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Steven Hajjar

Guardians Acquire Steve Hajjar From Reds To Complete Will Benson Trade

By Nick Deeds | March 25, 2023 at 10:02pm CDT

The Guardians and Reds finalized the deal that sent Will Benson to Cincinnati tonight, with left-handed pitcher Steve Hajjar, a second-round pick in the 2021 draft who the Reds acquired from the Twins in the Tyler Mahle trade last summer alongside Spencer Steer and Christian Encarnacion-Strand, headed to the Guardians. Both teams have announced Hajjar’s inclusion in the deal.

Hajjar, 22, joins Justin Boyd, Cincinnati’s second round pick in the 2022, as the return going to Cleveland in exchange for Benson, who struggled in a 28 game big league debut for the Guardians last year. Benson, who slashed .252/.353/.479 in 116 games at the Triple-A level for his career, figures to open the 2023 season in the Reds starting outfield alongside TJ Friedl and Jake Fraley.

Hajjar, posted a 3.61 ERA in 52 1/3 innings of work in 2022, his first professional season. While Hajjar played in complex ball, Single-A, and High-A during his first season, the bulk of his innings came at Single-A, where he posted a 2.47 ERA in 43 2/3 innings. Boyd, meanwhile, appeared in 22 minor league games after last summer’s draft, struggling to a .203/.277/.270 line while spending most of his time at Single-A.

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Cincinnati Reds Cleveland Guardians Transactions Justin Boyd Steven Hajjar Will Benson

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Reds Acquire Will Benson From Guardians

By Anthony Franco | March 25, 2023 at 6:26am CDT

The Reds are adding to their outfield, announcing the acquisition of Will Benson from the Guardians. Cleveland receives outfield prospect Justin Boyd and a player to be named later in the deal. In order to clear a spot on their 40-man roster, Cincinnati designated infielder Alejo López for assignment.

Benson was the 14th overall pick in the 2016 draft out of a Georgia high school. Listed at 6’5″ and 230 pounds, the lefty-hitting outfielder drew praise from prospect evaluators for his massive raw power and exceptionally patient plate approach. That was always paired with questions about his propensity to swing and miss, as his size has led to concerns about the length of his swing path and bat control. That combination of huge physical upside with a number of strikeouts has been on display for the bulk of his minor league career.

He moved slowly up the ranks, not reaching Double-A until the 2021 season. That was in part attributable to the cancelation of the minor league schedule the year before but also reflected the three-plus years he spent at various A-ball levels. He topped 20 home runs in both 2018 and ’19 while drawing nearly as many walks as anyone in the affiliated ranks but consistently struck out at a rate approaching or exceeding 30%. That remained the case in his first Double-A action, though he hit 14 homers with an 18.1% walk rate to earn a brief Triple-A look late in the ’21 season.

Benson struggled in his first 27 Triple-A games, leading the Guardians to leave him unprotected in that offseason’s Rule 5 draft. The draft never transpired because of the lockout and he returned to their top affiliate in Columbus last year. The 24-year-old put together arguably his most impressive minor league showing, hitting .278/.426/.522 with 17 home runs through 401 plate appearances. He walked at his customarily excellent 18.7% rate and stole 16 bases in 20 attempts. Most encouragingly, he cut his strikeout rate to a league average 22.7% clip.

As a result, the Guardians selected him for his major league debut last August. He got into 28 games, hitting .182/.250/.200 with three walks and 19 strikeouts over his first 61 plate appearances. It wasn’t a strong start to his MLB career, though Benson’s Triple-A production clearly elevated his stock relative to where it had been at the opening of the season.

Benson has experience at all three outfield positions throughout his professional career. He’s long been considered best suited for right field given his size and above-average arm strength, though he’s a deceptively good athlete who’s at least capable of covering center field in a pinch.

The Reds will roll the dice on his upside, betting on him to sustain some of the contact gains he made while continuing to demonstrate excellent plate discipline and tapping into his power. He still has all three minor league option years remaining, meaning the Reds can freely move him between Cincinnati and Triple-A Louisville for the foreseeable future. Benson has just 66 days of major league service time under his belt. He won’t reach arbitration until after the 2025 season at the earliest and is under club control through at least the ’28 campaign. Future optional assignments to the minor leagues can push that timeline back further.

Cincinnati doesn’t have much certainty in their short-term outfield mix. Jake Fraley had a solid 2022 campaign and seems the favorite for left field work. Nick Senzel is penciled in as the starting center fielder, though he might be delayed in Spring Training as he recovers from offseason toe surgery. Senzel has struggled enough over the past few seasons his hold on the center field job probably isn’t very strong. There’d seem to be an open battle for reps in right field, with TJ Friedl, Stuart Fairchild, Michael Siani, Nick Solak and perhaps offseason signees Wil Myers and Chad Pinder — both of whom can play other positions — in the mix. Benson steps into that group and could vie for at-bats in Spring Training.

The Guardians have a number of controllable outfield options who looked to be ahead of Benson on the depth chart. The presumptive regular outfield consists of Steven Kwan in left, Myles Straw in center and Oscar Gonzalez in right. While there are some questions about Straw’s offense and Gonzalez’s extremely aggressive plate approach, Cleveland also has Will Brennan on hand as a potential replacement. Top prospect George Valera isn’t far off big league readiness himself.

Considering that depth, the Guardians have now twice subtracted a promising young player from further down the depth chart for a prospect. Cleveland dealt Nolan Jones to the Rockies in November. The Benson trade is a similar move, this time also clearing a 40-man spot while bringing back a player who’s further from major league readiness.

Boyd, 22 next month, was selected with the 73rd overall pick coming out of Oregon State last summer. A right-handed hitting outfielder, he raked at a .373/.490/.577 clip during his final season in Corvallis. Boyd struggled over 21 Low-A games to close out the year but was an excellent college performer.

Baseball America placed him 133rd on their board before the draft, praising his athleticism and collegiate performance but raising questions about his power upside. He’ll likely start next season in either Low-A or High-A for Cleveland and won’t need to be added to the 40-man roster to keep him out of the Rule 5 draft until after the 2025 campaign.

To accommodate the one-for-one swap, the Reds also had to clear a 40-man roster spot. That comes at the expense of López, who has been an up-and-down infielder since June 2021. The 26-year-old has played in 75 big league contests, hitting .262/.307/.321 across 179 trips to the plate. He’s shown plus contact skills, only striking out 14.5% of the time. That hasn’t come with many walks or extra-base impact, though, as evidenced by his modest OBP and lone home run. It was a similar story in Louisville, where he hit .256/.330/.363 with three homers and an 11.5% strikeout percentage through 46 games last year.

López has primarily played second and third base but gotten brief looks in the outfield as well. He’ll be traded or placed on waivers in the next week. López has never been outrighted and doesn’t have the requisite service time to elect free agency if he clears waivers, so the Reds could keep him at Louisville as infield depth if he goes unclaimed.

Image courtesy of USA Today Sports.

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Cincinnati Reds Cleveland Guardians Newsstand Transactions Alejo Lopez Justin Boyd Steven Hajjar Will Benson

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Reds Trade Tyler Mahle To Twins

By Steve Adams | August 2, 2022 at 3:10pm CDT

The Twins have nabbed their second notable arm of the day, acquiring right-hander Tyler Mahle in a trade with the Reds, the teams announced. Cincinnati is receiving infield prospects Spencer Steer and Christian Encarnacion-Strand as well as left-handed pitching prospect Steven Hajjar in the deal. Minnesota has had interest in Mahle dating back to the offseason, when they also picked up another Reds starter, Sonny Gray, in a swap that sent 2021 first-rounder Chase Petty to the Reds.

Tyler Mahle

Minnesota has been focused on upgrading its pitching staff, both in the rotation and in the bullpen. Having already landed Orioles closer Jorge Lopez in a trade with Baltimore earlier this morning, it seems their focus has shifted to Mahle, who’d reunite with Gray and give the Twins a starter they can control for the remainder of the current season and for the 2023 campaign.

Mahle, 28 next month, has shaken off a terrible start to the 2022 season and pitched quite well over the past two months. He had a brief stint on the injured list due to a shoulder strain in mid-July, but Mahle only missed minimal time and has made a pair of effective starts since returning. Dating back to May 29, he’s pitched to a 2.83 ERA with a 27.9% strikeout rate and 7% walk rate in 57 1/3 innings.

Since a breakout during the 2020 season, Mahle has pitched to a 3.93 ERA with a 27.4% strikeout rate and 8.9% walk rate in 332 big league innings. He’s averaged 94 mph with his heater along the way and leaned heavily on a splitter and slider that have both graded out as above-average pitches at times — more recently favoring the splitter (particularly as a means of neutralizing lefties).

Beyond Mahle’s solid ERA, it’s easy to be intrigued by how he might fare when finally escaping the homer-happy confines of Cincinnati’s Great American Ball Park. He’s worked to an ugly 4.83 ERA and yielded an average of 1.69 home runs per nine innings over the past three seasons while pitching at home but boasts an outstanding 2.93 ERA and just a 0.52 HR/9 mark on the road. He also has above-average spin on his heater and rates in the 76th percentile or better, per Statcast, in each of the following metrics: expected ERA, expected batting average, expected slugging percentage and expected wOBA.

Mahle will give the Twins some desperately needed help in the rotation, which started the season on a surprisingly strong note but has floundered of late. Opening Day rotation members Bailey Ober and Chris Paddack are both on the injured list — Paddack lost for the season due to Tommy John surgery — and 2020 Cy Young runner-up Kenta Maeda is recovering from his own TJ procedure, performed late last season.

The Twins have leaned heavily on Mahle’s former Reds rotationmate Gray, rookie Joe Ryan and veterans Chris Archer and Dylan Bundy so far in 2022. Gray and Ryan have both been strong — a disastrous five-homer start for Ryan in his last appearance notwithstanding — and Bundy has been serviceable, if unspectacular, outside a pair of catastrophic starts of his own at the end of April and in early May. Archer has been limited to four or five outings per start throughout the season and begun to wilt in recent weeks, however, and the Twins’ overall rotation mix simply underwhelmed in July. Twins starters yielded an awful 6.49 ERA in July — third-worst among all big league teams.

Mahle is earning $5.2MM this season, making him plenty affordable even when factoring in his final arbitration raise for next season (or, as Dan Hayes of The Athletic suggests, in a potential long-term extension). Even absent an extension, he can be penciled into the 2023 staff alongside Gray, Ryan and (health-permitting) Maeda. That’s a much more solid foundation than the team carried into the current season.

Unlike this morning’s acquisition of Lopez, the Twins paid fairly extensively from the top end of their system to get this deal done. Steer, the Twins’ third-round pick in 2019, recently moved into the back end of Baseball America’s midseason top-100 rankings on the heels of a big first half.

Splitting his time between Double-A and Triple-A, Steer has turned in a combined .269/.361/.528 batting line with 20 home runs, 23 doubles, three triples, a 17% strikeout rate and a strong 10.8% walk rate. He’s split his time between second base, third base and shortstop this season, spending the bulk of his time at the hot corner (although Baseball America cites second as his best position). Given his breakout showing this year, it’s not unreasonable to think Steer could be an option for the Reds within the next year.

The 22-year-old Encarnacion-Strand, meanwhile was Minnesota’s fourth-round selection just last year. As with Steer, he’d having a huge season in the minors, logging a combined .302/.374/.612 batting line with 25 home runs, 25 doubles and four triples between Class-A Advanced and Double-A. Strikeouts have been more of an issue for Encarnacion-Strand than for Steer, as he’s fanned in about a quarter of his place appearances this season against a solid 8.7% walk rate. BA ranked him 14th in the Twins’ system, touting his plus-plus raw power but noting that he’s at best a fringey defender at third base and may need to move across the diamond.

Hajjar, 21, was the Twins’ second-round pick in last year’s draft and has had an impressive first full pro season this year. Minnesota has been limiting his workload, evidenced by 45 1/3 innings across a combined 13 starts, but the results have been strong. The former Michigan standout has logged a 3.18 ERA with a gaudy 39.2% strikeout rate so far, although his 14% walk rate is something he’ll obviously need to hone is he’s to ever realize his ceiling as a mid-rotation starter.

Hajjar can reach the mid-to-upper 90s with his heater, which he complements with a slider and changeup. Notably, Hajjar did spend more than a month on the shelf due to a shoulder strain, and his results since returning have been diminished. Still, he’s a clearly talented arm whom the Reds can add to the middle tier of a farm system they’re rapidly restocking.

With this trade, the Twins have now moved on from four of their top five picks in the 2021 draft since trading for Gray just prior to the season. That’ll take a toll on the system, which has also been harmed by a series of injuries to last year’s wave of top prospects (e.g. Josh Winder, Jordan Balazovic). That said, it’s also a testament to the strength of last year’s class. And, with the Twins receiving strong production from some recent graduates of the farm — including the aforementioned Ryan leverage reliever Jhoan Duran and slugging corner infielder Jose Miranda, among others — there’ll be a bit less pressure to tap into the upper levels of their system in the immediate future.

Time will tell whether the Twins have another move up their sleeve. They could certainly use another reliever and/or another starter, to say nothing of a backup catcher or an outfielder — all rumored to be on Minnesota’s wishlist. There’s about two hours left for them to find a way to pull together another deal (or deals). The Reds, meanwhile, will surely have other players on the move as general manager Nick Krall and his staff continue to restock the farm and simultaneously slash payroll.

C. Trent Rosecrans of The Athletic first reported (via Twitter) that the Twins and Reds were in “serious” talks regarding Mahle. The New York Post’s Jon Heyman tweeted that a deal was in place. Ted Schwerzler of TwinsDaily was first with the return (Twitter link).

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Cincinnati Reds Minnesota Twins Newsstand Transactions Christian Encarnacion-Strand Spencer Steer Steven Hajjar Tyler Mahle

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