC+), even though the shape of his production has totally changed.

Before we get into how that came to be, though, let’s take a moment to appreciate Peralta’s remarkable path here. Originally a left-handed pitcher in the Cardinals organization, he was released amid shoulder issues and played outfield in Independent ball for a couple of years before signing with the Diamondbacks in 2013. It’s borderline offensive to cram that stretch of Peralta’s career into one sentence. Indy ball isn’t exactly glamorous, and Peralta was broke and worked at McDonalds while waiting for the Diamondbacks, who he knew wanted to sign him, to free up the minor league roster space to do so. After he finally signed, it took only about a year for him to reach the big leagues, and Peralta has had one hell of a now nine-year MLB career, during which he’s been one of the better left field defenders in baseball (and has one Gold Glove), won a Silver Slugger during his peak year in 2018 (.293/.352/.516 with 30 bombs), led the league in triples twice, and endured wrist and shoulder surgeries while becoming a cult hero in Arizona. From a baseball role standpoint, the Rays are getting a platoon stick (.268/.325/.496 versus righties this year) and plus defender in a corner spot, but Peralta also brings the parts of himself that helped him grind through injury and Indy ball. Read the rest of this entry »

While still focusing upon teams that meet the loose definition of contenders (a .500 record or Playoff Odds of at least 10%), this year I have incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because the team’s performance at that spot is worth a look.

At the other positions in this series, I have used about 0.6 WAR or less thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — as my cutoff, making exceptions here and there, but for the designated hitters, I’ve lowered that to 0.3, both to keep the list length manageable and to account for the general spread of value; in the first full season of the universal DH, exactly half the teams in the majors have actually gotten 0.1 WAR or less from their DHs thus far, and only 10 have gotten more than 0.6. DHs as a group have hit .239/.317/.404 for a 104 wRC+; that last figure matches what they did as a group both last year and in 2019, and it’s boosted by the best performance by NL DHs (103 wRC+) since 2009, when their 117 wRC+ accounted for a grand total of 525 PA, about 32 per NL team.

Read the rest of this entry »

The trade deadline is nearly upon us, and there are plenty of teams still vying for playoff position in both the AL and NL. It’s been a slow hot stove season so far, but there should be plenty of action over the next two days as teams try to position themselves for the stretch run.

A reminder for how these rankings are calculated: first, we take the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), and their starting rotation and bullpen (a 50/50 blend of FIP- and RA9-, weighted by IP share) — and combine them to create an overall team quality metric. New for this year, I’ve opted to include defense as a component, though it’s weighted less heavily than offense and pitching. Some element of team defense is captured by RA9-, but now that FanGraphs has Statcast’s OAA/RAA available on our leaderboards, I’ve chosen to include that as the defensive component for each team. I also add in a factor for “luck,” adjusting a team’s win percentage based on expected win-loss record. The result is a power ranking, which is then presented in tiers below.

The Yankees stumbled out of the All-Star break a bit, getting swept in a pair of two-game series against the Astros and Mets. They took care of business against the Orioles and Royals and continue to hold a commanding lead in the AL East, but they did slip behind the Dodgers for the overall best record in baseball and hold a slim two-game lead over the Astros for the top seed in the American League. They got an early start on their deadline shopping by trading for Andrew Benintendi to stabilize their outfield. They’ll almost certainly be in the market for pitching help, too, especially after Michael King was lost for the season with a fractured elbow. And as for your weekly Aaron Judge check-in: he’s blasted nine home runs since the All-Star break, no big deal.

The Dodgers emphatically started off the second half with a four-game sweep of the Giants two weekends ago. Those two teams match up for four more games in San Francisco to start this week, with a series against the Padres immediately afterwards. Neither division rival is anywhere close to challenging for the NL West, but a solid week against these two teams should all but wrap up the division for Los Angeles in the first week of August.

This week in “you can’t predict baseball,” the Astros sandwiched a pair of series wins against the Mariners between a three-game sweep at the hands of the A’s. Interestingly, they’re reportedly open to moving one of their starters prior to the deadline; they’re currently running a six-man rotation, Lance McCullers Jr. is close to returning from his elbow injury he suffered last year during the postseason, and they have a number of pitching prospects currently throwing well at Triple-A. It’s an enviable situation to be in, and one that is rare given how high pitcher attrition rates are in the modern era. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve ever played the game 2048, you know the deep satisfaction of sliding things around and making everything look cleaner. Two 2’s become a 4, two 4’s become an 8, and pretty soon you’ve slid your way into a gratifying relaxation. What does that have to do with baseball? The Phillies made a 2048-style trade this weekend, and I can’t wait to tell you about it.

The baseball version of that slide-and-combine game is all about defense. If you acquire a defensive wizard at shortstop, you can slide your existing shortstop to third, your third baseman to first, your first baseman to DH – you get the idea. You can do the same in the outfield. Add a Gold Glove center fielder, and your average center fielder becomes a great right fielder. Your solid right fielder can take over for the guy in left field you’d rather have DH. Adding one defender and sliding can turn a blah defense into a good one. Deeply satisfying, just like 2048.

The Phillies and their porous defense would seem like a perfect candidate for such satisfying sliding, but before the season, they couldn’t actually do it. There were some pesky pieces blocking their natural ability to slide down the defensive spectrum. With essentially three DHs – Kyle Schwarber, Rhys Hoskins, and Nick Castellanos – and only two landing spots between them, the “slide someone to DH” part of the equation wouldn’t work. When Bryce Harper injured his elbow, he couldn’t play the field, which further jammed up the works. Read the rest of this entry »

Bryan Shaw will reach two milestones the next time he takes the mound. The 34-year-old Guardians reliever has made 499 regular-season appearances in a Cleveland uniform, and he’s thrown 999-and-two-thirds professional innings. Neither should come as a surprise. Shaw has never been a star, but he’s always been a workhorse. Moreover, he’s a Terry Francona favorite.

“He’s like a lineman,” the Guardians manager said of Shaw. “When they allow a sack, everybody notices. When [Shaw] gives up runs, people want to bury him. But he saves our ass, time and time again. He pitches when other guys can’t… He’s been a trouper for a long time.”

Now in his 12th big-league season, and in his second stint with Cleveland, Shaw has led the American League in appearances in four different seasons, each time with his current club. The right-hander has appeared in 733 games overall — he’s also pitched for the Diamondbacks, Rockies, and Mariners — which ranks fifth-most among active pitchers.

He knows where he stands among his peers. Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday, the Dodgers acquired steady 36-year-old reliever Chris Martin from the Cubs in exchange for utilityman Zach McKinstry, who has spent most of the season at Triple-A Oklahoma City.

This is Martin’s seventh major league organization (Red Sox, Rockies, Yankees, Rangers, Braves, Cubs, Dodgers), but his journey has been even more winding and complex than that. Martin was a draft-and-follow by the Rockies in 2005 but blew out his shoulder during his sophomore year at McLennan Junior College in Texas and needed labrum surgery, so he went unsigned. He was again passed over in the 2006 draft and spent parts of four years in Independent Ball before signing with the Red Sox. He was traded to the Rockies as the secondary piece in a deal for Jonathan Herrera (Franklin Morales was the headline prospect), and then was traded to the Yankees for cash not long after that. He threw 20 innings for the Yankees before spending two seasons in Japan with Hokkaido. There, Martin learned a splitter from a then 21-year-old Shohei Ohtani before returning to MLB with Texas. He was a Braves deadline acquisition in 2019, and was with Atlanta in ’20 and ’21 before signing with the Cubs this past winter. Read the rest of this entry »

Late Friday night, the Mariners and the Reds consummated the first blockbuster trade of the deadline period, with changeup artist Luis Castillo on his way to the Pacific Northwest for a considerable haul of young players headlined by No. 11 overall prospect Noelvi Marte. In exchange for about a year and a half of Castillo, the Reds netted a combination of upside (Marte, 18-year-old Low-A shortstop Edwin Arroyo, and burgeoning reliever Andrew Moore) and stability (likely 2023 rotation contributor Levi Stoudt).

The 20-year-old Marte, a potential All-Star shortstop and a 60 FV prospect, is hitting .275/.363/.462 at High-A Everett and has actually performed better than that more recently, slashing .301/.379/.549 since the beginning of June; he hit 15 homers and 19 doubles in 85 games prior to the trade. Marte has his doubters, or at least people in the industry who would take the under on my personal evaluation of him. There are scouts and clubs who were discouraged by his early-season conditioning; others are skeptical of his hit tool. Most commonly, though, there are scouts who think he won’t stay at shortstop. This is in part due to the way his physique looked early this season (it wasn’t bad, but was close to maxed-out), and also because Marte has had issues with errors, mostly of the throwing variety; he has accumulated 24 total errors already in 2022. Read the rest of this entry »