Yusei Kikuchi Returns an Astronomical Haul for the Blue Jays

I’ve been pondering Yusei Kikuchi’s trade deadline fate for months. That sounds overly specific – there are so many players that get traded every year. Why wonder about this one guy? He has a 4.75 ERA this year and a 4.72 mark for his career. He’ll be a free agent at year’s end. Months? Shouldn’t I have been doing something more useful with my time? Probably. But hey, now I’m in a better position to write about this particularly astounding deadline transaction: Last night, the Blue Jays traded Kikuchi to the Astros in exchange for a bountiful crop of young players: Jake Bloss, Joey Loperfido, and Will Wagner.

Kikuchi turns analysts like me into Fox Mulder: We want to believe. We’re talking about a guy with one of the prettiest fastballs in baseball, period. It has great shape. He throws hard, sitting 94-96 mph and topping out around 99. Stuff models love it. PitchingBot thinks it’s the nastiest fastball thrown by a starter, and tied for the overall best (with Sonny Gray’s fastball) after considering location. Stuff+ is skeptical, relatively speaking – it thinks the fastball is the third-best among starters, behind the heaters of Kutter Crawford and Zack Wheeler.

Kikuchi throws a nice slider to complement the fastball, 88-90 mph and with sharp bite for a gyro slider. He rounds out his arsenal with a hard, two-plane curveball and a bizarre slider that seems to float and fade simultaneously. He does it from a funky arm slot and with a deceptive delivery. When Kikuchi is on, he’s capable of torching opposing lineups singlehandedly. His first 10 starts of this season were phenomenal: 2.64 ERA, 2.61 FIP, a 26% strikeout rate, and a minuscule 5.5% walk rate. He’d been steadily improving in Toronto, and this year looked like his breakout.

Since then, things have gone quite poorly. I’m talking about a 6.87 ERA and 4.67 FIP poorly, 13 homers in only 12 starts poorly. Kikuchi has gotten shelled repeatedly, and the Jays have plummeted out of the playoff race at the same time. His timing for his woes could’ve hardly been worse, creating a strange dilemma for the Jays. Kikuchi was on fire through most of June, and the Jays’ playoff odds bounced around between 20 and 40 percent during that time. When Kikuchi’s perceived trade value was at its highest, the team wasn’t ready to sell.

Then he started getting worse, and the Jays’ playoff odds started dipping at the same time, with the bottom falling out around the end of June, when a seven-game losing streak, followed by a 4-6 stretch against playoff competition, put them hopelessly far behind in the standings. It was finally time to trade Kikuchi – except, across seven starts from May 26-June 28, he had a 7.12 ERA and peripherals that weren’t much better. The smart move seemed to be holding Kikuchi a bit longer, waiting for both a rebound and the trade deadline to produce some motivated buyers.

So the Jays held, but Kikuchi didn’t improve much. He’s been slightly better in July, but only slightly: 6.59 ERA, 4.03 FIP, and a home run per start over five starts. He managed six or more innings in only one of those starts, to boot. But now time has run out, and so Kikuchi’s on the move. Or maybe I should rephrase: Luckily, just before time ran out, it turns out that the entire hypothetical decline in Kikuchi’s trade value was just made up. The Astros sent the Blue Jays a phenomenal trade offer, and now Kikuchi is headed down to the Gulf Coast to chase the playoffs.

I still think Kikuchi is a good option as a mid-rotation starter. He’s almost certainly not as good as his early-season form, but he’s much better than he’s performed over the last two months. His game sinks or floats based on how many home runs he allows. That’s been the story with his model-beloved arsenal, too; they’re great pitches on average, but he leaves both his fastball and slider in dangerous locations too much for someone without huge movement. His pitches are more timing-disruptive than pure bat-missers, and that just doesn’t work as well when you leave it middle-middle.

For the Astros, that combination probably feels familiar. A homer-prone pitcher who looks dominant when the ball stays in the yard? Sounds like Hunter Brown, or late-career Justin Verlander. But the Astros have struggled to field starting pitchers all year. They lost two starters they were counting on for the whole season in June. Verlander has been out for more than a month. Lance McCullers Jr. hasn’t pitched all year, and his rehab has been rocky; there’s currently no timeline for his return. Their rotation has been three solid arms (Framber Valdez, Ronel Blanco, and Brown), and then pray for rain, not the best plan in a retractable-roof stadium.

Even worse, Blanco and Brown are going to reach their career highs in innings soon, so the team is talking about a six-man rotation to protect its arms. Adding Kikuchi lessens the load on the top trio significantly. He’s not exactly an innings eater, but the Astros surely will be happy with someone going out there every fifth or sixth day and putting up five-plus respectable innings.

One of the guys Houston has turned to for innings in recent weeks is Jake Bloss, the headline of the players heading to Toronto in the deal. He’s been awesome, a spectacularly fast riser who was a third round draft pick only last year before tearing through the minors. He was a breakout small-college player who transferred to Georgetown in his senior year and impressed against his toughest competition yet, so he’s been moving up levels and surprising people for three years now. A winter in the Houston pitching lab seems to have sharpened his command, and as you might expect, he has the team’s signature rising fastball cooking in 2024.

This isn’t some mirage; he’s throwing multiple plus pitches and might have pretty good command, too. In the minors, he struck out 27% of batters and allowed very little hard contact en route to a sub-2.00 ERA and solid 3.20 FIP. He shredded minor league hitters so comprehensively that I completely understand why Houston brought him up to the majors to see if the magic could continue, but his first three big league starts have been rough. More specifically, his third major league start was rough: The A’s launched four homers off of him in only four innings. I’m a big fan of the potential here, but I’d ideally give him a little bit more time in the minors to develop, and I think the Astros reached that conclusion as well, hence the trade.

This would’ve made for a logical one-for-one swap: a fast-rising pitching prospect for a mid-rotation rental. But then, unfathomably, the Astros kicked in significantly more. We had Bloss as their no. 2 prospect; Joey Loperfido was no. 3 until he graduated from prospect status earlier this season. He’s a big versatile outfielder with true-outcome fever; he has 30-homer power, takes walks, and strikes out a bunch. Our prospect team put a 45 FV grade on him as a versatile bench player with the ability to field five positions (the outfield plus first and second), with an outside chance of hitting enough to become an everyday player.

But wait, there’s still more. The last player in the deal is Will Wagner, Billy Wagner’s son and an upper-minors infielder with a contact-over-power approach. You can probably picture this general archetype; when it works out as well as possible, it’s Brendan Donovan. When it doesn’t, it’s any number of utility infielders that your team uses to patch holes in the roster. Wagner is hitting .307/.424/.429 with more strikeouts than walks in Triple-A this year, but I think that line overstates his likely major league impact. Pitchers are going to assail him with strikes until he starts to make them pay for it, and as you might have realized from how similar his OBP and slug are, that’s been a struggle for him.

Still, it’s highly likely that Wagner becomes a part-time contributor in the majors, if only at the bottom of the roster. He’s Rule 5 eligible after this year, and I think that the Jays’ roster situation makes it likely that he’ll end up on the 40-man as a result. The Astros were unlikely to have space for him, so that addition feels like a get-the-deal-over-the-finish-line sweetener.

Only… why did the Astros need to add a sweetener? This is a huge win for the Blue Jays, in my opinion. The Astros are wizards when it comes to getting the most out of mid-round draft picks. Bloss, Loperfido, and Wagner are all big success stories, unheralded picks who have far exceeded their expectations. But after doing all that hard work, the team turned around and flipped them for a mid-rotation rental.

I understand why the Astros need Kikuchi. But based on returns at the past few trade deadlines, Bloss alone was right around what I’d expect the Jays to get for dealing him. Maybe a Wagner-type player or two if the Astros were particularly keen to get the deal done. Loperfido, too? That’s a lot of good young players for 2-3 months of a solid-but-not-overwhelming pitcher.

The more I mull this over in my head, the more I think the Astros wanted Kikuchi specifically. If they were calling every team in baseball and saying “We need starting, and we’ll offer Jake Bloss plus…” someone would have dealt them an arm in fairly short order. I’d trade some of the starters who haven’t yet been moved (Jack Flaherty and Zack Littell spring to mind) for less than this return, and I suspect that their teams might too. This only makes sense to me if the Astros wanted Kikuchi specifically and weren’t willing to miss their guy. That’s how you end up making an offer that makes analysts across the board go “Whoa, really?”

I think it’s worth bumping expectations of Kikuchi up slightly given this context. When a team wants someone this badly, it surely has a reason. But I also think the Astros front office is a strange mishmash of old and new, and that they’re working at cross purposes. The part of the org that sagely selects college pitchers with interesting peripherals and then helps them unlock new heights in their game probably isn’t the same part that ships out a mountain of top prospects for two-plus months of a mid-rotation starter. I understand the Astros’ motivation in the deal, and yet I still think they gave up too much.