The trade: The Seattle Mariners acquired first baseman Carlos Santana and cash from the Kansas City Royals for right-handed pitchers Wyatt Mills and William Fleming.
MLB trade season is here! There have been a handful of minor deals since the regular season began, but until Monday, they've all been of the roster-jostling sort in which a team is trying to create space or resolve the status of player who has been designated for assignment. On Monday, we got a real trade: A notable veteran (Santana) is heading for the Mariners, while Seattle sends a pair of pitching prospects back to Kansas City. The Mariners will also receive some cash in the deal to allay some of the salary Santana still has coming in 2022.
OK, it's not "stop the presses" material, but a baseball trade is always interesting -- and this one carries a few more implications than what is obvious on the surface. Let's grade it.
Fitting that it's Jerry Dipoto who gets the in-season trade movement going. The Mariners entered this season optimistic that they were ready to contend for the American League West or, at the very least, one of the many wild-card slots now available to MLB teams. Instead, the Mariners have been kind of all over the place, with alternating periods of hot and cold play.
The cold stretches have tended to stretch longer than the hot ones, thus Seattle enters play on Monday six games under .500. That puts the Mariners in a tie for 11th place in the AL hierarchy. The team they are tied with is the Baltimore Orioles, who begin a series in Seattle on Monday night. Both teams are seven games out of the sixth spot in the AL. Seattle is in fourth place in the AL West race, 12 games back of the powerful Houston Astros.
All told, this adds up to about a 13% chance at a playoff spot for Seattle, according to my system, and it's only that high because the Mariners are nearly at breakeven in run differential (minus-1) against an above-average strength of schedule. While it is certainly possible that the Mariners could go on a hot streak and get back into the wild-card picture, their chances of doing so don't seem to be necessarily bolstered by the addition of Santana.
The Mariners lost Ty France to what was diagnosed as a Grade 2 flexor strain, suffered in a collision at first base with Oakland's Sheldon Neuse on Thursday. France was placed on the injured list and is eligible to return as early as this weekend. But this deal strongly suggests that he is not expected to be ready to return then or anytime close to it. The loss of France is a blow to the Seattle offense, which ranks 26th in runs per game but a more palatable 11th in OPS+, which adjusts for ballpark factors.
France is enjoying an All-Star-caliber season, hitting for career bests in all three slash categories: .316/.390/.476. He is leading the Mariners in hits (87) and RBIs (45) and has created 10 more runs (52) than any other Seattle hitter.
Even before this trade, the Mariners have been leaning heavily on journeymen and with little in the way of positive effect. The glaring example is 34-year-old Justin Upton, who has been getting regular time despite looking pretty well done prior to joining Seattle. He was released by the Angels near the end of spring training and since the start of the 2019 season has a .208 average and 88 OPS+. The Mariners just have not gotten much mileage this season out of fill-ins.
And now Santana is added to that parade, and his career trajectory is not dissimilar to that of Upton, only he's a couple of years older. Santana is hitting .211 since the start of the 2020 season with an 86 OPS+. A recent stretch of hot hitting has his 2022 line up to near league average (98 OPS+). Even better, in June, Santana hit .357/.478/.554 for Kansas City, with much of that production coming in a pair of four-hit games.
Dipoto seems to be trying to catch lightning in a bottle. Maybe Santana stays hot, fills the void opened by France's absence nicely, and bolsters the lineup in a DH/reserve role after France returns. Given the longer arc of Santana's recent career, and his age, odds would be against his recent tear continuing for long, but you never know.
It comes down to this for me: Did you really have to trade two pitching prospects to fill a short-term opening for a player who might well be washed up during a season in which your hopes for contention have all but faded? You have to admire DiPoto's persistence. But if I'm him, I'm less concerned with how Santana might or might not fill in for France and more concerned that I didn't feel like there was an in-house option who could do that job just as well.
Grade: C-
This trade was likely only possible because of Santana's hot streak. After he had two hits and drove in a pair of runs on Sunday, his OPS this season reached .690, the highest it's been since Sept. 9 of last season. The Royals seized the opportunity created by Santana's spree to not only add a couple of arms to the organization but also open up a spot for one of their two premier first-base prospects who have spent this season so far at Triple-A. One of them, Vinnie Pasquantino, was recalled from Omaha at the same time the trade was announced. The other, Nick Pratto, has had an uneven season but still shouldn't be far behind.
Santana's time with the Royals served its purpose. He bought some time for Pratto and Pasquantino, whose stock has really soared over the past year. He offered plate discipline to an organization that has chronically lacked that trait. And, perhaps, he offered that model of a professional approach that could be surveyed by younger hitters such as Bobby Witt Jr. and MJ Melendez.
Santana was hitting .150 at the end of May, and if that had gone on much longer, the Royals would have had to consider releasing him outright to make way for one of the prospects despite the remaining money on his contract (probably around $6 million or so for the remainder of this season). The cash headed to Seattle in the deal was unknown, but chances are the Mariners won't be on the hook for much of Santana's salary.
For the Royals, that's neither here nor there because they were able to convert the sunk cost of Santana into two additional arms for the system. The more immediate help will come from Mills, who entered the season as the Mariners' 10th-ranked prospect, per ESPN's Kiley McDaniel. That's not nothing, given Seattle overall No. 6 organizational ranking.
Mills, 27, is a true side-armer whose arm slot makes him a promising complementary pitcher for any team looking to throw different looks at opposing hitters. Back in March, McDaniel wrote, "Mills is a low-slot righty reliever with above-average stuff and command -- he could be an eighth-inning arm as soon as 2022."
Indeed, Mills made eight appearances for Seattle earlier this season and fared well, for the most part. With his arm slot, finding a pitch to combat lefty hitters is essential, and, so far, Mills has not found that pitch. Lefties have a 1.203 OPS off him in 26 plate appearances thus far during his big league career, though he has fared better this year than during his 11-game MLB debut in 2021. The Royals will start Mills in Omaha, though their big league bullpen could certainly use some help.
Fleming is a wild card, a lanky 6-foot-6 righty who has worked as a starter for Class A Modesto this season. McDaniel didn't rate him among Seattle's ranked prospects before the season, but Fangraphs assigned him a future value of 35+ and described a robust fastball that has been too hittable thus far. But he's got size and a good arm and, as an 11th-round pick just last year, is early in his professional journey. There's a possibility he never reaches Kansas City, but taking this kind of flier on a player is exactly what teams in the Royals' position need to do.
While the trade does have the practical implication for Kansas City that they can promote a premier prospect in Pasquantino, it also sends the message that the Royals are open for business in the trade market. With some quality veterans likely in play like Whit Merrifield and Andrew Benintendi, don't expect this to be the last trade grade piece you see on the Royals.