The Texas Rangers were among baseball's most active teams at the trade deadline, acquiring Max Scherzer, Jordan Montgomery, Chris Stratton, and Austin Hedges to try and help push them toward their first postseason berth since 2016. Those pickups have been good ones for this Rangers team, but the addition they made one month prior is the one that has Rangers fans unhappy.
Texas tried improving what was a subpar bullpen by adding Aroldis Chapman in a trade with the Royals. Chapman was having a resurgent year with KC after really flaming out in New York with the Yankees. Chapman was back to throwing triple digits consistentl, and that's remained the case in Texas, but his struggles in save situations have been incredibly frustrating.
Chapman has a solid 3.32 ERA with the Rangers, but he's blown three of his five save opportunities and has also taken two losses in his 22 appearances with the club. Being the main reason the team blows and/or loses games is not what Texas had in mind when acquiring Chapman. Even with his struggles, that's not the worst part of the trade.
The Rangers trade for Aroldis Chapman has aged like milk in the sun
As if Chapman having his struggles and the Rangers bullpen still having massive issues wasn't bad enough, the Rangers are now watching one of their old pitchers blossom in Kansas City.
The trade looked like a Rangers fleece at the time with Kansas City giving up just Cole Ragans and 17-year-old prospect Roni Cabrera in the deal. Ragans had obvious talent but had an ERA over 5.00 in parts of three seasons with the Rangers while Cabrera wasn't much of anything as a prospect. Cabrera has played decently well in the Royals system, but it's Ragans who has blossomed into a budding star for the lowly Royals.
The southpaw has made eight starts with the Royals and has a 1.51 ERA in 47.2 innings of work. He's struck out 63 batters as a Royal and has allowed just one home run. This is a pitcher who had an ERA of 5.92 in 17 appearances with Texas this season and had no role in their future plans. Now, he looks like a future Kansas City ace.
Since the trade deadline, Ragans has been arguably the best pitcher in baseball. He has a 1.48 in his seven starts which leads the majors among qualified starters. He also leads in FIP (1.46) and strikeouts (60). He won the AL Pitcher of the Month for August, and started September by allowing just one hit with seven strikeouts in six innings against the White Sox. This is a trade nobody could've possibly predicted winding up this bad for Texas, and it's just the first of five bad ones on this list.
2) The Angels trade for Lucas Giolito has already run its course
When discussing bad trades, you simply can't do much worse than Lucas Giolito did for the Angels. Yes, I said did, because his time with the Angels has already come to an end.
in an effort to try and show Shohei Ohtani that the Angels are capable of building a winner, the Angels went all in at the trade deadline. They traded some of the few good prospects they actually had in an effort to acquire as many players as they could to help them in 2023.
The biggest trade of the many they made was with the White Sox, and it landed them Lucas Giolito and Reynaldo Lopez. The Angels got some good outings from Lopez, but Giolito was an unmitigated disaster.
The right-hander was acquired to be a frontline starter for that team, and he wound up posting a 6.89 ERA in six starts with the Angels. That ERA is a little bloated from one awful start in Atlanta when he allowed nine runs in 3.2 innings pitched, but the team was 1-5 in games he started for a reason.
The Angels let him and Lopez go on waivers to Cleveland just one month after they were acquired because the team fell out of contention and this helped them dip under the luxury tax. The Guardians claimed Giolito and in his first start with them, he allowed nine runs in three innings in a crucial loss to the Twins.
Giolito was the first to accomplish this feat of allowing eight or more runs in a game for three different teams in the same season in over 120 years. Surely his finish with Cleveland will be better than the start, but that can only be said with any sort of certainty because it really can't get any worse than that. With the Guardians now six games out, their claim will likely wind up being almost as pointless as the Angels trade. At least they didn't give up their top two prospects.
3) The Blue Jays trade for Paul DeJong has gone worse than worst-case scenario
The Blue Jays are fortunate to have one of, if not the best shortstop in baseball in Bo Bichette. Unfortunately, Bichette hurt himself just before the trade deadline and had to land on the IL. Losing Bichette for any amount of time was something the Jays couldn't really afford, but it did happen before the deadline at least, giving Toronto some time to land a short-term replacement. Unfortunately, the replacement wound up doing absolutely nothing.
The Jays made one of their two trades with the Cardinals around the deadline to acquire Paul DeJong in exchange for right-handed pitching prospect Matt Svanson. This wasn't an extraordinary price to pay, but it's certainly a trade Ross Atkins would do again if he had the chance as DeJong did virtually nothing for Toronto.
The veteran shortstop was having a decent year with St. Louis, hitting 13 home runs with a slightly below-average 93 OPS+, but he made up for it with stellar defense at a premium position. DeJong wound up being fine in the field, but his bat made him unusable.
The 30-year-old had three hits in 44 at-bats as a Blue Jay. Those hits were all singles, he struck out 18 times, and drove in only one run in 13 games played. Like the Angels with Giolito, the Blue Jays cut their losses and got rid of DeJong. The Giants wound up with the shortstop, and in his first game with San Francisco he had three hits in five at-bats with a two-run homer and a clutch two-run single in extras to help the Giants win a big game in Philadelphia. He hasn't done much since, but that one game was more than DeJong did in 13 north of the border.
4) The Marlins trade for David Robertson aging poorly
For the first time in a long time, the Miami Marlins were in position to go for it. They did so at the trade deadline, with their first big move being with their division rival. The Marlins gave up two promising prospects in exchange for David Robertson who at the time looked like the best relief pitcher on the market. Mets fans thought they could've gotten more, Marlins fans were excited. The tone has since flipped dramatically.
After blowing just three of his 17 save opportunities with the Mets, Robertson has blown three of his seven with the Marlins. He's taken four losses already with Miami in just 12 appearances while losing twice in 40 appearances with the Mets. Wins and losses as a pitching stat doesn't mean anything, but it's certainly saying something for a closer to have four losses in 12 appearances.
Robertson has gone from a 2.05 ERA with the Mets to a 7.50 ERA with Miami in his 12 innings of work. He's already been taken out of the closer's role, and appeared in the sixth inning his last time out.
Robertson isn't the only reason Miami has gone from a playoff spot to a team on the outside looking in, but he certainly hasn't done anything to make them better. The Marlins can still make the playoffs and the battle-tested Robertson can turn his season around a bit, but for now, this is a trade that's aging horribly for Kim Ng.
5) The Padres trade for Rich Hill and Ji-Man Choi has aged like milk in the sun
The Padres were a team around where the Mets stood at the deadline, yet New York chose to sell while San Diego bought. Granted, they didn't go all in like we're used to seeing A.J. Preller do, but they did make an effort to push toward the postseason while not trading any of their expiring contracts.
One of the trades the Padres made was with the Pirates, acquiring Rich Hill to fortify their rotation and Ji-Man Choi to be a productive DH against right-handed pitching. Both players have done next to nothing to help San Diego.
Hill, pitching for his 13th MLB team, has been a disaster for San Diego. The 43-year-old has a 10.71 ERA in six appearances (five starts) and 19.1 innings pitched. He's completed five innings just once, allowed six runs twice, and has led his team to an 0-6 record in the games he's appeared in.
Choi was supposed to provide somewhat of a spark to an offense that needed it. Matt Carpenter was brought in to be the primary DH against righties, but he's struggled to the point where he has just 13 at-bats since the trade deadline.
Choi hadn't had a good year for Pittsburgh, but he's a guy who's done well against righties in the past, and seemed like an obvious upgrade. Unfortunately, Choi is hitless in 11 at-bats with the Friars and has been on the IL since mid-August with a left rib strain. It's not entirely his fault that he's been unproductive, but that doesn't make the trade look any better for the Padres.
The Padres were three games under .500 and five games back of a postseason spot with a 33.9% chance to make it at the trade deadline, and are now nine games under .500 and 6.5 games back of a postseason spot with a 0.9% chance to make it.