With a 51-51 record and 2.1% playoff odds entering Friday, the Cardinals didn’t have much reason to approach the trade deadline in aggressive fashion, but they did busy themselves with incremental upgrades of their rotation. In a move that Ben Clemens broke down here, they traded righty John Gant and lefty prospect Evan Sisk to the Twins for lefty J.A. Happ, and in a separate move, they got in on the Nationals’ fire sale by adding southpaw Jon Lester in exchange for center fielder Lane Thomas.

It would be an understatement to say that the 37-year-old Lester ain’t what he used to be. After pitching to a 5.16 ERA, 5.14 FIP, and 5.85 xERA — the last of which was the majors’ worst among qualifiers — in the final season of his six-year, $155 million deal with the Cubs in 2020, the team quite understandably turned down its end of a $25 million mutual option and sent him on his merry way with a $10 million buyout, all of it deferred. He signed a one-year, $5 million deal with the Nationals, but before he could make his regular season debut, he missed time during spring training to undergo a parathyroidectomy and then tested positive for COVID-19 amid the Nationals’ first outbreak of the season. He finally took the mound for the Nats on April 30, and over the course of 16 starts, posted a 5.02 ERA, 5.41 FIP, and 4.90 xERA in 75.1 innings.

The indicators, as you’d imagine, aren’t good. Via Statcast, Lester’s fastball velocity has dropped from an average of 89.4 mph last year to 89.0 this year. Of the 113 pitchers with at least 70 innings as starters, his 14.9% strikeout rate and 6.4% strikeout-walk differential are the fourth-lowest and his 5.41 FIP the sixth-highest. This may not be the end of the line for the five-time All-Star with a pair of World Series rings, but we can probably see it from here. Read the rest of this entry »

The San Diego Padres made big moves in the offseason in an attempt to chase down the Dodgers. They traded Luis Patiño, Blake Hunt, Cole Wilcox and Francisco Mejía to acquire 2018 AL Cy Young award winner Blake Snell from the Tampa Bay Rays. Less than 24 hours later, they traded Zach Davies, Reginald Preciado, Owen Caissie, Ismael Mena, and Yeison Santana to the Cubs for 2020 NL Cy Young runner-up Yu Darvish and his personal catcher Victor Caratini. They turned Hudson Head, David Bednar, Omar Cruz, Drake Fellows into Joe Musgrove in a three-way trade with the Mets and Pirates. Earlier this week they kicked off trade deadline season trading Tucupita Marcano, Jack Suwinski and Michell Miliano to the Pirates for All-Star second baseman Adam Frazier. That flurry of deals alone has seen the Padres part with their second, seventh, eighth, 13th, 15th, 21st, 26th, 28th and 52nd ranked prospects, and send their 2020 second and third round draft picks to other teams for major-league ready talent.

When laid out like that, it seems less surprising that the Padres were outgunned when it came to the deadline’s blockbusters, like the “super-ultra-mega-juggernaut deal” that sent Max Scherzer and Trea Turner from the Nationals to the Dodgers. But the Padres were not done dealing just because they missed out on the starter they craved. With three minutes before the deadline, they made a smaller move, adding center fielder Jake Marisnick from the Cubs. Anderson Espinoza, a 40+ FV prospect who slots in at No. 29 in the Cubs’ system, is headed back to Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »

The Phillies’ team defense, specifically their infield defense, has been bad. As a team they’ve allowed a .302 BABIP, which is sixth-highest in baseball, and while that’s not a catch-all metric for team defense, it is a fair shorthand. They are also in the bottom third of baseball in most advanced defensive metrics on the site and second to last in Defensive Runs Saved. The scouty, visual evaluation of their infielders reinforces this. Didi Gregorius will still make the occasional slick play, but he’s lost a step-and-a-half due to age, and so has Jean Segura. Rhys Hoskins and Alec Bohm have never been good defenders; they should probably be playing at DH and first base, respectively.

Freddy Galvis, who debuted as a Phillie, can’t change all of that on his own, but he will bring his leather wizardry back to Citizens Bank Park and help in this specific area. He has been the platonic ideal of a 45 FV player throughout his career: a flawed hitter with a one-note offensive skillset (in his case, empty power) who can play the heck out of shortstop or second base. His trademark pirouette and ability to make strong, accurate throws from his knees have led to a long highlight reel of defensive plays spanning nearly a decade in the big leagues. He and José Iglesias were both briefly part of the same middle infield in relative obscurity with the 2019 Reds, comprising what I believe is the best defensive middle infield tandem of this century.

The 31-year-old Galvis is currently out with a quad injury, but before being sidelined, he was producing on par with his career norms, which is to say he remains swing-happy, is going to run an OBP close to .300, and will smack a few doubles and homers here and there. It makes sense for him to spell Gregorious and Segura once in a while, especially when Zack Wheeler (50.4% ground ball rate) or the newly acquired Kyle Gibson (50.8%) start.

In exchange for Galvis, the Phillies sent Tyler Burch to the Orioles. A 23-year-old undrafted free agent from Lewis-Clark State, Burch was leading the org in swinging-strike rate at the time of the trade, whiffing 49 hitters in 30 innings (mostly at Low-A) at the time of the trade, though all of that has come in relief. Twenty-three-year-old relievers in A-ball aren’t exciting if you look at them like that, but Burch has real arm strength (93–96 mph, up three ticks from 2019) and a plus breaking ball, and he’s performing at a superlative level on paper. And because of when he signed (2019), there’s still time for him to be seasoned in the minors without occupying a 40-man roster spot.

The Phillies have a habit of trading pitching prospects away (I count eight in the last year) while struggling to maintain competitive pitching depth at the big league level. Netting Galvis fills a small need, one Philadelphia has also tried to address several times in the last year (remember Kyle Holder?). But Burch is the sort of piece recent Phillies clubs have been missing: a young, homegrown reliever who at the very least projects to provide depth and resiliency to injury without forcing the team to turn to reclamation projects or cost them real assets to acquire.

Phillies fans will, and should, be stoked to see Galvis back in the uniform. News of this deal made me feel like someone who quit smoking years ago catching a whiff of an early-morning cigarette on the walk to work. But they also gave up the pitcher missing bats at the highest rate in the org for a glove-first bench infielder who has been freely available on the open market several times in the last few years. It’s logical, but short-sighted.

The Mets remained on the sidelines during the frenzy of deals that went down on Thursday and early Friday, but they finally made a big move about an hour before the 4 pm ET trade deadline. In a deal with the Cubs, they acquired infielder Javier Báez, righty Trevor Williams, and cash considerations in exchange for center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong, the team’s first-round pick in the 2020 amateur draft.

The move addresses a pair of particularly acute needs for the Mets, who placed shortstop Francisco Lindor and ace Jacob deGrom on the Injured List on back-to-back days just after the All-Star break. Lindor left the team’s first game of the second half with a strained oblique, and is now two weeks into a three-to-five-week recovery period, having just returned to baseball activities as of Friday. Báez, a pending free agent, can handle shortstop duties until he gets back, then slide over to second base to form a double play combination that will be must-see TV.

Meanwhile, after deGrom skipped the All-Star Game, he landed on the IL due to a bout of forearm tightness, further exposing the team’s already-depleted rotation. In the 10 games the Mets have played since he went down, they’ve started a pitcher who left his outing and landed on the 60-day IL with a hamstring strain (Robert Stock), a reliever who was the first of six pitchers in an all-bullpen doubleheader game (Aaron Loup), and a starter who was designated for assignment for the second and third times this season the day after getting pummeled (Jerad Eickhoff). A couple hours after the deadline, MLB.com’s Anthony DiComo reported that deGrom is dealing with additional inflammation and is being shut down from throwing for two weeks, with a September return now the best-case scenario. Williams is no deGrom, but he can provide some back-end stability over the next month, and he has a year of club control remaining.

The 28-year-old Báez has rebounded from a dreadful 2020 campaign, during which he hit for just a 57 wRC+ and netted zero WAR; he was vocal about the loss of in-game video to help him make adjustments. His .248/.292/.484 line this year isn’t overly impressive, but he’s shaken off a dreadful June (.157/.231/.373) with a red-hot July (.324/.355/.535), lifting his wRC+ back to 105. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last few days, the Yankees addressed their surprisingly punchless and right-handed heavy lineup by adding Joey Gallo and Anthony Rizzo. In the waning minutes before the trade deadline, they struck a deal with the Angels to bring in another southpaw: left-handed pitcher Andrew Heaney. In exchange, New York will send a pair of pitching prospects to Los Angeles: Janson Junk and Elvis Peguero.

Heaney is playing out the last year of team control before he hits free agency this offseason. Over the last four years, he’s posted a strikeout-to-walk ratio a touch under four, the 26th best mark among the 100 qualified starters during that period. Unfortunately, he’s struggled with a gigantic home run problem that has led to some ugly ERAs that far outpace his peripherals.

This year, all those strengths and weaknesses are in full effect. He’s posting fantastic strikeout (28.2%) and walk (7.7%) rates but he’s allowed 16 home runs in 94 innings. Because his batted ball profile skews so heavily towards elevated contact, his home-run-per-fly-ball rate is around league average, but his HR/9 is the 15th highest among all starters with a similar number of innings pitched. That doesn’t bode well for a move to Yankee Stadium, which has boosted home run totals by 7% over the last four years.

Heaney’s pitch repertoire is rather odd. His four-seam fastball was classified as a sinker for much of his career because it moves horizontally like a sinker does but it doesn’t have the telltale vertical movement. He gets that horizontal action on his heater because he throws from an extremely low arm angle. With an odd release point and an uncommon movement profile, his fastball has been a whiff-generating machine. Opposing batters swing and miss nearly 30% of the time against his heater. Read the rest of this entry »

Some moves are made for getting a team to the playoffs or helping them win a fight for the division. But with the largest lead of any first-place team in baseball in a division where all the other teams are either treading water or selling, the White Sox could basically stick their roster on cruise control and maybe casually stop off and grab a sandwich. But even with the advantage that is the AL Central, they did make a trade on Friday, and it’s about one very specific thing: brutally destroying any hopes or dreams of late-inning comebacks for any playoff opponent who is behind in the late innings. By acquiring closer Craig Kimbrel from the Cubs for second baseman Nick Madrigal and pitcher Codi Heuer, they’ve done just that; pairing him with Liam Hendriks and the rest of what’s already a good bullpen is as frightening as any slasher-movie antagonist.

Kimbrel is having his best season in a long time, with a microscopic 0.72 ERA, 1.08 FIP, and 64 strikeouts in 36 2/3 innings to go with his lowest walk rate since 2017. Given his poor first two seasons with the Cubs that were full of both command issues and injury setbacks, some may worry about a possible pumpkinification for the 33-year-old righty. I’m not. ZiPS and the other projection systems all saw quite a bit to like even in Kimbrel’s pedigree, enough to consider him at least an adequate reliever coming into 2021. And there’s little whiff of a fluke in this season’s stats; with a rebounding first-strike rate and batters having their least effective contact year ever, ZiPS thinks that his strikeout and walk rates are right in line with how well he’s actually pitched.

Kimbrel is succeeding the way he did in the old days: a blazing fastball and a knuckle-curve located where batters both have trouble keeping the bat on their shoulders and actually hitting it. Unlike a nasty slider where the goal is to make the batter look foolish on a pitch that is a zip code away, Kimbrel’s knuckle-curve needs to be a borderline pitch. When he can’t spot it, it’s ineffective, as it was in 2019 and ’20. This year, he’s got the heat map of olden days.

Does adding Kimbrel give the White Sox the best bullpen in baseball? ZiPS thinks so, and when our depth charts are fully updated, I suspect they’ll show up at the top there as well. That could be the case next season, too, as Kimbrel is not a pure rental for the White Sox unless they want it to be. With a $16 million option and a $1 million buyout for 2022, it’s basically a one-year, $15 million decision. The White Sox certainly have the ability to pay that should they end up happy with this signing.

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The Braves have added an entire outfield in one deadline day. They swung two deals earlier on Friday, one with Cleveland and one with Miami, helping them set up a left-field platoon of Eddie Rosario and Adam Duvall. But they made an even bigger splash just prior to the buzzer with a one-for-one deal with the Royals, acquiring Jorge Soler from Kansas City in exchange for righty Kasey Kalich.

Soler is a huge name on paper, but he’s in the midst of a major down year. He’s pretty much your typical big-power, swing-and-miss outfielder, but a deflated BABIP at just .229 and a below-career-norm ISO at .179 have contributed to an uncharacteristically low .192/.288/.370 triple slash, good for a 81 wRC+. He’s still slugged 13 homers, but the lack of production at the plate — in combination with poor defense in right field and half of his starts coming at designated hitter — has yielded an ugly overall output. Soler has been worth -1.0 WAR, the fourth-lowest mark among all position players.

Still, there’s plenty of reason to think that Soler’s 2021 is something of an anomaly. He’s hitting the ball hard — his average exit velocity and hard-hit rates are both in the 91st percentile — and he’s still hitting the ball in the air, with a 17.3 degree average launch angle and just a 39.7% ground ball rate, a touch below his career averages. Perhaps he is hitting too many popups though, as the percentage of batted balls he’s “under” has risen to his highest level since 2017, before his breakout. Perhaps that is still a bit nit-picky for someone who has seemingly just been dealt a lot of poor luck; Soler’s expected wOBA is still roughly in line with his 2020 figure, and the disparity between his expected and actual wOBAs is the fifth-largest in the game. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a bit of wiggle room to the definition of “contender” in the NL East. That is what drove the Phillies to buy on trade deadline day, with a particular focus on shoring up some of the pitching depth issues that have plagued them throughout the season.

They made two moves on Friday, one small and one big, netting them a total of three pitchers. They swung the big trade in the afternoon, acquiring Kyle Gibson, Ian Kennedy, and minor league lefty Hans Crouse from the Rangers in exchange for Spencer Howard and two prospects: righties Kevin Gowdy and Josh Gessner. They also received $4 million from Texas. This move came after one made earlier in the day that saw them acquire minor league lefty Braeden Ogle from the Pirates in exchange for minor league catcher Abrahan Gutierrez.

The moves were certainly motivated by the relatively soft competition in the division as well as a weak rest-of-season schedule that could allow the Phillies to make some late noise. Philadelphia is 51-51 at present, but they’re just 3.5 games behind the Mets for first place in the East, and the .476 win percentage for their remaining strength of schedule ranks as the second-weakest in baseball (just behind the Reds). Their ability to hang around, coupled with the Mets’ injury issues, provided the front office a blueprint to the postseason with odds that might be a bit rosier than their record would suggest. Into games on Friday, our Playoff Odds give the Phillies a 20.3% chance of punching a ticket to October baseball, something they have not done since 2011. They have the second-longest active playoff drought in the majors. Read the rest of this entry »

The NL West has been a slugging match all year. The Giants have the best record in baseball. The Dodgers are hot on their heels and just added two All-Stars to go for the division title, with the Padres in hot pursuit. San Francisco wasn’t going to take that lying down, though. As Jeff Passan first reported, the team has acquired Kris Bryant from the Cubs in exchange for two prospects, Alexander Canario and Caleb Kilian.

Bryant has been a hotly rumored deadline chip for seemingly forever; as soon as the Cubs hit a rough patch in the standings, they announced their intentions to sell off pieces that weren’t controllable past 2021, with him, Anthony Rizzo, and Javier Báez the obvious candidates for a move. All three have now been dealt to contenders, and for my money, Bryant is the best player of the three. He’ll slot into San Francisco’s roster all over the place, one of the perks of trading for him; he plays all four corner spots capably and has even started 10 games in center as the Cubs dealt with injury and ineptitude in the outfield. He’s not going to win a Gold Glove out there anytime soon — and the less said about his two innings at shortstop, the better — but if you’re looking to squeeze Bryant’s bat into the lineup, there are any number of possibilities.

That bat is the reason San Francisco made this trade. Rumors of Bryant’s demise were greatly exaggerated; he had an absolutely abysmal 2020, playing in only 34 games and compiling easily the worst line of his career, but he’s been back to his old tricks in 2021. That game is power and walks, and it’s worked to the tune of a .267/.358/.503 slash line, an on-base-light approximation of his career line.
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