MLB Trade Deadline: Reactions to Tampa Bay Rays transactions

The dust is still settling on yesterday’s trade deadline transactions. Here we’ll summarize some of the coverage of the Rays trade activity from around the baseball world. No doubt there will be further analyses, which we’ll try to update, as usual, in our View from the Catwalk column. I’m sure baseball podcasts like The Ringer, Statcast, and Effectively Wild will be chattering about trades in the days to come as well.

For coverage of Rays transactions, you can read Marc Topkin’s assessment in the Tampa Bay Times ($). Topkin seems generally upbeat about the results.

The Athletic ($) breaks down TB-Miami trade, with the beat reporters for the Marlins and the Rays weighing in. You can find another beat reporter perspective from Juan Toribio.

Since the Rays were very active, I had expected for find some Rays-related trade commentary from some of the national writers. Mike Petriello, whose work is always great and even-handed, thinks Rays trades were among the most impactful of deadline day.

Ben Clemens on FanGraphs thinks the Rays-Marlins trade is worth discussing.

But otherwise, the Rays have not merited much attention. Some national writers, like Ken Rosenthal, seem a little grumpy about the whole thing. Rosenthal’s claim here ($) is that since few big name players were moved, baseball execs have clearly gotten too cost-conscious and risk-averse. The upshot, which seems to be the upshot of say 75% of baseball writing? Baseball is broken.

Other national writers looked at winners and losers (surely we can all assess these within 24 hours after a trade?), but few saw the Rays transactions as worthy of discussion.

For example, here’s Jim Bowden ($) on winners and losers, in which the Rays are neither.

And Rays don’t get much attention from ESPN’s David Schoenfield, either.

I suspect that these writers are focused on big names and a few big market teams, so with Yankees and Red Sox absent from the day, and folks like Madison Bumgarner staying with their original teams, they see little worth discussing.

Eno Sarris at the Athletic ($) also says little about the Rays — but he at least can justify his omission as he has a methodology for assessing trades, looking at changes in projected win expectancy. He finds that Atlanta and Cleveland were the ones to most move the needle, which is bad news for the Rays who are competing with the Indians for a Wild Card spot.

Finally, if you are curious about the couple of prospects the Rays picked up, Eric Longenhagen shares rankings of all prospects traded.