Until a few hours ago, the Cubs had been relying on the grace of Kyle Ryan as their sole bullpen left-hander. Lo, that is no longer the case: Per reports from Jon Heyman, the Cubs have acquired Andrew Chafin from the Diamondbacks for a PTBNL or cash considerations, and Josh Osich from the Red Sox for a PTBNL.

Chafin has been a consistently useful pitcher over the course of his career, accruing 4.0 WAR over six seasons prior to this one. Though he sports an ugly 8.10 ERA in 2020, his more reasonable 3.88 FIP suggests that there has been some amount of bad luck affecting him over his very small sample of work — he has, after all, only thrown 6 2/3 innings so far this season. Though he’s walked more batters than is usual for him, his 30.3% strikeout rate is consistent with his career numbers. The same is true of the velocities on his three pitches. And aside from a disastrous appearance on July 29, when he failed to record an out and allowed three runs on a homer and a double, Chafin really hasn’t been all that bad.

Chafin has been on the Injured List since August 19 with a left finger sprain. According to Heyman, the D-backs will pay Chafin’s salary down to the minimum, hoping for a “low-level prospect” to come back to Arizona should Chafin make a quick return from his injury, which is clearly what the Cubs expect. When Chafin does come back, he should certainly be an improvement over Ryan. Read the rest of this entry »

Robbie Ray had often been mentioned in hot stove rumors. As the Diamondbacks have toed the line between buying and selling, adding and subtracting, Ray was someone whose name you’d hear in connection to possible trades to contending teams looking for rotation help. He always stayed put though, even as his service clock ticked away and his electric arm never quite broke out the way he or his team hoped.

With just hours to spare before Monday’s trade deadline, Ray was finally traded. The Toronto Blue Jays made him the second starting pitcher they’d acquired in as many days, sending Travis Bergen to Arizona to complete the deal. To put it mildly, the circumstances of Ray’s exit from the Diamondbacks are not what the team hoped for. Though it was always unlikely Arizona would challenge the Dodgers for the division, they had still hoped to contend for a wild card spot. Instead, they entered Monday holding a record of 14-21, last place in the NL West. Ray, meanwhile, no longer offers multiple years of team control, as he’s set to enter free agency after this season. Even if he were pitching like a top-of-the-rotation arm, the days of him netting an impact prospect are over.

Alas, Ray is not pitching like a top-of-the-rotation arm. Over seven starts this season, he has thrown 31 innings and allowed 27 runs (7.84 ERA), has struck out 43, and has walked an MLB-leading 31 batters. Ray has never been what you would call a control wizard. Out of 146 pitchers who have thrown at least 500 innings since he debuted in 2014, only two have walked a greater percentage of hitters than Ray (10.9%). He’d always been able to make that work, however, because he’s struck out the seventh-highest percentage of hitters (28.7%) in that span. That exorbitant strikeout rate has been steady, too — if his current rate holds, this would be his fourth-straight season striking out at least 12 batters per nine innings. Read the rest of this entry »

Early this morning, the Padres and Indians officially consummated a much-rumored deal surrounding starter Mike Clevinger, one significant enough to demand multiple pieces of analysis, the prospect-centric slice of which I’ll serve you here. The broad strokes analysis of Cleveland’s prospect package is that in addition to the big league pieces they received, they added 20-year-old shortstop Gabriel Arias, yet another candidate to be the club’s long-term shortstop in the event that Francisco Lindor is either traded or leaves in free agency, and two other prospects, Joey Cantillo and Owen Miller, who fit archetypes that the org has often targeted and developed well.

He doesn’t have the highest ceiling of the group (Arias does), but I think Joey Cantillo is the best prospect in the trade. He entered 2020 coming off a breakout 2019 during which, at age 19, he struck out 144 hitters in 111 combined innings at Low-A Fort Wayne and Hi-A Lake Elsinore. It was a meteoric rise for a teenager who was less than two years removed from being a 16th round pick ($300,000 signing bonus) out of a high school in Hawaii, and Cantillo’s strikeout totals were especially confounding because he doesn’t throw all that hard, only living in the 87-90 range, touching 92. How does he do it? This piece has some specifics about how a fastball with below-average velocity can still miss bats in the strike zone. Cantillo also has an impact changeup. From his scouting report on The Board, where you can already see how the new Indians prospects rank in the system:

Not only does it have bat-missing movement but Cantillo’s arm speed really sells hitters on the notion that they’re getting a fastball; A-ball bats flailed at it in 2019. The carry on his fastball enables Cantillo to compete for swinging strikes in the zone, and that, plus his ability to throw lots of competitively-located changeups mean he can work back into any count. His breaking ball usage is ahead of its quality, something that might change if Cantillo does start throwing harder and adds power to his curve. The breaking ball and development of velo are now the two variables driving Cantillo’s potential future FV movement, but for now I think he has the tools to go right at hitters and be a No. 4/5 starter.

Read the rest of this entry »

Just over a year ago, Mike Minor was the subject of much debate as far as whether the Rangers — a middling team as the deadline approached — should trade the lefty at or near the peak of his value given that he was pitching well and signed through 2020. Ultimately, the club chose not to move him, finished below .500, and saw his stock drop considerably with a rough start to the abbreviated 2020 season. On Monday, the Rangers did their best to salvage some value by dealing him within the AL West, sending him to the division-leading A’s along with cash considerations for a pair of players to be named later and international slot money.

While the players headed to Texas can’t officially be named since they weren’t part of the A’s 60-man pool, a source told The Athletic’s Levi Weaver that they’re a pair of 2019 draft picks: third-rounder Marcus Smith, a center fielder who was 27th among A’s prospects on THE BOARD, and 11th-rounder Dustin Harris, a third baseman who did not crack the list of 39. More on them below.

Per the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s Jeff Wilson, the Rangers are also sending Oakland half of Minor’s remaining salary (about $1.4 million remaining, prorated from his $9.5 million full-season salary) but are getting back $133,000 worth of international slot money. Interestingly enough, though interest in Lynn was said to be very high, so was their asking price, to the point that they again kept him

As for Minor, the 32-year-old southpaw entered 2020 riding a streak of three strong seasons since returning from a two-year absence from the majors (2015-16) caused by May 2015 surgery to repair a small tear in his labrum. He threw 77.2 innings out of the bullpen for the Royals in 2017, good for 2.2 WAR, then signed a three-year, $28 million deal with the Rangers. Read the rest of this entry »

The San Diego Padres and Cleveland Indians reached a whopper of an agreement on trade deadline day, with Cleveland sending pitcher Mike Clevinger, outfielder Greg Allen, and a player to be named later to the Padres for shortstop Gabriel Arias, catcher Austin Hedges, pitcher Cal Quantrill, first baseman Josh Naylor, pitcher Joey Cantillo, and shortstop Owen Miller. A nine-player trade is a significant deal, and with so many familiar names and a legitimate major league ace in the mix, this is one that will be looked back on for a long time, regardless of how it works out for either side.

The Padres have seen the wisdom of pushing in all of their chips for some time, though not always with the right cards in their hand. Just a few months into A.J. Preller’s stint as the general manager, the team decided to go all-in coming off a 77-85 season, bringing in Matt Kemp, Justin Upton, Wil Myers, James Shields, Derek Norris, and Will Middlebrooks in a two-month period over the 2014-2015 offseason. Problem was, the team wasn’t holding a high pair in that particular card game, and with the team’s talent otherwise generally unimpressive, San Diego actually won fewer games in 2015 than in 2014. Those moves cost them money, time, and players such as Yasmani Grandal, Trea Turner, Max Fried, Joe Ross, and Zach Eflin. That the team later turned a bag of lemons into liquid gold by landing Fernando Tatis Jr. for a struggling James Shields was a nice post-credits vignette for this tale of tragedy and heartbreak, but was hardly a reasonable expectation at the time of these moves.

In 2014, the Padres traded players they needed for players they didn’t.

2020 is a whole different story. This time around, the Padres are indisputably a serious contender, a 21-15 team, one that our projected standings now peg with a 98% chance of making the playoffs. Nor does this kind of performance appear to be any kind of fluke, at least in the eyes of the ZiPS projections. ZiPS saw Wild Card upside for the Padres in 2019 — which didn’t happen — but forecast an even better team in 2020, one it projected with an 87-75 record and a 52% chance of making the playoffs back before the season’s postponement. Read the rest of this entry »

It seems like new Rockies pitcher Mychal Givens has had a robust trade market each of the last two summers, both because he is a good pitcher and because he has multiple years of team control left. The Orioles finally pulled the trigger on a deal for him and scooped up three prospects from the Rockies: Terrin Vavra, Tyler Nevin, and a player to be named later.

Givens has thrown 336 innings across parts of six seasons with the Orioles and has amassed a 3.32 career ERA (he’s sporting a cool 1.38 ERA this year) and struck out just shy of 11 hitters per nine (roughly 33% K%) during that time. His strikeout rate has climbed each of the last two years as Givens increased the usage of his changeup, which had previously been a distant tertiary pitch behind his fastball and a slider.

But Givens still works heavily with that mid-90s fastball (nearly 70% of the time), which averages 94 mph and tops out at 98. In addition to having a great arm, the right-hander has a unique low-slot delivery that lets him attack hitters in the top half of the zone from an odd angle. For how terse and explosive Givens’ delivery is, he has good feel for locating his secondary stuff to each pitch’s appropriate zip code and he adds stability to a Rockies bullpen filled with pitchers who have a history of being rather wild. Read the rest of this entry »

Catcher valuation, like Maria, is a difficult problem to solve. The San Diego Padres took a stab at it on Sunday night, trading for Seattle backstop Austin Nola in a seven-player swap. Jake Mailhot took a look at the calculus behind that decision, which completely revamped San Diego’s catching depth chart while also sending a big-name prospect to Seattle, which Eric Longenhagen covered.

But that wasn’t the entirety of the deal — not by a long-shot. A.J. Preller tacked on a swap of relievers in much the same way you or I might grab a pint of ice cream at the grocery store — “Well, since I’m already here, I might as well get this.” Relievers Austin Adams and Dan Altavilla are headed to San Diego as part of the Nola deal as well.

You’ve probably heard Austin Adams’ name before. It might even be the right Austin Adams — there’s another righty reliever by the same name in the Twins organization. You might not know just how excellent he is though. In a short 32-inning stint in the big leagues last year, he blew the competition away, striking out 40% of his opponents. He also walked 12%, which isn’t great, and had surgery to repair a torn ACL last September, so it’s not like he’s peak Craig Kimbrel without the name recognition. But he’s seriously great.

Adams sports the classic origin story for a good reliever: the Nationals traded him away for pitching help. In 2019 (!), they sent Adams to the Mariners for minor leaguer Nick Wells. Roughly a week later, the Mariners called him up, and after a debut featuring all three true outcomes — three strikeouts, a walk, and a home run in five batters — he rounded into being their best bullpen weapon. Read the rest of this entry »