Guardians Release Roman Quinn
The Guardians announced Tuesday that outfielder Roman Quinn has been released. He’d been playing with their Triple-A affiliate after signing a minor league deal over the winter but coming up shy of a roster spot in spring training. Quinn is now a free agent and will look to sign on with another club in search of some speed and/or outfield depth.
Quinn, 29, was once a touted prospect in the Phillies organization but has never found his footing in the big leagues. He appeared in 15 games with the Guardians’ Triple-A club this year but managed only a .176/.391/.235 batting line in 48 plate appearances. That comes on the heels of a .215/.287/.304 showing in 87 big league plate appearances between the Rays and Phillies in 2022.
In parts of six Major League seasons, Quinn has tallied 599 plate appearances with a tepid .226/.303/.348 batting line to show for his efforts. Contact has been a considerable problem for Quinn, who’s fanned in 30.4% of his plate appearances against an 8% walk rate.
While Quinn doesn’t hit much, he’s a flat-out burner on the basepaths and in the outfield — evidenced by a 96th-percentile ranking from Statcast for his average sprint speed during the 2022 season. Despite a paltry .303 career on-base percentage, Quinn has swiped 43 bases in 54 tries (79.6%). He’s also capable of playing all three outfield positions and has drawn above-average grades for his glovework from both Defensive Runs Saved and Statcast’s Outs Above Average.
MLBTR Chat Transcript
Click here to read a transcript of today’s chat with MLBTR’s Steve Adams.
Giants Select Casey Schmitt, Designate Darin Ruf For Assignment
11:02am: The Giants announced that they’ve selected Schmitt’s contract. In a corresponding move, they reinstated first baseman/outfielder Darin Ruf from the injured list and designated him for assignment. Outfielder Cal Stevenson was also optioned to Sacramento.
11:00am: The Giants will select the contract of infield prospect Casey Schmitt prior to tonight’s game, reports Alex Pavlovic of NBC Sports Bay Area. The 2020 second-round pick will be making his Major League debut.
Schmitt, 24, has gotten out to a .313/.352/.410 start in Triple-A Sacrmento, striking out at a 19.3% clip against a more tepid 5.5% walk rate. For the season’s first few weeks, Schmitt was hitting for average but doing little else, walking at only a 3.6% clip with just a .367 slugging percentage. He’s picked up the pace of late, however, hitting .327/.393/.473 with a homer, five doubles, three stolen bases, an 8.2% walk rate and just a 13.1% strikeout rate over his past 14 games and 55 plate appearances.
While Schmitt has played primarily shortstop so far in 2023, the bulk of his minor league work has come at third base. In all, he has 512 career innings at shortstop and 1223 innings at the hot corner. The Giants have also played him at second base three times this month — the first three appearances of his career at that position — likely in an effort to increase his versatility and his utility on the big league roster.
The Giants have received outstanding production from infielders Thairo Estrada (.344/.394/.534) and J.D. Davis (.287/.360/.515), but with Brandon Crawford shelved by a calf strain (and struggling even when healthy), the infield has been thinned out. Brett Wisely and David Villar have both gotten looks at second base, with Estrada sliding over to shortstop in place of Crawford, but neither has hit well at all in 2023. Schmitt can give the Giants an option at either middle-infield slot, with Estrada handling the other, and hopefully provide a spark to the lineup in the process.
Scouting reports on Schmitt peg him as a plus defender on the left side of the infield, so it stands to reason that he can handle whichever of shortstop, second base or third base the Giants ask of him on a given day. What remains to be seen is whether this proves to be a short-term call-up until Crawford returns or whether Schmitt will get the chance to play his way into a more permanent role with the club. Given the team’s 15-19 start, it’s sensible to take a look at Schmitt and adjust the roster around him if he adapts well at the big league level. If he’s indeed in the Majors for good, he’d be on track to reach arbitration as a likely Super Two player following the 2025 season and reach free agency following the 2029 season — though future optional assignments can of course alter both trajectories.
As for Ruf, the 36-year-old’s return to the Giants will prove quite brief. Released by the Mets earlier this year, he quickly re-signed with the Giants and appeared in nine games before landing on the injured list due to a wrist injury. In 27 plate appearances prior to that IL stint, Ruf posted a solid .261/.370/.348 batting line.
The veteran Ruf was an outstanding find for the Giants in his return from a productive three-year run in the KBO, batting .248/.358/.455 in 726 plate appearances with San Francisco from 2020 through the 2022 trade deadline, when he was traded to the Mets in exchange for the aforementioned Davis and three others. It proved to be a disastrous trade for the Mets, as Davis immediately began hitting in San Francisco, while Ruf’s bat cratered in Queens; he hit just .152/.216/.197 in 74 plate appearances with the Mets last year and didn’t appear in a single game in 2023 before being cut loose.
The Giants will have a week to trade Ruf, place him on outright waiver or place him on release waivers. He has enough service time to reject an outright assignment and still retain his full $3MM salary. The Mets are on the hook for that sum as part of last summer’s trade, so any team that picks Ruf up will only be required to pay him the prorated league minimum for any time spent on the MLB roster. That’d be subtracted from what the Mets owe to him. In 727 career plate appearances against left-handed pitching, Ruf is a .271/.368/.519 hitter (142 wRC+).
Pirates To Designate Chase De Jong For Assignment
The Pirates are continuing to reshape the edges of their active roster, as they’re set to designate right-hander Chase De Jong for assignment and select the contract of outfielder Josh Palacios from Triple-A Indianapolis, reports Jason Mackey of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Twitter link).
De Jong, 29, had what looked to be a breakout 2022 showing with the Bucs after bouncing between the Blue Jays, Dodgers, Mariners, Twins and Astros organizations over the first 10 years of his big league career. Last year’s 71 2/3 frames were a career-high for the former second-round pick, and he turned in a sharp 2.64 ERA with a 20.1% strikeout rate against a 10.2% walk rate while working as a durable multi-inning reliever.
Things have gone awry quickly in 2023, however. De Jong has appeared in five games and been tattooed for 11 earned runs on 13 hits (three home runs), five walks and a hit batter while only fanning five of his 47 opponents (10.6%). His swinging-strike rate has plummeted from a respectable 10.5% in 2022 to 5.2% so far in 2023.
Promising as De Jong’s bottom-line results were in 2022, his pedestrian strikeout/walk rates and favorable BABIP (.222) and strand rate (86.3%) always made some level of regression seem likely. The extent to which they’ve snowballed was hardly a guarantee, but De Jong’s track record prior to last year’s excellent showing was rough; in 98 innings from 2017-21, he was tagged for a 6.52 ERA with similarly bearish marks from fielding-independent metrics. Overall, in 179 total innings at the MLB level, De Jong carries a 5.18 ERA, 17.6% strikeout rate, 10.2% walk rate, 30.7% ground-ball rate and 1.76 HR/9.
De Jong is out of minor league options, so the Pirates’ only course of action if they wanted to make a change was to designate him for assignment. They’ll have a week to trade De Jong or attempt to pass him through outright waivers. Even if he goes unclaimed, he’d have the option to reject the assignment by virtue of the fact that he’s been outrighted previously in his career.
Palacios, 27, is a former Blue Jays prospect who’s seen brief MLB time with Toronto (2021) and Washington (2022). He’s batted just .207/.267/.232 in a tiny sample of 91 Major League plate appearances but is a far more accomplished hitter in Triple-A, where he’s batted .305/.391/.462 in parts of three seasons. That includes a Herculean start to his 2023 season in Indianapolis, where he’s tallied 60 plate appearances and logged a ludicrous .434/.500/.774 slash line with four homers, four doubles, a triple and three stolen bases (in three attempts). Palacios has drawn six walks (10.6%) against just seven strikeouts (11.7%) and seen time in all three outfield spots.
Max Fried Facing Notable Absence Due To Forearm Strain
9:04am: MLB.com’s Mark Bowman reports that while an MRI did not raise concern about Tommy John surgery for Fried, the Braves still don’t expect this to be a short-term absence. Fried will be shut down from throwing while his forearm heals, and while there’s no concrete timeline, it’ll likely be long enough that he’ll need to build back up from scratch.
8:31am: The Braves announced Tuesday that they’ve placed left-hander Max Fried on the 15-day injured list due to a strained left forearm. His placement on the IL is retroactive to May 6. Fellow left-hander Danny Young has been recalled from Triple-A Gwinnett in his place.
It’s the second IL trip of the young season for Fried, who exited his Opening Day start due to a hamstring strain that required an absence of a couple weeks. The Braves hadn’t given a concrete indication that Fried was dealing with an injury prior to this morning’s announcement, though manager Brian Snitker somewhat cryptically said over the weekend that the team was “going through some things” when determining the timing of Fried’s next start.
Fried, 29, entered his most recent start having yielded just one run through his first 20 innings of the 2023 season before being trounced by the Orioles for seven runs (five earned) in six innings. After averaging 94.8 mph on his fastball through the season’s first three starts, that velocity dipped to an average of 93.5 mph over his two most recent turns.
The Braves haven’t provided a timetable for Fried’s return or given any indication as to the severity of the strain at this time. Even if it’s only a minimal absence for Fried, it’s still a blow to an Atlanta club that was already operating with only four healthy starters. Right-hander Kyle Wright is out indefinitely due to a shoulder strain, and the Braves lost righty Ian Anderson to Tommy John surgery earlier in the 2023 season.
That slate of injuries had already left the Braves with Fried, Spencer Strider, Charlie Morton and Bryce Elder as their rotation options. Fried going down will likely require the team to call up two of Dylan Dodd, Jared Shuster and Michael Soroka from Gwinnett to step onto the starting staff.
Both Dodd and Shuster have been hit hard in limited MLB action this season, however, and both have displayed uncharacteristically shaky command in their handful of Triple-A starts as well. Soroka, meanwhile, pitched just 13 2/3 innings from 2020-22 (big leagues and minors combined) due to a series of injuries — namely a pair of Achilles tears. He’s gone more than four innings in just one of his five starts with Gwinnett and has been hit hard in each of his past two appearances, yielding a combined ten earned runs in seven innings of work.
There are other options to consider, though they’d require an additional 40-man roster move. Twenty-seven-year-old righty Allan Winans, for instance, has pitched to a solid 2.90 ERA in six appearances (four starts) with impressive strikeout and walk rates. He tossed six quality innings on May 3 and, speculatively speaking, could be an option in the next couple weeks if the Braves want to make space for him on the 40-man roster. Lefty Domingo Robles and righty Tanner Gordon were both recently bumped up to Triple-A after strong starts to the season in Double-A, but both have been hit hard in their first appearances with Gwinnett and neither is on the 40-man.
Certainly, in the event of a prolonged absence for Fried, it’s easier to envision the Braves going outside the organization to address the sudden vacancies in the rotation. That’s a scenario most Braves fans would prefer not to think about. The team figures to have more updates on Fried’s status in the near future.
In the meantime, Young’s recall from Gwinnett will give Atlanta an extra arm in the bullpen. He’s appeared in four games for the big league club already this season, holding opponents to a run on three hits and no walks with six punchouts in 3 2/3 frames. Things have been a bit rockier in Gwinnett, where he’s surrendered four runs on nine hits (two homers) and two walks with six punchouts in 4 2/3 innings. Young, 28, is a pure reliever whose lone professional start was with the Blue Jays’ Low-A affiliate back in 2015, so he won’t be a rotation option while Fried is on the mend.
Pedro Strop Eyeing Comeback Attempt
Longtime Cubs reliever Pedro Strop is eyeing a comeback attempt, as the right-hander himself made clear when tweeting out video of himself throwing a bullpen session this weekend. “I want to come back,” Strop wrote in yesterday’s tweet. It’s the second time in the past couple weeks that he’s alluded to a comeback by tweeting out video of a ‘pen session, though yesterday’s was more direct than the first.
Strop, who’ll turn 38 in June, hasn’t pitched in the Majors since 2021 and has thrown just 4 1/3 big league innings since the conclusion of the 2019 season. He’s pitched for los Leones del Escogido in the Dominican Winter League in each of the past two offseasons, combining for 23 2/3 innings of 3.80 ERA ball with a 25.2% strikeout rate and 11.6% walk rate. Strop also tossed 14 innings in the 2021 Mexican League, allowing five runs (3.21 ERA) on 14 hits and five walks with 16 punchouts.
Strop’s last season with a significant amount of time spent in the Majors was back in 2019, when he limped to a 4.97 ERA in 41 2/3 frames. His 27.5% strikeout rate that year remained plenty strong, but Strop’s 11.2% walk rate was one of the highest of his career and his velocity dipped to what was then a career-low 93.6 mph. In two subsequent seasons, he tossed 4 1/3 frames between the Reds and Cubs but walked eight of his 25 opponents in that time while sitting at 91.8 mph with his heater.
Prior to those struggles, Strop was a durable and excellent reliever over a six-year stretch with the Cubs. Acquired alongside Jake Arrieta in an absolute heist of a trade with the Orioles, Strop’s first six seasons in Chicago resulted in a 2.63 ERA over 331 1/3 innings. He pitched to a sub-3.00 ERA every season, fanned 28.2% of his total opponents and walked 9.5% of them. He picked up 19 saves and another 114 holds during regular-season play along the way, and he also excelled in the postseason. Through 17 total innings, he allowed just four runs (2.12 ERA) on eight hits and six walks with 12 strikeouts — including two scoreless frames during the Cubs’ 2016 World Series run.
Time will tell whether Strop actually gets another opportunity with an affiliated club and whether he can take that hypothetical opportunity a step further and ultimately return to a big league mound. He certainly wouldn’t be the first pitcher to engineer a successful big league return in his late 30s, though. Daniel Bard returned from a seven-year MLB absence at age 35 back in 2020, and Rich Hill was also 35 by the time he kicked off a late-career renaissance that he’s still continuing into his age-43 season.
Pirates Select Chris Owings
1:35pm: The Pirates announced that they’ve selected Owings’ contract and optioned Mathias to Triple-A.
10:36am: The Pirates are set to select the contract of veteran utilityman Chris Owings, reports Jason Mackey of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He’s not on the 40-man roster, although the Pirates have an open spot after outrighting Drew Maggi over the weekend. They’ll still need to clear a spot on the 26-man roster.
Owings, 31, is out to a strong start with the Pirates’ Triple-A affiliate in Indianapolis, batting .273/.360/.523 (121 wRC+) with a pair of homers, five doubles and a 10% walk rate (against a 26% strikeout rate) in his first 50 trips to the plate. The Pirates will be the seventh Major League team for which he’s played, and this will be the 11th season in which he’s logged at least some time on a big league roster. He’s played every position other than catcher and first base over the first decade of his big league career.
Owings hasn’t topped 68 plate appearances in a big league season since 2019 and hasn’t appeared in 100 games since the 2018 campaign. His versatility and strong Triple-A production — career .306/.347/.482 in eight seasons — regularly make him a popular depth piece on minor league contracts like the one he signed with the Pirates. Substantial playing time in the Majors has been tough to come by in recent years, however, in part due to injury but also due to substandard performance at the plate.
Though Owings was generally productive with the Rockies in 2020-21, thumb and hamstring injuries limited him to just 94 plate appearances in that time. His .298/.372/.536 batting line with Colorado was obviously quite strong, but it’s a small sample that looks like an outlier when compared to Owings’ broader track record. In nearly 2500 career trips to the plate, Owings is a .239/.287/.366 hitter — including just a .107/.254/.143 output in 68 plate appearances with the Orioles in 2022.
Presumably, Owings will take on a bench role with the Pirates, who already have a pair of righty-swinging infield/outfield pieces on the bench in Miguel Andujar and Mark Mathias. Andujar is out of minor league options, so he can’t be sent down without first clearing waivers — and even then, he’d have the right to reject the assignment in lieu of free agency due to the fact that he’s already been outrighted once in his career (earlier this year by Pittsburgh). Mathias does have one minor league option remaining, though he’s also sporting a solid .275/.370/.325 batting line in 46 plate appearances.
Rockies Outright Yonathan Daza
The Rockies announced Monday that outfielder Yonathan Daza went unclaimed on waivers and has been assigned outright to Triple-A Albuquerque. He’d been designated for assignment last Friday but will remain with the organization and no longer occupy a spot on the 40-man roster, as he doesn’t have the necessary service time to reject the outright assignment.
Daza, 29, has been a semi-regular presence in the Colorado outfield over the past three seasons, posting a strong batting average but offering minimal power with a marginal walk rate. He’s a .290/.338/.369 hitter with just four home runs and three stolen bases in 819 plate appearances dating back to the 2021 season. So far in 2023, Daza has gotten out to a .270/.304/.351 start with a career-worst 3.8% walk rate.
While Daza has experience at all three outfield spots, he’s generally drawn poor defensive grades for his work in center field. He’s received stronger but not elite marks for his work in the left field, but his general lack of offense aside from that fairly empty batting average doesn’t play as well in the corners. He’s also out of minor league options, so the Rockies couldn’t send him down without first designating him for assignment and sending him through waivers; conversely, any team that placed a claim on Daza would’ve had to carry him on its active roster.
With Daza pushed to the side for now, the Rockies will roll with an outfield of Jurickson Profar in left field, Randal Grichuk in center and Kris Bryant in right. Recent call-up Brenton Doyle is currently operating as the fourth outfielder, and while he’s had some issues making contact, he’s already displayed more power than Daza and stolen more bases in 11 games (five) than Daza has in his career (four). Both Daza and Doyle are right-handed hitters, and it seems the Rockies simply feel Doyle, a 2019 fourth-round pick who’s five years younger, is the superior option for the role that’s currently available.
The Rockies are generally thin on center field depth, so with an injury to either Grichuk or Doyle, it’s plenty feasible that they’ll select Daza’s contract and bring him back to the big league roster. For now, his DFA and subsequent outright will allow the Rox to take a look at Doyle, a younger player with more club control and an intriguing blend of power and speed — albeit with plenty of questions about his ability to make contact (career 29.8% strikeout rate in the minors).
Read The Transcript Of Today’s Fantasy Baseball Chat With Nicklaus Gaut
Nicklaus Gaut has been writing about fantasy baseball since 2019, covering a variety of roto and point league topics at RotoBaller and RotoGraphs, with over a decade of playing experience. He plays multiple formats but has recently leaned more heavily into NFBC high-stakes contests, entering his first Main Event and Online Championships in 2023. You can follow him here on Twitter.
Our regular fantasy chat host, Brad Johnson, is on vacation for a few weeks, so Nicklaus will be stepping in to field your questions while Brad’s away! Click here to read a transcript of today’s chat!
Royals Designate Franmil Reyes For Assignment
The Royals have acquired righty James McArthur from the Phillies in exchange for minor league outfielder Junior Marin, per a team announcement. Outfielder/DH Franmil Reyes was designated for assignment in a corresponding move. McArthur, who was designated for assignment by the Phils a few days back, will be assigned to Triple-A Omaha.
Kansas City signed Reyes, 27, to a minor league deal back in February, hoping that the 6’5″ slugger could recapture some of the form he’d showed with San Diego and Cleveland in years past. Reyes has a pair of 30-homer campaigns under his belt, including a 37-homer effort back in 2019. Overall, from 2018-21, he posted a combined .260/.325/.503 with 92 home runs in 1540 plate appearances. Strikeouts were an issue, as he fanned in 29.5% of his trips to the plate during that stretch, but Reyes offset that issue with his prodigious power and a respectable nine percent walk rate.
Things went south in a hurry in 2022, however, and they’ve gone from bad to worse in 2023. Reyes batted just .213/.254/.350 with a mammoth 37.1% strikeout rate in 280 plate appearances with the Guardians last year before being placed on waivers and claimed by the Cubs. A .234/.301/.389 showing down the stretch in Chicago resulted in an outright off the 40-man roster and minor league free agency, which eventually brought Reyes to Kansas City.
Though Reyes slugged a pair of early homers and had a brief hot streak in mid-April, he was optioned to Triple-A after going hitless and failing to reach base in 20 consecutive plate appearances. That swoon dropped him to a .186/.231/.288 batting line and sent his strikeout rate soaring to 36.9%. In four Triple-A games, he’s gone 3-for-15 with a homer, a walk and seven strikeouts (18 total plate appearances).
The Royals will have a week to trade Reyes, place him on outright waivers, or release him. His minor league contract came with a $2MM base salary, which makes it all the likelier that he’d pass through outright waivers unclaimed if the team goes that route.
In place of Reyes, the Royals will hope to unlock something in the 26-year-old McArthur — a towering 6’7″, 230-pound righty who has yet to make his big league debut. McArthur has opened the 2023 season with a rough patch in Triple-A Lehigh Valley, yielding 13 runs on 20 hits, seven walks and a pair of hit batters against 15 strikeouts in 16 innings of work. That’s his first taste of Triple-A after spending the two prior seasons in Double-A Reading, where he combined for a 4.73 ERA with a 24.7% strikeout rate against an 8.4% walk rate in 131 innings.
McArthur has worked primarily as a starter in the minors (including this year in Triple-A), though FanGraphs’ Eric Longenhagen wrote in his April overview of the Phillies’ system that McArthur was sitting 94-96 mph during short relief stints in spring training. Pitchers this tall can often have difficulty repeating their mechanics and thus be pushed to the bullpen, and it’s possible that’s where McArthur will ultimately land.
The Royals have Major League Baseball’s third-worst rotation ERA and fourth-worst bullpen ERA, so it’s hardly a surprise to see them adding nearly MLB-ready depth. McArthur doesn’t possess a huge ceiling, but he’s not far off from being ready for a Major League look, and Kansas City needs all the arms it can get at this point.
In exchange for some near-MLB pitching help, the Royals will part ways with a teenage outfield prospect who is likely years from being anywhere close to a consideration at the big league level. Marin turned 19 in mid-March and hasn’t yet advanced beyond Rookie ball. He’s already listed at 6’2″ and 240 pounds and has played right field near exclusively, with only a two-game cameo in left otherwise. Marin is a .328/.425/.554 hitter in 214 professional plate appearances but also struck out 31 times in 103 plate appearances with Kansas City’s affiliate in the Arizona Complex League last year. There’s some obvious power in his bat, but he wasn’t ranked among the best prospects in a sub-par Royals farm system and will now be a years-long development project for the Phillies.