Reds Acquire Ke’Bryan Hayes in Divisional Swap

I’m not going to sugarcoat it, it’s been a slow week for deadline trades. The way the haves and have-nots line up this year, impactful additions are few and far between. The teams out of the playoff picture don’t have a lot to give up, and the teams with intriguing rental players are mostly already in the race. But the Pittsburgh Pirates, consistent innovators in ways to do weird things without contending, have entered the fray by trading Ke’Bryan Hayes to the Cincinnati Reds in exchange for Taylor Rogers, minor leaguer Sammy Stafura and cash considerations, as Mark Feinsand first reported.

Hayes is about as far from a deadline rental as you can imagine. He signed a lengthy contract extension in April 2022 and is still on that deal; he’s under team control through as long as 2030, in fact, and for cheap! He’s due an average of $7.5 million annually for the next four years, and the pact’s 2030 club option is for just $12 million with a $6 million buyout. That’s the kind of deal that gets teams salivating: long team control at rates that would barely get you a good middle reliever in free agency.

It gets better! Hayes is one of the best defenders in baseball. Since his 2020 debut, he leads all major leaguers with 73 Outs Above Average. Think that’s a fluke? He leads all major leaguers in Defensive Runs Saved – by 28 runs! The distance between him and second place is the same as the distance between second place and 25th. There are plenty of good third basemen with good defensive numbers. Hayes is head and shoulders ahead of all of them, unquestionably, and he’s lapping the third base field again this year, with 15 OAA (second place is four guys tied with four).

Let’s continue: Hayes had one of the best debuts of the Statcast era. He came up during the COVID-abbreviated 2020 season and hit .376/.442/.682 in 95 plate appearances across 24 games. It’s a caricature of a batting line, of course, but the building blocks were great. He has reasonable bat speed, hits the ball hard, and makes a lot of contact. He strikes out less than league average. He’s a plus baserunner.

Okay, let’s read the return again. That’s very little, considering all the team control so reasonably priced. And let’s read all those things about Hayes as a player again. Well, they all sound great! So what’s the problem? Hayes can’t hit. Oh sure, I quoted you a small-sample line and plenty of secondary statistical markers, but the ball doesn’t lie. Over 2,269 plate appearances since that spectacular debut, Hayes is hitting .249/.302/.356, good for an 80 wRC+. In his last two years, that’s down to .234/.281/.290, with a 58 wRC+. He has six homers – six!! – over around 800 plate appearances in that time. He’s an offensive black hole so dense that his defense is two wins above average over that time frame – and yet his total value is less than a win above replacement.

What do the Reds see in Hayes? Probably the same thing that I’ve seen for years: an irresistible riddle to try to solve. If he could post even a league average batting line, he’d be a star. The only reason he isn’t swimming in Gold Gloves (he has one, from 2023) is that he just doesn’t hit well enough for people to vote for him. And he should be able to be a league average hitter. He’s shown all the skills you need to do it, just never at the same time.

Step one for the Reds is going to be getting him to elevate the ball more. Guys with this level of bat control often unlock this skill eventually, and a good pitch on that front is “Hey, now you get to hit in Cincinnati.” Even this year, Hayes’ average exit velocity is above average. Lift some of that, put it in a bandbox, and heck, 10 homers would be marvelous. His poor batting performance is honestly quite shocking; both xStats and all of our projection systems think he should be meaningfully better than this.

Step two is throwing a ton of hitting philosophies and coaches at Hayes over the winter to see what he likes best. This is a multi-year play; you get Hayes for peanuts for half a decade, so even if it takes him a year to hit his stride, the tradeoff would be a great one. I don’t have a silver bullet that would fix him; I’d probably be getting paid by the Reds to not write it down for this blog if I did. But you can see the point of this bet: If this guy hits even okay — and all the tools say he should — he’ll be elite. Heck, even when he put up a 91 wRC+ from 2021 to 2023, he was worth 3.3 WAR per 600 PA. Where else are you going to get that kind of production for $7.5 million? Want proof that big league teams can acquire defense on the cheap? Here you go.

Of course, teams competing right now don’t generally trade away relievers with 2.45 ERAs. Why the heck is Rogers in this deal? He’s a well-paid rental, the exact opposite of what the Pirates are looking for. It’s weird! But I have a theory of how it went down. Rogers simply wasn’t a key part of the Reds’ bullpen plans. His average entry leverage was 10th on the team; they preferred a ton of other relievers in big spots. Brent Suter is already very good in the funky-lefty role. Sam Moll is back from Triple-A and up to his usual Sam Moll tricks (throwing any pitch in any count, not knowing where the ball is going, etc.). Rogers only made seven appearances in the month of July, totaling 5.1 innings. That’s eighth out of nine Reds relievers, or eighth out of eight if you don’t count a two-inning mop up appearance by catcher Jose Trevino.

Let’s consider him surplus, then. Why did the Pirates want him? My guess is that the Reds proposed Pittsburgh sending over the rest of Hayes’ 2025 salary as part of the deal, but that the Pirates balked at it. That, or there’s some law of universal attraction that requires twins to be traded on the same day.

In the Nutting era, the Pirates haven’t made a habit of spending money unnecessarily – or spending money at all, really. By taking Rogers and his salary back plus receiving offsetting cash considerations, they’re breaking even monetarily for the moment, but I assume they’re going to turn around and trade Rogers again. Surely some lefty-needy contender would happily take Rogers for nothing more than his contract, saving the Pirates the $2.3 million they’d otherwise be paying the Reds to cover Hayes’ salary. (Hey, $2.3 million covers a lot of new bricks.)

Honestly, I bet they’ll get something back for Rogers beyond payroll savings if they move him; he might not look like a world-beater, but there’s no way to slice his statistics where he isn’t at least serviceable. I can’t imagine he’ll appear in a single game for Pittsburgh, and yet he’s surely an attractive part of the bargain – monetary savings plus some chance of prospect return are the two things that the Pirates build themselves around.

Stafura, the other player heading to the Pirates in the deal, isn’t much more than a lottery ticket. Here’s Eric Longenhagen’s latest update on him:

Stafura was ranked 62nd on my 2023 Draft Board and signed for just shy of $2.5 million (a late first round bonus) in the second round rather than go to Clemson. He’s spent the past two seasons at Low-A Daytona, where Stafura has reached base enough to post above-average overall offensive lines. But his strikeouts have been elevated and didn’t improve in his repeat season. Stafura has worked hard to develop big league physicality since turning pro, and he looks the part in the uniform. He’s on time to button middle-middle fastballs and hits a ton of top-spinning liners to his pull side. His pull-heavy approach and crude barrel feel leave him vulnerable to breaking pitches, which he’s chasing at more than a 40% clip in 2025. He’s likely to mature into below-average hit and power tools. Stafura’s shortstop defense is headlined by plus range and acrobatics enabled by his strong lower body. The lone wart of his defense is throwing accuracy, as Stafura throws too many one-hoppers to first and occasionally pulls his teammates off the bag. At this age, that’s not a daming problem, and long-term, he should be an above-average shortstop defender who can play all over the place in a low-impact utility role.

I’d note that striking out this often in the low minors is a very bad sign, but I concur with Eric overall. He pointed out to me that the Pirates seem to like former over-slot guys who haven’t yet panned out. That fits Stafura to a tee, and you can understand the thinking here: If you’re looking for long shots, you might as well start with ones who had loud enough tools to get a bag of loot in the draft. Realistically, though, the odds of Stafura working out are low; he’s 32nd on our updated Pittsburgh prospect rankings.

What do I think about this trade overall? For the Reds, I think it’s a no-brainer. I’m still very much in trade valuation mode here, and Hayes feels like a kind of player that models love. He’s so good defensively that it’s almost impossible to project him any worse than he’s played this year – and even this year, he’s tracking towards a 1.4-WAR season, which would have been the fifth-best WAR total among hitters on the 2024 Reds. Heck, he’d be seventh on the 2025 Reds in season-to-date WAR despite a 57 wRC+.

The Reds have some stars, but they also have plenty of roster holes. They’re somewhat payroll-constrained. They’ll take cheap WAR any way they can get it, basically, and preferably in the form of players who will be under team control for reasonable rates throughout Elly De La Cruz’s team control years. Oh yeah, Hayes will even take pressure off of De La Cruz defensively. Who wouldn’t want to have that kind of security blanket flanking them in the field? That’s a minor benefit, but a benefit nonetheless. It’s a great speculative fit, really, the kind of player that the Reds have been sorely lacking in recent years. Sure, there’s a risk that Hayes just never hits again, but like I said, he’s replacing guys who have been just as bad in aggregate.

From Pittsburgh’s side, well, at least Bob Nutting saved a little money going forward. It’s pretty clear that the Pirates consider Hayes’ contract to be both dead weight and dead weight they couldn’t afford. Stafura is just a lottery ticket, really. Rogers is a prospective future lottery ticket. These aren’t moves built around contending any sooner; they’re built around the general concept that trading for a ton of maybe’s will eventually turn into a smaller pile of yes’es.

Misguided, given that Paul Skenes is in the major leagues right now? It seems that way to me. But the Pirates surely don’t care what I think. They stick to their process, which generally involves trading major league contributors before they get too expensive and eschewing free agency. The three players who the Pirates have signed to long-term extensions in the last few years – Hayes, Mitch Keller, and Bryan Reynolds – were the only three Pirates with guaranteed contracts that stretch beyond the 2025 season. Keller and Reynolds could at least feasibly be on the move this deadline, too. The idea here is clearly to run the team as close to the bone as possible, and from that perspective, trading Hayes is a step in their preferred direction. They furthered this plan by trading Caleb Ferguson, due roughly $1 million the rest of the season, this afternoon as well.

Now, can they use that money they freed up to improve? I kind of doubt it. If you’re wondering what kind of infielder you can get for $7.5 million a year, the amount they’ve gotten out of paying Hayes by making this trade, you can look at current Pirate Isiah Kiner-Falefa, who signed a two-year deal for $7.5 million a year before the 2024 season. He’s racked up 2.5 WAR over 828 plate appearances over that time. That’s a perfectly fine deal for the rate, and absolutely not the kind of player that will push the Pirates into playoff contention from where they are right now.

More broadly, Hayes has been quite poor at the plate this year, but so have the rest of the Pirates. He’s second among their hitters in WAR! There’s nothing even resembling a good major league offense here right now. Paradoxically, I think that made it easier to trade Hayes. The Reds’ problem is that they need a few more cost-controlled role players. The Pirates’ problem is that they need a whole new offense. At that point, maybe you should just get rid of everyone and run out a series of rookies until some guys click. I’m not saying that’s a good option, but given the constraints, it might be the best one available.

That’s surely a bummer for Pirates fans to hear, but honestly, it’s all I’ve got. This is all according to plan. They were hoping to do this. If they end up with no Hayes, no Rogers, and some very marginal improvement of their farm system, they’ll call it a success, and I think that’s exactly what will happen. Meanwhile, the Reds will get a chance at a Hayes bounce back that would inject their squad with a meaningful chunk of surplus value, and if it doesn’t work, the contract is hardly a millstone. Well, unless you’re the Pirates, that is.