Before we moved Curtis Mead, I wrote a bit about “should we trade assets” at the trade deadline. The decision basically was whether to keep everybody in order to make a possibly futile run at the final Wild card, so that we could earn ourselves a 3-game away series in Atlanta.
Well, we just got SWEPT in a 4-game series in Atlanta, as a pretty clear preview of what we were actually fighting for, and before the final game of the sweep was done, the GM had clearly red the tea leaves properly and the team had moved Luis Garcia. He was held out of Sunday’s game .. but still boarded the team charter to Philadelphia since the trade wasn’t finalized, so he got the news mid-flight, and then had to catch a shuttle up the coast to join his new team.
- Yovanny Cruz, 26yr old 40-man RHP reliever who just made his MLB debut
- Jake Bird, 30yr old 30-man journeyman RHP reliever who’s in his 5th pro season but who still has 2 years of arb control.
- Jack Cebert, a 2025 15th round RHP starter from Texas Tech who just got to AA
- Ben Grable, a 2025 11th round RHP reliever from Indiana who also just got to AA.
Two 40-man players coming over; one replaces Garcia and Poulin goes to the 60-day to make room for the other.
We part ways with the longest serving player in our organization, an IFA we signed in 2016 as a 16 yr old who has certainly run the gamut of ups and downs in this org. He was a serious non-tender candidate just last December, but for reasons discussed in my post on the topic then, the team kept him and things paid off. He’s mashing this year, slashing .283/.313/.560 as of the trade, well ahead of his career slash line of .368/.301/.431. He LEADS the NL in slugging percentage amongst qualified hitters, which is amazing to see. He’s also an abhorrent fielder, going from -17 DRS at SS in 2022, then getting moved to 2B, where he got progressively worse over the next 3 years, culminating with a -17 DRS figure in 2025 (that’s awfully hard to do at 2B), which then led to him going to 1B this year.
To his credit, he’s slugged his way into supporting his starting at 1B. He’s also a severe platoon guy, posting a .918 OPS figure against RHP this season versus just a .627 OPS against LHP. Despite hitting well this season, his OPS is still a meager .313, but he goes to a park where his pull-happy swing could net him homers in bunches.
My cynical take? We took a non-tender candidate with a career .301 OPS who’s been relegated to 1B and turned him into 4 arms. No, these are not 4 arms who are going to challenge for the Cy Young necessarily, but we’ve turned Garcia into two relievers who can help today, a pretty solid looking AA reliever, and a AA starter who could turn into something.
I like this trade, and I like what the front office is thinking.