Rays Add Griffin Jax and Adrian Houser, Twins Attempt To Fix Taj Bradley

I was starting to get worried that Griffin Jax was going to be left behind in the Twins’ wholesale liquidation of their bullpen. Fear not; the hardest thrower in the Air Force Reserve is headed out after all. The Rays currently sit two games under .500 and 3 1/2 games out of a Wild Card spot, with a 9.9% chance of making the playoffs. That long-shot contender status did not dampen their enthusiasm for Jax in the slightest. Tampa Bay sent the talented but inconsistent starter Taj Bradley to Minnesota in exchange for Jax, who is under team control through 2027.

The Rays also sent infielder Curtis Mead and prospects Duncan Davitt and Ben Peoples to the White Sox in exchange for Adrian Houser, who will presumably take the rotation spot Bradley vacated.

Balls in play are scary; a seeing-eye grounder or a bad hop might turn a sure out into a big inning. The only way to be sure to avoid these outcomes is to strike batters out. Jax does this as well as anyone: His 36.4% strikeout rate is seventh among qualified relievers. He’s also seventh in whiff rate and third in chase rate. The only pitcher who moved at the deadline and is ahead of Jax in any of those categories is Mason Miller.

Jax accomplishes all this by throwing hard (his four-seamer averages 97.0 mph and his sinker 96.6), but he doesn’t throw the ball by hitters. His fastballs are only his third- and fourth-most common pitches. Instead, he throws his sweeper almost half the time and his changeup (which, at an average velo of 92.3 mph, why bother calling it that?) as much as his four-seamer and sinker combined.

Jax’s sweeper and changeup move in opposite horizontal directions, and while standard procedure calls for breaking balls to same-handed hitters and changeups to opposite-handed ones, Jax throws both to everyone. Sometimes on consecutive pitches.

Here’s an 0-1 sweeper to Joshua Palacios for a called strike at the bottom of the zone.

Statcast says it caught the zone, though the onscreen K-Zone and Palacios both disagree. No matter; Palacios has seen it, so the next time he sees a pitch coming into that spot at that velocity, he knows it’s a sweeper and he can do something with it.

Or not.

The Rays love power bullpen arms; even before they added Jax, they had the hardest average fastball velocity of any relief corps in the American League. But plenty of other teams at least checked in on Jax, either by himself or in concert with one of the 50 other players the Twins traded this week. You see why.

The return for Minnesota is even more interesting than Jax himself. Bradley isn’t some kid in complex ball who’s years out from the draft. He’s only 24, but he has 13 more career major league starts than Garrett Crochet, and only one fewer than Spencer Strider. He’s basically a veteran.

I love Bradley’s stuff; his average four-seamer comes in at 96.1 mph, one-tenth above Zack Wheeler’s. He’s got a pretty low-80s slow curve with some of the best vertical movement in the league, and a hard splitter he uses almost as a combination secondary fastball and changeup.

But he’s been maddeningly inconsistent. Here, I’ll give you Bradley’s last three starts: Six innings, two hits, one run, five strikeouts at Fenway Park on July 10, then six scoreless innings with six strikeouts against the Orioles on July 18; Bradley’s most recent start came against the lowly White Sox, and he gave up four runs in 1 2/3 innings, with four hits, three walks, a wild pitch, and zero strikeouts. The Rays sent him to Triple-A shortly thereafter.

This year, Bradley’s splitter has picked up 300 RPM of spin, his curveball his lost almost three inches of IVB, his strikeout rate has dropped from 26.6% to 20.2%, and his opponent chase rate has dropped from the 70th percentile to the 30th.

But there’s so much underlying ability there — to say nothing of durability, since he’s made at least 20 starts in all three of his major league seasons despite getting yo-yo’d by the Rays — Bradley is begging to be fixed. I think I can fix him, and I’m just some guy, and Bradley already throws a cutter.

The Twins have been known to get one over on the Rays when trading talented starting pitchers — ask them how they got Joe Ryan — and if they can un-screw-up Bradley, they’ll have a sidekick for Ryan under team control through 2029.

The Rays might’ve just rage-demoted Bradley last week, but after they traded Zack Littell this week as well, they did need a fifth starter. The next man up otherwise was Connor Seabold.

That necessitated the trade for Houser, who was previously wrecking house for the aforementioned White Sox: 6-2 with a 2.10 ERA in 11 starts.

I love Houser. He’s hurt all the time; in parts of nine major league seasons he’s never qualified for the ERA title. He doesn’t strike anyone out, and despite that he issues a lot of walks. Out of 137 pitchers with 500 or more inning since 2018, Houser is in the bottom 10 for K-BB%. The guys around him are Wade Miley, Chase Anderson, Zach Davies, and Antonio Senzatela.

There are two kinds of 32-year-old sinkerballers who don’t strike anyone out: Good ones and bad ones. Good ones pitch for the Brewers and Rays, and bad ones pitch for the Rockies. Houser spent the first seven seasons of his big league career in Milwaukee, and is now on his way to St. Petersburg. And every couple years, Houser rips off a season of 20 or so starts with an ERA in the low 3.00s. He’ll fit right in.

Obviously, there are a few things about Houser’s peripherals that point to imminent FIP-based collapse. But he’s throwing harder than he ever has, and he does have one durable skill through good times and bad: He keeps the ball in the yard. That’s important for the Rays, who found out this year that Steinbrenner Field plays like it’s on the Moon.

Houser will be useful, and the price for him is not steep. Mead, one of just 12 Australian-born position players in major league history, is one step beyond being a post-hype sleeper. He came to Tampa Bay from the Phillies in an under-the-radar 2019 trade that sent Cristopher Sánchez to Philadelphia. This innocuous swap of minor prospects became noteworthy first when Mead popped all the way to 27th on the 2023 Preseason Top 100, and later when he un-popped and Sánchez grew into a front-of-rotation starter.

Never rush to judge a trade, he says, having spent all day judging trades day-of.

After 111 big league games over three season, Mead has moved down the defensive spectrum while at the same time not growing into enough power to play, say, first base regularly. He’s a career .238/.307/.322 hitter who can play every infield position except shortstop, but he’s made more starts at first base than anywhere else this season. Just as Houser was born to play for the Rays, Mead, who is Gavin Sheets by way of Brett Lawrie, was born to play for the White Sox.

Davitt is a fringy future swingman; his pedestrian fastball velocity (91.5 mph average since his promotion to Triple-A Durham) has forced him to lean on his two breaking pitches more since his promotion. He’ll probably have a big league career of some length because he throws a ton of strikes (his overall BB/9 this season is under 2.00 in 19 starts), but there’s probably not a future as much more than a depth arm.

Peoples has a little more upside; he transitioned to the bullpen full-time this year, and has an athletic, whippy delivery that allows him to sit mid-90s and touch 99 when he’s really feeling it. Even at age 24, in Triple-A, there’s room for improvement on the breaking ball. He’s probably a middle reliever, with a chance to be effective in a higher-leverage role if his breaking ball and command improve.

Given Houser’s performance so far this year, it feels like the White Sox could’ve gotten more for him, perhaps by asking for one better player rather than three from nearer the bottom of the pile. Still, this is a 32-year-old the White Sox signed in May for a pro-rated $1.35 million, and they got three guys who will probably play in the majors, one of whom could be a decent middle reliever. That’s a good return on investment if you zoom out.