San Diego has all the makings of a scary-good rotation to match up with the defending champion Dodgers.
The dormant hot stove cranked up the heat late Sunday night when reports surfaced that the Padres were acquiring starter Blake Snell in a trade with the Rays. Let's grade the deal that saw the reigning American League champs ship off a former Cy Young Award winner to one of the game's most talented teams.
The Deal
Padres reportedly acquire: LHP Blake Snell
Rays reportedly acquire: RHP Luis Patiño, C Francisco Mejía, RHP Cole Wilcox and C Blake Hunt
Grading San Diego's Side of the Deal
Let's quickly look at the recent history of the Padres: San Diego has been steadily stockpiling young talent under general manager A.J. Preller, and after nine straight losing seasons and 13 years without making the playoffs, the Padres finally broke through in an abridged 2020. The team had the second-best record (37-23) and second-highest run differential (plus-84) in the National League, boasting one of the best and deepest lineups in baseball. Short sample season aside, this team is legitimately loaded, and the club has decided that now is the time to cash in their chips and elevate itself into the upper echelon of World Series contenders.
In Snell, the Padres are getting a dependable starter with an elite ability to miss bats and deliver on the big stage. The lefty turned 28 this month and is signed for three seasons at a very affordable $39 million. Aside from a wonky home run rate that will surely regress to the mean moving forward, he bounced back nicely last year from an up-and-down, injury-hampered 2019 season.
The price for such a pitcher is unsurprisingly steep. In Patiño, the Padres are parting ways with one of the most promising young arms in the game. Patiño is 21 and has a fastball that sits in the upper-90s and a makeup that seems to have him destined for success. He struggled in his brief big league debut last season, but he owns a 2.35 ERA and 279 strikeouts across 234 innings in the minors and is ranked as the league's No. 23 prospect by MLB Pipeline.
Mejía, 25, was once considered an elite prospect in his own right but has failed to find consistency in the majors. Tampa Bay will be his third franchise after coming up with Cleveland, so perhaps a change of scenery will spark a breakthrough. The Rays brought back Mike Zunino this offseason, but Mejía will provide needed depth, and he should be given the opportunity to prove he can be a long-term answer at the position.
Wilcox and Hunt are longer-term investments. Wilcox, 21, put up strong numbers at Georgia and was a third-round pick in 2020, while Hunt, 22, is a power-hitting catcher with a strong arm who hasn't played above the Single-A level yet.
While those departures put a dent in San Diego's abundance of organizational depth, Snell slots into an already potent rotation that should look something like this in 2021:
- Snell
- Dinelson Lamet
- Zach Davies
- Chris Paddack
- Mackenzie Gore
That's among the strongest in the league, with a tremendously high ceiling considering the youth and relative inexperience. Looking beyond next year, the entire rotation should be back in 2022 and welcome the return of Mike Clevinger, who will miss next season while recovering from Tommy John surgery. The Padres have the arms to hang with the division rival Dodgers for the foreseeable future, and while seeing Patiño star for another franchise would sting a bit, the foundation San Diego has built for itself should make the defending champs sweat just a little bit at the prospect of repeating.
Grade: A-
Grading Tampa Bay's side of the deal:
Let's first examine what the Rays did devoid of context: This is an impressive haul for a single player. Here's what FanGraphs' lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen wrote about Patiño heading into 2020:
“He’s smaller, and his changeup and command are not very good yet. But this is one of the best on-mound athletes in the minors … Were this a college prospect, he’d be in the conversation for the draft’s top pick, and I’m very comfortable projecting on the command and changeup because of the athleticism/makeup combination. I expect Patiño will reach the big leagues this year in a bullpen role and compete for a rotation spot in 2021.”
Patiño did appear in the Padres' bullpen last season and was roughed up a bit, but expect him to be on a fast track to Tampa Bay's rotation. In Mejía, the Rays should be getting at the very least a talented backup with a high ceiling. Wilcox and Hunt are hardly throw-ins, either, and the Rays have a strong track records at identifying and developing prospect talent.
Now let's bring context back into the picture: the defending AL champions—who came within two wins of winning the World Series—just traded away their homegrown ace that won the Cy Young Award two years ago, has a 2.83 career ERA in the postseason and is owed an average of $13 million over the next three seasons. If we boil a player's worth down to a dollar sign and assign a value of about $9 million per win, then Snell is worth the remaining salary of his contract several times over. It's unsettling for a franchise that came so close to winning it all two months ago to willingly part ways with a player of Snell's caliber in his prime because he's about to get a little more expensive—even if his added price tag still qualifies him as underpaid.
This is how the Rays operate, for better or worse. This move is not the sign of a 1998 Marlins-style fire sale, or the fall of Western civilization. The Rays aren't foregoing 2021 in the name of cutting costs. They're simply maneuvering within the rules of the game. It's their imperative to try to be competitive at as low a cost as possible, and if there's enough of a public recoil to the franchise's constant churn of roster turnover to keep payroll to a minimum, then the onus is on the league to rethink how players' earning timelines should be structured. Less than an hour after news of the Snell trade broke, USA Today's Bob Nightengale reported that Gold Glove center fielder Kevin Kiermaier could be the next player shipped off. Such is life as a Rays fan.
However you feel about the way the Rays are run, Snell's departure from the franchise that drafted him nearly a decade ago pairs uncomfortably well with his last game in a Tampa Bay uniform: abrupt, puzzling and rationalized by an adherence to a broader philosophy. From the Rays' perspective, the hope is that the end result of this move isn't as immediately doomed as the one that preceded it.
Grade: B+