You Get a Reliever and You Get a Reliever and…
We’re barreling toward the trade deadline, which means it’s time for teams to decide if they’re in, out, or Tampa Bay. After picking which of those categories they fit into, the next move is obvious. In? Trade for a reliever. Out? Trade away your relievers. Tampa Bay? Make 10 moves, with more moving parts than you can possibly imagine. All of those types were on display this weekend, so let’s round up some reliever trades.
The Brewers and Rockies got the party started with a simple swap: Nick Mears to the Brewers, Bradley Blalock and Yujanyer Herrera to the Rockies. This one is basically what you’d expect from a deadline deal. The Brewers need relief help; they have nine pitchers on the IL, and while they just got Devin Williams back, they lost Bryan Hudson to injury earlier this week. It’s been an uphill battle to fill innings in Milwaukee this year. Mears slots right into the middle of the bullpen, helping to lengthen the number of innings the Brewers can cover with high octane arms. The Brewers have the fewest innings pitched by starters this year, so that depth really matters.
By ERA, Mears isn’t having a good year. His 5.56 mark is the worst of his career, and he’s been the fourth or fifth arm out of a pretty bad unit. He doesn’t seem like an impact get. But pretty much everything other than his ERA suggests that better days are ahead.
Compiling a 2.60 FIP as a Rockie is a spectacular feat. Mears has done it with a great big raftload of strikeouts; his 28.1% strikeout rate is the highest of his career. His 10.3% walk rate isn’t good, but it’s good for him; he came into the year with a career 15.4% mark across parts of four major league seasons. That FIP probably flatters him too much – imagine the kind of luck you have to allow only a 4.2% HR/FB rate while playing home games at Coors Field – but the strikeouts are undoubtedly real.
His fastball is the kind of pitch you can lean on – its velocity sits 95-96 mph, tops out at 99, and he throws it with almost pure backspin. He likes to work the glove side corner with the pitch, and this year he’s had good command of it. It might be the best fastball on the Brewers’ whole team right away, depending on how you feel about Trevor Megill’s similar offering. He complements that heater with a gyro slider and a 12-6 curveball, which means that all of his offerings work vertically off of each other. He uses his slider as an out pitch, saving it for advantageous counts and tunneling it off of his fastball, and the whole package works well together.
I think that Mears is one of Milwaukee’s better relievers today. It could get better than that, too, because the Brewers have historically been excellent at unlocking extra performance in relievers they target. Mears hasn’t even reached arbitration yet; if he’s as good as I think he is, he might be part of Milwaukee’s late-inning crew for three more years after this one.
To get Mears, the Brewers gave up two pitchers of their own. Blalock has spent most of the year starting in Double-A, where he lives off of his good-shape fastball. That’s his best pitch by far; a vertical release point and good arm action mean that it has plus vertical movement. It’s also pretty much all he has; he works a splitter off of it, but when the chips are on the table, he’s pretty much
fastball only. Eric Longenhagen thinks that his profile would work best in a long relief role, where that fastball reliance would be less of a liability, but given that the Rockies aren’t competing right now, they’ll probably give him more time to develop a good secondary pitch while starting in the minors.
Yujanyer Herrera, a new entrant to The Board, is an inter
