Mariners Noon Number: M’s make middle reliever centerpiece of trade
Hernandez was rated the M’s No. 6 prospect by MLB.com at the start of the season. The other three players are all right-handed pitchers. Low-grade lottery tickets.
Granted, the M’s system overall is rated pretty low these days. They only have one player on either MLB.com or Baseball America’s Top 100 list: outfielder Kyle Lewis, who started his latest injury comeback on Thursday going 2 for 3 with a walk and stolen base for High-A Modesto.
So the outlay here wasn’t particularly expensive, but it was not nonexistent.
Let’s look at what the M’s got.
Phelps is a decent right-handed pitcher, more effective as a reliever. He throws hard (a mid-90s fastball with a useable curve and change). He has good strikeout numbers (career 8.4 per nine, 11.8 and 9.8 last two years as reliever). He walks way too many (3.5 career, 3.9 and 4.0 last two years).
He’s useful in that he has relieved and started in the past, but the list of guys that have made the switch to the pen and back to starter and had success is really limited (John Smoltz, notwithstanding).
Another thing that appealed to GM Jerry Dipoto is that Phelps is under team control through 2018.
But here’s the thing. Phelps is…just a guy. He’s a middle reliever. He’s never closed. He hasn’t been reliable as a starter. He’s a relatively useful arm in low-leverage situations that teams can usually sign cheap on the free agent market, or even pick up as a non-roster invitee or as a throw-in of a bigger trade.
Almost never is a middle reliever THE guy in an MLB trade. But the M’s rotation is sketchy, especially since they’ve been shuttling rookies and journeymen up and down from Tacoma to fill the bottom of the rotation all season with all the injuries. They need reliable middle relievers to pick up the slack.
Thus, enter David Phelps.
It just seems a shame to lose any controllable assets, however valuable they may (or may not) be, in order to acquire a middle reliever.
It will be interesting to see if Dipoto is willing to move any of the more interesting prospects in the system (see: Tyler O’Neill) in a possibly Quixotic attempt to end the team’s postseason drought, even if it’s just for a one-game play-in.