Deadline Day Recap: All steak, no sizzle
On Bass and Pop, Groshans, White, Frasso, De Jesus, Stripling, Kendall Williams, Castillo, Taylor, Whit Merrifield???, Atkins, Eppler, Madani, Morosi, and more!
The Blue Jays strengthened their team at Tuesday’s trade deadline, adding a couple of sneaky-good bullpen pieces, a big league calibre swingman, and a former All-Star Swiss Army knife. Given some of the big names that were out there, and some of the upgrades the teams they’re competing with made, it felt like a letdown.
Should it have? Does perception matter more than reality? Just how much better are they? Whit Merrifield??!?!
Let’s talk about it!
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Bass and Pop
• Jays trade: INF Jordan Groshans
• Jays receive: RHP Anthony Bass, RHP Zach Pop, PTBNL
To say that Anthony Bass and Zach Pop are really nice relievers for the Blue Jays to have added at the deadline is probably underselling it.
Bass is the seventh best reliever in the majors this year by fWAR (1.4). He throws in the mid-90s. He strikes out a batter per inning. His outstanding FIP (2.09) is in line with his even better ERA (1.41). His K-BB of 20.6% is not quite elite-elite, but is in the top 50 among MLB relievers this year, and better than any of the Jays’ other relievers. As far as right-handed bullpen options go for the Jays, he’s slot between Adam Cimber and Yimi Garcia, or maybe even between Garcia and Jordan Romano. More importantly, he knocks everyone behind him — looking at you, Trevor Richards — back a peg. That’s huge. That’s exactly the kind of move the Blue Jays needed to make.
Brampton’s Zach Pop will likely slot in behind Adam Cimber to start off. Probably even behind David Phelps. But there’s a chance he could grow into a bigger role, especially if he finds some of the swing-and-miss he had last season. Opponents were whiffing on the slider more before last year’s sticky stuff ban came into effect, so that might be a little too much to ask. Either way, his 63.1% groundball rate will play as is. And until Nate Pearson or Julian Merryweather return, nobody in the Jays' bullpen will be throwing harder than Pop, whose fastball clocks in at 97 mph on average.
Importantly, both Pop and Bass have multiple years of control left — Bass in the form of a club option for 2023, whereas Pop will finish this season with less than two years of big league service time. With two minor league options still remaining, he could conceivably be here for five years or more.
Going the other way was Groshans, whose struggles I focused on when I wrote about this trade on Tuesday afternoon. He’s a prospect who still has a lot to like about him, but it has always been assumed that he’ll need to move off of shortstop eventually, and now it seems very unclear that he’s ever going to hit for power. That’s not a typical third base profile, obviously. But the Marlins aren’t wrong for still finding things to like there.
It was a good trade! Get past the “name” value of Groshans, who was a 12th overall pick not that long ago, and who hung around top 100 lists for a little longer than he probably should have, and I don’t think there would be any qualms about it from Jays fans in the slightest.
But as the biggest deadline deal for a team with the third best playoff odds in the American League, and — according to FanGraphs — the sixth best odds to win the World Series in baseball? Feels light!
I mean, look at some of the names we had been talking about in the days and hours heading into the deadline! Castillo, Montas, Rodón, Syndergaard, Iglesias, Happ, Robertson, etc.
Bass has been really great this year, but it feels weird!
Mitch White, aka “Strip Light”
Jays trade: RHP Nick Frasso, LHP Moises Brito
Jays get: RHP Mitch White, INF Alex De Jesus
The Jays’ second deal of the day was another very sensible one, with the focal point of it being swingman Mitch White. The Dodgers have a bit of a pitching factory on their hands, and White was on his way to being squeezed off of that roster. By my count White has spent just over 20 days in the minor leagues this season, meaning that he has burned his final option year. In other words, the Dodgers would have had a tough time keeping him on their roster next spring. So, rather than risking that he might end up lost on waivers, they cashed him in for a couple of farther-away pitching prospects.
That’s some uninspiring background, but remember that a guy on the fringes of L.A.’s roster is different than a guy on the fringes of the roster of most other teams. White's fastball sits at about 94, he struck out more than a batter per inning over 46 2/3 last season, though that rate is down a little bit this year. He does a decent job limiting walks, has kept the ball in the ballpark (easier to do in Dodger Stadium than other places, I will grant), and has a 3.58 ERA and 3.87 FIP over 105 2/3 big league innings for his career — numbers that his 2022 marks are completely in line with.
He also will finish the year with fewer than two years of big league service, meaning that the Jays control him for upwards of five years.
The big thing, though, is his versatility. White has pitched 38 times in the big leagues, with fourteen of those outings coming as starts, ten of which he’s made this year. About 75% of his career appearances have been multi-inning efforts. Rather than adding a more fully-fledged starter, and forcing one of their current crop to the ‘pen, the Jays have found themselves another Ross Stripling — also important because of Stripling’s impending free agency.
Another echo of Stripling deal comes from the fact that the price here feels kind of high! Kendall Williams had been a 2019 second-round pick, number 52 overall, when the Jays sent him to L.A. for Stripling a year later. Similarly, Nick Frasso is a name that Jays prospect-watchers know well, and were probably taken aback by when they saw it included in the deal. The 2020 fourth-rounder missed much of this season with injury, but can hit 99 with his fastball and has been outstanding since being moved up to High-A Vancouver, albeit as a 23-year-old. (He can also dunk a basketball).
He’s one of the few real guys with eye-popping velocity that the Jays have produced recently, and by virtue of the dearth of those types in the system may have seemed like a better prospect than he really is. On the other hand, if the Dodgers wanted him there’s definitely something there.
Frasso’s inclusion in a deal like this speaks to how difficult things really were for the Jays at this deadline because of the thinned-out state of their farm system, I think. Future Blue Jays had Frasso as the number 11 prospect in the Jays’ system in their recent mid=season rankings. MLB Pipeline has slotted him in at number 26 for the Dodgers.
It seems Buster Olney had it nailed on Tuesday morning, when he told TSN 1050, “Part of the issue, I think, for the Jays, what I'm hearing from other teams is that folks from other teams just don't view their farm system with a lot of enthusiasm. They don't look at them as being a team you want to go to necessarily. They're not at the top of the list.”
There are certainly going to be Jays fans who will look at the way Frasso lights up the radar gun and feel as though the club shouldn’t have moved him. Largely that’s due to White’s unsexy profile. Thing is, this is a guy having legitimate big league success, whereas Frasso is a lottery ticket — important to remember, even if it maybe felt leading up to the deadline like Frasso was the kind of guy who might be able to get you more.
There were two other prospects involved in this deal, with the Jays sending LHP Moises Brito — who has a very impressive stat line as a 19-year-old in the Dominican Summer League this year, striking out 32 over 29 innings, walking just one, and posting an ERA of 1.86 — to the Dodgers. Could be something, but he’s a long, long way off.
Coming back to Toronto is High-A infielder Alex De Jesus, who I will absolutely mistakenly call “David” at some point on a podcast in the coming months and years. De Jesus's numbers paint him as a high walk, high strikeout kind of guy, who hasn't quite tapped into his power yet. A 20-year-old who started the year in A-ball and has since moved up, he's slashing an impressive .282/.376/.421 at the higher level.
Before you get too excited about those numbers, his .797 OPS makes him the sixth-best hitter with at least 150 plate appearances on L.A.'s Midwest League affiliate, the Great Lakes Loons. Granted, he's the second best among those in their age-20 season or below, and the guy above him is the Dodgers' top prospect, catcher Diego Cartaya (ranked 12th overall by Pipeline).
De Jesus is a big-framed "shortstop" — really a third baseman — who FanGraphs, when ranking him the number 43 Dodgers prospect before the season, said "has so much strength and power that even if he continues to trend down the defensive spectrum, one can envision him playing a role in the Bobby Dalbec/Matt Davidson mold, an extreme power-over-hit corner bat who can give you 30 annual homers if you’re willing to live with all the strikeouts."
We've heard stuff lately about the Jays' attempts to better their players' swing decisions — this David Laurila interview with Hunter Mense, for example, and this piece on Lourdes Gurriel Jr. — so I suspect it's with a purpose that the Jays looked to De Jesus here. Or, perhaps, simply the fact that he’s quite good, as evidenced by the fact that he’s already jumped into the Jays’ top 10 for Pipeline, slotting in as their new number eight.
Still, this deal is really about White and how he helps the major league club right now. It would have been tough to demote Stripling, given how well he’s pitched in the rotation this season. Yusei Kikuchi is not an ideal bullpen candidate either. This is a much more comfortable fit than a bigger name starter, in that sense. Frankie Montas he is not, but the Jays needed to find a way to stash a starter in the bullpen and they’ve done it here with aplomb.
Plus, they’ve added to their depth, because they still also have Max Castill — oh… wait…
Whit Merrifield???
• Jays trade RHP Max Castillo, OF Samad Taylor
• Jays acquire UTIL Whit Merrifield
Samad Taylor, like Jordan Groshans, would have needed to be added to the Jays’ 40-man roster this winter in order to protect him from being taken in the Rule 5 draft. Max Castillo, though he’s acquitted himself well in the big league when called upon this year, doesn’t offer the quality that Mitch White does in a swingman role. I get trading those guys.
I also get trading for a player who can play a little centre field in a pinch, plays some second base, adds a badly needed element of speed, and has a pretty strong track record as a hitter.
But Whit Merrifield???
Merrifield is hard to strike out, can steal a base, and can play a few positions without embarrassing himself (he saves that for when choosing whether to get vaccinated or not — HEYO!). But the thing about his “track record” as a hitter is that I have to use that term, because if we’re only looking at the last year or two he truly sucks.
You can squint and tell yourself that he’s been BABIP’d a little bit this year (he has), or that the park in Kansas City has suppressed his power a little over the years (sure, why not?), but it’s hard to go to his FanGraphs page and not notice the correlation in trends between his age and his wRC+.
• 2018: Age 29, 119 wRC+
• 2019: Age 30, 110 wRC+
• 2020: Age 31, 106 wRC+
• 2021: Age 32, 91 wRC+
• 2022: Age 33, 80 wRC+
Thing is, despite the recent offensive struggles of Santiago Espinal and Cavan Biggio, I don’t think he’s here to save the Blue Jays’ offensive output from second base. The base stealing is the thing. Merrifield “only” has a sprint speed of 28.5 ft/s this season, which is exactly in line with George Springer and Teoscar Hernández, but he’s very much got good base stealing instincts. He’s swiped 15 bags in 18 tries this year (83%) and stole 40 on 44 attempts last year (91%). He doesn’t have the flat-out speed to go every single time he’s on base, but the combination of speed and selectivity is appealing. Y’know, to a point.
Merrifield also has versatility. He has played fewer than 600 innings in centre over the course of his career, and only 49 this season, but the metrics don’t dislike him out there. He can’t be much worse than Raimel Tapia, so using those two as a platoon to back up George Springer also makes some sense. It’s just… really?
Thing is, much like the Bass acquisition, I think this is one where we have to reconfigure the expectations we have based on the name — only in the opposite way. Merrifield doesn’t offer a whole lot any more, but what he does offer helps raise the floor at least a little bit in some rather narrow ways. The Jays didn’t give up much for him — a guy who probably wasn’t going to last on the roster beyond the Rule 5 and a guy whose 40-man spot would have been in peril once Julian Merryweather and Nate Pearson are ready to come off of the 60-day IL. They’re also not paying a ton for him financially, at least in baseball terms — just 1/3 of his $2.75 million salary this year, plus (presumably) the $750,000 buyout of his $6.5 million option for next year. All told that’s about $1.7 million. Not great, but not bank-breaking! And hell, maybe he even does enough over the next two months to put that option for next year back into play.
That is, if he even gets here.
Merrifield, as you probably alreadly know, was one of 10 Royals players added to the restricted list for their recent series in Toronto because of his vaccination status. He’s suggested that he’d get the vax if he was traded somewhere where it was necessary — something I wish I knew before I was all “Pfft, clearly he’s not coming to Toronto!” on Twitter when news first broke that he was heading somewhere on Tuesday LOL — and refusing to do it now would mean no salary for home games (i.e. a 50% pay cut the rest of the year), so I doubt it’s actually going to be an issue. Funny though! And Ross Atkins added to the potential hilarity when he told reporters on Tuesday evening that “this is a very fresh acquisition” and that the Jays will “let him work through that with his family.”
Of course he’s got to say that. And of course Merrifield will get it. He’s a Toronto Blue Jay now. Weird!!!
Other transactions
The Jays made the following minor roster moves on Tuesday as well:
• LHP Anthony Banda was designated for assignment
• LHP Andrew Vasquez was claimed off waivers by the Phillies
• RHP Jeremy Beasley was traded to the Pirates for cash considerations
Big picture
First of all, oh man am I glad that’s over. Living on Twitter sucks at the best of times, but when your timeline and replies start getting polluted by fans in the throes of dread shitting out every negative thought that enters their brains? Not fun!
It’s also not fun when those folks’ too-early anger at the front office ultimately ends up looking something close to valid. Or when you have high profile people goading on peoples’ worst instincts.
Like this, for example.
Or this. (Not Hazel, obviously!)
Man alive. It’s not difficult to look up the transactions made by the 2014 Blue Jays. That year they traded Liam Hendriks and Erik Kratz for Danny Valencia. That’s it! This was not that!
And “the gap”? Sorry, is this a fuckin’ horse race or are there multiple multi-game rounds in the playoffs that we see over and over and over that anybody who gets there can win?
I know it’s not a very good TV answer to say, “Well, actually, the playoffs are a crapshoot…,” but this is not helpful framing.
Anyway!
The Jays’ deadline did underwhelm, given the hype that had been building for it. That doesn’t mean it was a bad deadline. Last year’s July haul for the World Champion Braves was comprised of Joc Pederson, Stephen Vogt, Richard Rodrígues, Jorge Soler, Adam Duvall, and Eddie Rosario — not exactly game-changers on the face of it
Yes, the Yankees did do more. The Mariners are a threat to take the top wild card spot — though the Jays’ head start (they’re currently four games up), the fact that they haven’t played to their true talent level yet, and the improvements that they made put them in a very strong position still. There is a very real chance that we’ll look back on this as an opportunity missed.
But not only should the Yankees have been more willing than the Jays to push their chips in, by virtue of the fact that they’re all but guaranteed a bye past the first of those four playoff rounds, they simply had better chips. And more of them.
Given the nature of prospects it may be a pyrrhic victory for the Jays to say “we improved without losing Moreno, Tiedemann, Orelvis, Pearson, Horwitz, etc., etc., etc.” But that’s not nothing, especially considering the number of prospects the team has dealt over the last year.
It’s just, unfortunately, quite a bit more meaningful for GMs than it is for fans.
Take this gobbledygook from Mets GM Billy Eppler, for example, which comes from Newsday’s Tim Healey.
After the deadline on Tuesday, Eppler was asked, "How do you balance the long view (of not trading top prospects) with this year's team that is off to the second-best start in franchise history and looks special heading into October?"
His response:
“Yeah, we understand what our odds look like. We can factor in different types of acquisitions and see how that changes. What we can also do is factor in the players that we're yielding. Through the forecast and some of the predictive modelling that we're able to do, we can look and see what does that actually subtract from the future and how many years does that subtract out in the future.
If you're subtracting a percent or 1.5% aggregate over a four- or five-year period to move up 1% now, I don't think that's how sustainability — which has been an objective of mine and (owner) Steve's and Sandy's as we're putting this whole thing together, is to try to do everything in service to that kind of sustainability. That's how we measure that. Everything that presented itself just took too much of that future away."
Now, Ross Atkins didn’t say this, so it would be unfair to roast him for it. But I think it speaks to the GM mindset in a lot of places here in 2022, and also woof.
Yet, I say that, but what this really boils down to is what we already sorta know: that the difference between “playoff team” and “World Series contender” basically doesn’t exist. Winning four consecutive playoff series isn’t all luck, but there’s a hell of a lot of it involved. The Mets are 2.5 games up on Atlanta in the NL East, who are 7.5 games up on the teams tied for third in the wild card race. In my mind they should have done more to ensure they don’t fall out of the division lead — winning three straight series is easier than four — but even that apparently doesn’t compute when you’ve got a bad case of GM brain.
Again, I don’t mean that about Ross. He’s shown repeatedly that he’s willing to get very aggressive when it comes to improving the Blue Jays — which is why all that “typical Blue Jays inaction!” stuff I kept seeing on Twitter in the days heading into the deadline was so painfully eye-roll-inducing. This time he just didn’t have the depth of top-end pieces to justify taking the kinds of big swings we all wanted.
Tough as it is to wrap our heads around, the objective isn’t to close the gap between the Jays and the Yankees. New York’s lead isn’t insurmountable, but it’s big enough that spending massive future capital to chase them down is too unlikely to move the needle enough. The Jays chose to get better where they could, tried to stay on path, and will still have a chance to get into an even better position by improvements from players they already have — either on the roster (looking at you, Bo) or from the farm system (Pearson, Merryweather, Zulueta, etc.).
If you had told me a month ago that at the deadline the Jays would add a couple of nice relievers, find some back-end starting depth, and added a versatile bench piece, I’d have told you that sounds about right. It probably is about right.
It’s just… that doesn’t make it any easier to watch the Yankees load up or the Padres go and make deal for Juan Soto that the Blue Jays simply could not have countered, does it?
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I think even before Atkins spoke yesterday it was fairly clear that this was probably not 'Plan A' for the Jays, and we'll probably never know whether the moves they were able to make were Plan C, D, E or whatever. But as much as everyone gets hung up on the 'get it done league' thing (and it was a good line) of course it's not actually that simple and it's probably quite difficult to have your fallback positions sort of prepped and know when it's time to pivot to those rather than keep after something that's not going to work.
All of which to say while it would have been a lot more fun to see the Jays add Luis Castillo and Iglesias or something, you don't have to jiggle the focus too much to see that as far as Plan X goes, this was all right.
Great stuff Stoeten. After sleeping on it, I've moved from "What the hell, this sucks!" to "Eh, it's fine, actually." It's really all about getting to the dance and I think this roster will get the job done. From there, if the bats heat up anything is possible. Giddy-up!