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Minor MLB Transactions: 4/28/21

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The latest minor moves from around baseball…

  • The Rangers have traded 24-year-old right-hander Leon Hunter to the American League West rival Mariners for cash considerations or a player to be named later, according to an announcement from Texas. Hunter was a 35th-round pick of the Rangers in 2019 who pitched at the rookie and Low-A levels that year. He notched a minuscule 1.38 ERA and amassed 30 strikeouts against just five walks in 25 innings during his first professional action, but with no minor league campaign in 2020, Hunter was unable to build on that quality showing last season.
  • The Mets announced that they’ve claimed catcher Deivy Grullon off waivers from the Rays. New York then optioned the 25-year-old to its alternate site. Grullon, whom the Rays designated on April 24, totaled 13 major league plate appearances between the Phillies and Red Sox from 2019-20. In his Triple-A debut in 2019, Grullon batted a productive .283/.354/.496 with 21 home runs in 457 PA.

Rays To Promote Shane McClanahan

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The Rays are set to promote top pitching prospect Shane McClanahan to start Thursday’s game against the Athletics, tweets Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times. It’s a nice birthday present for the 2018 No. 31 overall pick, who turns 24 today.

Shane McClanahan | Orlando Ramirez-USA TODAY Sports

McClanahan technically already made his Major League debut, but it came during last year’s postseason. This will represent the left-hander’s first taste of big league action during the regular season. It’s not yet clear whether this will be a spot start or the beginning of a legitimate audition for a rotation job, but the Rays have thus far received shaky work from lefties Ryan Yarbrough and veteran Rich Hill. Right-hander Chris Archer, meanwhile, is on the injured list with a forearm injury.

McClanahan pitched just seven innings of Rookie ball after being drafted and didn’t pitch at all in 2020 due to the canceled minor league season. He was excellent in his only full minor league season, however, pitching to a 3.36 ERA with a huge 30.6 percent strikeout rate and a solid 8.9 percent walk rate through 120 2/3 innings across three levels (Class-A, Class-A Advanced and Double-A). He’s considered to be one of the game’s better all-around prospects, sitting 75th at MLB.com, 90th at Baseball America and 117th at FanGraphs.

Scouting reports on McClanahan all note that his future may ultimately lie in the bullpen, where he can lean on a triple-digit heater and a wipeout breaking ball to thrive as a two-pitch, late-inning weapon. But he’s also improved his control and added a still-developing changeup to his arsenal, and the Rays understandably will give him a chance to start before dropping into a relief role. MLB.com’s report suggests McClanahan could be a solid No. 3 starter if the changeup and control are there, while FanGraphs’ Eric Longenhagen believes he’ll eventually be a power reliever at the back of the Tampa Bay ’pen.

Whatever the outcome for McClanahan, most expect that he’ll be an important piece of the Rays’ pitching staff for the foreseeable future. He didn’t accrue any big league service for last year’s postseason play, and he’s now spent enough time at the alternate site that his path to free agency has been pushed back a year. Even if he’s in the Majors for good from this point forth, he’d be controllable all the way through the 2027 season. Due to the timing of his promotion, he’s currently on track to qualify as a Super Two player, which would make him arbitration-eligible four times, beginning in the 2023-24 offseason. Future optional assignments to the minors, of course, could impact both timelines.

Rays Make Several Roster Moves

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TODAY: Patino has been officially called up from the taxi squad, the Rays announced.

APRIL 24: The Rays made a quartet of roster moves, including the activation of right-hander Diego Castillo from the COVID-related injury list.  Catcher Deivy Grullon was designated for assignment in a corresponding move to open up a 40-man roster spot, while right-hander Chris Mazza has been placed on the regular 10-day IL due to shoulder inflammation.  Luis Patino has also been added to Tampa Bay’s taxi squad, and is expected to join the active roster tomorrow.  (MLB.com’s Adam Berry was among those to report the news.)

Patino is expected to make his Rays debut Sunday, pitching in some type of piggyback capacity along with scheduled starter Josh Fleming, who told Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times that he isn’t yet sure how the Rays will deploy the combination of Fleming’s relatively soft-tossing arsenal along with Patino’s high-powered fastball.

Patino was the centerpiece of the four-player package sent by the Padres to Tampa Bay last offseason in exchange for Blake Snell.  For a controlled and affordable former Cy Young Award winner, San Diego had to pay a hefty price, and this mean parting ways with one of the sport’s top pitching prospects in Patino.  The 21-year-old righty has had some issues with his command, though his fastball and slider are already considered plus pitches and his changeup isn’t behind, according to MLB Pipeline’s scouting report.  Patino made his Major League debut last season, tossing 17 1/3 innings in the regular season for the Padres (with a 5.19 ERA, 21 strikeouts, and a troubling 14 walks) and then 2 2/3 more frames in the postseason.

Castillo returns after just a one-day stint on the COVID-IL.  Castillo has already recorded four saves in his role as Tampa Bay’s top choice at closer, along with a 2.79 ERA and 33.3% strikeout rate over 9 2/3 innings.

Mazza has an ugly 8.49 ERA over six outings this season, mostly generated during two rough appearances against the Rangers and Red Sox that saw him allow a combined 10 runs over 5 2/3 innings.  Mazza looked better in last night’s game against the Blue Jays, allowing only a single hit in three shutout innings of relief.

After being claimed off waivers from the Reds in early April, Grullon could find himself on the move again without seeing any big league action in a Rays uniform.  Grullon appeared in four games with the Phillies in 2019 and one game with the Red Sox last season, before Cincinnati claimed him away from Boston in December.  Grullon has a .253/.305/.405 slash line and 70 home runs over 2387 career minor league plate appearances in Philadelphia’s system.

Chris Archer Could Miss A Couple More Weeks

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  • Rays righty Chris Archer has already missed two weeks because of forearm tightness, and a return is not imminent. Archer is likely a couple more weeks from rejoining the Rays’ rotation, manager Kevin Cash revealed (via Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times). Even though he endured a disastrous 2019 with the Pirates and then missed all of last season because of thoracic outlet surgery, Tampa Bay reunited with Archer – previously a Ray from 2012-18 – on a one-year, $6.5MM deal in free agency. The gamble hasn’t paid off so far, as Archer didn’t complete three innings in either of the two starts he made before he hit the IL.

Rays Select Louis Head, Place Diego Castillo On COVID IL

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The Rays have selected right-hander Louis Head, placed righty Diego Castillo on the COVID-19 injured list and recalled RHP Chris Mazza, Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times was among those to report.

This is a nice birthday present for Head, who turned 31 today. He was a 15th-round pick of the Indians back in 2012, but he hasn’t thrown a single major league pitch to this point. Head, who most recently pitched in the Dodgers’ system, has logged a solid 3.67 ERA in 410 minor league innings. However, he has struggled at the Triple-A level, where he owns a 5.46 ERA over 90 2/3 frames.

Before going on the IL, the 27-year-old Castillo was in the midst of yet another strong season. Through 9 2/3 innings, Castillo has posted a 2.79 ERA with six hits allowed and 13 strikeouts against three walks, and he leads the Rays with four saves in six chances. Jeffrey Springs and Trevor Richards are the only other Rays with saves this year.

Ryan Sherriff Returns To Rays

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  • The Rays placed left-hander Ryan Sherriff on the restricted list April 3 when he decided to take time off from the game, but he has returned to the organization, Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times reports. Sherriff will head to minor league camp in order to get himself back into pitching shape. The 30-year-old has only thrown one-third of an inning for the Rays this season, but he held opposing offenses scoreless over 9 2/3 innings in 2020. Sherriff added another two scoreless frames against the Dodgers in a pair of World Series appearances.

Rays Place Collin McHugh On Injured List

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The Rays placed reliever Collin McHugh on the 10-day injured list with a back strain, relays Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times (Twitter link). Fellow righty Chris Mazza, who had recently been optioned, was recalled to take his place in the bullpen. It’s yet another injury for the Rays’ relief core, which had already lost Nick Anderson, Chaz Roe and Pete Fairbanks in the season’s early going. McHugh, signed to a one-year deal over the offseason, has pitched 5.1 innings for Tampa Bay to this point, allowing eight runs (six earned) but striking out five with just one walk issued.

Is Yoshi Tsutsugo Expendable For The Rays?

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  • Yoshi Tsutsugo is off to a rough start, with only a .154/.214/.179 slash line over his first 43 plate appearances of the season.  This performance has already cost Tsutsugo playing time, and Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times wonders if it might lead the Rays to part ways with Tsutsugo altogether, maybe as soon as May when Ji-Man Choi is off the injured list.  It would essentially be a punt on the $7MM salary Tsutsugo is owed this season, and while the low-payroll Rays would be loath to eat that much money, Topkin writes that “the Rays may decide Tsutsugo is a lost cause.”  The terms of Tsutsugo’s two-year, $12MM contract prevent him from being sent to the minors without his permission.  Tsutsugo was pretty average (98 wRC+, 99 OPS+) over 158 PA in his first Major League season in 2020, with the obvious caveats that he had to deal with the pandemic on top of the difficulties of adjusting to a new league.

Kevin Kiermaier Activated From Injured List

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The Rays activated Kevin Kiermaier off the 10-day injured list today, and he played two innings as defensive sub in Tampa Bay’s 6-3 victory over the Yankees.  It was Kiermaier’s first appearance since April 5, as a left quad strain sent the three-time Gold Glover to the IL only four games into the new season.  While still one of the sport’s best defenders when he is able to play, Kiermaier has been a frequent IL visitor over the years due to a wide variety of injuries, which is why the Rays have fortified their center field depth in the form of Manuel Margot and Brett Phillips.

Offseason In Review: Tampa Bay Rays

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Tampa Bay remodeled its pitching staff as the team prepares to defend its American League pennant.

Major League Signings

Trades & Claims

Notable Minor League Signings

Extensions

  • None

Notable Losses

The Rays began their offseason by, as usual, trimming payroll.  Declining club options on Charlie Morton and Mike Zunino removed $19.5MM in potential expenditures off the team’s books, though in Zunino’s case, the two sides only temporarily parted ways.  Zunino re-signed with the team for $3MM in guaranteed money, plus another $3MM more in total earnings if the Rays choose to exercise another club option on the catcher for 2022.

In short, the Zunino situation saved the team $1.5MM, and they ended up retaining a player they clearly value as a defender.  Zunino has yet to show much of anything at the plate as he enters his third season in Tampa, though as we’ll explore later, Zunino wasn’t the only move the Rays made to address their seemingly neverending quest for catching help.

Declining Morton’s option was a bigger call for the Rays, given how the veteran performed over his two seasons with the club.  Yet, as always, general manager Erik Neander and his front office looked to maximize the Rays’ value on what (little) they had available to spend.  Exercising Morton’s club option would have cost the Rays $15MM, whereas signing three starters and three relievers (Chris Archer, Rich Hill, Michael Wacha, Collin McHugh, Chaz Roe, Oliver Drake) ended up costing the team a combined $15.725MM.  Heading into a season where pitching depth may be more important than ever, the Rays managed to get six free agent arms for the price of one pitcher entering his age-37 season.

This is standard operating practice for the Rays, even when the team is reloading for what they hope will be a return trip to the World Series.  Not many pennant winners head into the next season having parted ways with two top-of-the-rotation starters, yet that’s exactly what Tampa Bay did in saying goodbye to Morton and in trading Blake Snell to the Padres.

The Snell trade was one of the offseason’s biggest moves for any team, and there was obviously a financial component.  Snell is owed $39MM over the 2021-23 seasons, so the Rays again cleared some money.  For moving a former Cy Young Award winner with three years of control, the Rays picked up a four-player package that they believe can help them in the coming years and as early as the 2021 season.

Luis Patino, one of the sport’s top pitching prospects, is expected to be called up at some point during the year to add yet another arm to the Rays’ rotation mix.  Francisco Mejia is serving as Zunino’s backup and, should Mejia start to show any of his past top-prospect potential, could end up supplanting Zunino in 2021 and onward as the Rays’ regular catcher.  Right-hander Cole Wilcox and catcher Blake Hunt are longer-term pieces that could prove useful down the road and give the Rays a pair of recent early draftees with high ceilings to bolster a perennially strong farm.

Time will tell if the Rays made the correct move in trading Snell when they did, and it could be that the deal only occurred because San Diego was the only team willing (or able, given the Padres’ deep farm system) to meet Tampa Bay’s big asking price.  It probably also didn’t hurt that the Rays already had a lot of familiarity with the Padres’ prospects given how the two teams have been frequent trade partners in recent years.

With Morton and Snell gone, Tyler Glasnow and Ryan Yarbrough are the provisional top two starters in the Tampa rotation, with Hill, Archer, and Wacha all signed to one-year contracts to round out the starting five.  That initial rotation has already hit a snag since Archer is on the injured list with right lateral forearm tightness, though Archer isn’t expected to miss much time.

Josh Fleming has stepped into the rotation in Archer’s place, providing the first glimpse of the second layer of the Rays’ pitching depth.  Fleming, swingman McHugh, Patino, Trevor Richards, Shane McClanahan, and Brent Honeywell Jr. could all end up getting regular starts as the season progresses, or at least handle bulk-pitcher duties behind an opener.

Pitching was very much at the forefront of the Rays’ winter plans, as the team reportedly had interest in such names as Martin Perez, Mike Foltynewicz, Julio Teheran, and Anibal Sanchez.  Tampa Bay also made strong bids to sign Corey Kluber and acquire Jameson Taillon from the Pirates, though both Kluber and Taillon ended up on the division-rival Yankees.

While there was risk involved in all of those pitchers on the Rays’ target list, they also ended up rolling the dice on the pitchers they did acquire.  Archer missed all of 2020 due to thoracic outlet syndrome surgery and hasn’t pitched well essentially since the moment Tampa dealt the right-hander to Pittsburgh at the July 2018 trade deadline.  As fun as it would be (well, for everyone besides Pirates fans) to see Archer reignite his career with his former team, it is still very unclear if the righty can be a notable contributor.

The same can be said of Wacha, as injuries and an increasingly large home run rate have drastically worsened the right-hander’s results in the years since his All-Star peak with the Cardinals.  Thanks to his increased velocity and strong swinging-strike numbers, however, Wacha did draw some interest from around the league despite some pretty miserable bottom-line numbers (6.62 ERA) over 34 innings with the Mets in 2020.

Hill is a different story, as the southpaw has continued to pitch effectively even as he enters his age-41 season.  Since the start of the 2017 campaign, Hill and Morton have very similar numbers — except Hill has only tossed 375 2/3 innings to Morton’s 563 1/3 innings.  Since Hill has proven he can deliver front-of-the-rotation production when healthy, the Rays will be particularly careful with his usage to keep him fresh for what they hope will be some important innings come October.

The bullpen also saw quite a bit of turnover, as McHugh and minor league signing Hunter Strickland were added in free agency, and the duo of Chris Mazza and Jeffrey Springs were acquired in an inter-division trade with the Red Sox.  Drake, Roe, and Andrew Kittredge were re-signed to new contracts, while Jose Alvarado, Aaron Loup, Aaron Slegers, and John Curtiss were all shuffled out of the relief corps.

Bullpen reorganization is a Rays staple, and the team will need as much depth as it can find from the farm system due to a number of early injuries.  Roe (shoulder strain) and Nick Anderson (partial elbow ligament tear) will be out until at least July, while Drake was re-signed with the knowledge that he’d also be out until around midseason due to a forearm problem.  Right-hander Pete Fairbanks is also sidelined until May due to a rotator cuff strain.

Given all these injuries, it isn’t surprising that the Rays are at or near the bottom of several team bullpen categories, but this is a problem that needs to be quickly solved considering how quality relief pitching has been a cornerstone of the Rays’ success.  If the bullpen is struggling, it puts even more pressure on the starters to not just post quality innings, but to eat innings altogether, which is doesn’t fit the Rays’ usual pitching strategy.

With so much offseason focus on the rotation and bullpen, Tampa Bay did very little with its group of position players.  Besides re-signing Zunino and adding Mejia, the Rays are more or less running it back with the 2020 group intact.  This isn’t to say that the team didn’t at least check into some notable acquisitions, as the Rays were linked to Kolten Wong, Yoenis Cespedes, and even Marcell Ozuna at different points in the offseason (though according to reports, Ozuna would have only been a realistic addition if he had been willing to accept a one-year contract).

Hunter Renfroe was let go in free agency, and the only other notable subtraction from the position player mix was Nate Lowe, who was traded to the Rangers as part of a six-player deal.  Since the Rays also picked up a couple of other first base prospects in Evan Edwards and Dillon Paulson over the winter, Tampa Bay might have felt it had the depth to part with Lowe, especially since the first base picture on the big league roster was also pretty crowded.

Two weeks into the season, however, Lowe is off to a pretty solid start — .245/.327/.510 with four home runs in 55 plate appearances.  Not earth-shattering numbers, though they do stand out considering that Ji-Man Choi is injured and Yoshi Tsutsugo and Mike Brosseau are both in season-opening slumps.  Lowe was even an above-average hitter (106 wRC+, 109 OPS+) over 245 PA with Tampa in 2019-20, but the Rays never seemed particularly enamored with the idea of giving him an extended look at first base.

While the Rays haven’t gotten off to a good start as a whole in 2021, it’s obviously way too early to write off a team that has made a habit of overachieving.  The Rays’ habit of finding hidden gems in trades or low-level waiver pickups also makes it somewhat difficult to evaluate their moves in the moment.  Who would’ve thought that postseason hero Randy Arozarena would end up as the headline acquisition of the 2019-20 offseason, for instance?  More pivots and roster alterations are certainly likely to occur over the course of the season, as Tampa Bay is perpetually looking to both build and rebuild even while vying for a playoff berth.

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