Breaking news! A trade

[harmony]

Disappointed Minnesota Twins fans react to the Harry Ford trade:

https://twinsdaily.com/forums/topic/727 ... nt-1592811

[D-train]

We got Garver for 2 years at $25MM.

Fuck it all - got get JT Realmuto for 2 years at $15MM AAV with mutual option for year 3. Give Raleigh a break - he can’t take the grind he took last year forever. Split DH and catching with JT. He’s got great defense and he’s worth 2.0 WAR easily.

For another $5-6MM I’d say JT’s 2 WAR is better than Mitch’s -0.1

Better bargain than Garver. IMHO.

Cal caught 120 games and hit 60 HRs. Can't fathom why we would want to mess with that. He was NEVER injured. OPS of .996 as a C and .788 as a DH.

[D-train]

Varitek for Slocumb Redux?

Yep. This guy’s numbers are mediocre. Dumb move imho. Should have gotten more.

Why couldn’t they have just picked up another reliever off the scrap heap like they’ve been doing for years?

Just based on his stats at Tacoma, Ford looks like a pretty solid player, and it’s not realistic to expect Cal to keep catching 150 games a year for too much longer.

As I posted earlier, to not even give the kid a chance to see what he could do, seems ridiculous.

Again, Cal caught 120 games last season and hit 60 HRs. Hit 49 HRs as a C and 11 as a DH so yeah let's DH him 100 times a season.

[D-train]

Moral of the story. Don't take a guy that couldn't even hit .300 in HS with the 12th overall pick in the draft.

Screenshot 2025-12-07 093054.png (93.87 KiB) Viewed 130 times

[Seattle or Bust]

Disappointed Minnesota Twins fans react to the Harry Ford trade:

https://twinsdaily.com/forums/topic/727 ... nt-1592811

For what reason?

They had nothing to trade for Ford after trading Duran for Eduardo Tait.

[Seattle or Bust]

Moral of the story. Don't take a guy that couldn't even hit .300 in HS with the 12th overall pick in the draft.

Screenshot 2025-12-07 093054.png

I mean, he's hit for a high average in the minors...

The bigger concern is just 5 homers as a senior with a metal bat in his hands.

My brother hit 13 his senior year and certainly wasn't a 1st round pick.

[Seattle or Bust]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9f5O5aqYVE

I mean it's hard not to watch this and think he can't be one of the best relievers in the league.

No lefty relievers throw 101 and have this kinda secondary stuff.

Go to 5 mins in the vid and look at the AB vs Soto. Pure dominance.

[Sexymarinersfan]

Great piece by Keith Law on the Harrison Ford for Ferrer trade.

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/686890 ... ers-trade/

[AT Fresno]

Reese Maguire is available....

[Big_Maple]

In case folks don’t get the Keith Law article, here’s the full text:

In the most Hollywood trade since the Texas Rangers picked up Cole Hamels, the Mariners acquired Jose Ferrer from the Nationals on Saturday night for Harrison Ford (fine, Harry Ford, but his given name is Harrison). Ford was Seattle’s 2021 first-round pick and was a top-100 prospect as recently as this offseason, while Ferrer is a left-handed reliever coming off a mixed season at best. I like the deal for both sides.

Even though at first glance it looks like the Mariners gave up a top prospect for a generic middle reliever, the pitcher they’re getting is a lot better than his 4.48 ERA last year might imply. Jose Ferrer — still the true Cyrano, no disrespect to Steve Martin — is that left-handed reliever, and he’s coming off his first full year in the majors.

He appeared in 72 games for the Nationals in 2025, putting him in the top 10 in the league in appearances, and posted a 64 percent groundball rate while walking just 4.6 percent of opposing batters. He did this by throwing his 97-98 mph sinker about 70 percent of the time, which would be fine if he had no other weapons, but he does have at least one and maybe two.

He’s developed an above-average or better changeup with hard tumbling action, and he throws what I think are both a cutter and a slider. (Statcast calls them all sliders, but within the data, you can see two clusters by spin rate and horizontal break.) The slider is a real swing-and-miss pitch. It’s almost deranged that Ferrer didn’t use the secondary stuff more, given the size of the platoon split he had last year, with righties hitting .323/.380/.422 off him with a .408 (!) BABIP.

I can see what the Mariners might like about Ferrer: He gets groundballs and doesn’t walk guys. He has two underutilized weapons that should get him more swings and misses while closing that platoon split.

Meanwhile, Ford’s star has dimmed in the last year or two. Even in February, when I ranked him as the No. 79 prospect in baseball, I pointed out that the odds of him sticking at catcher were declining, and he still hasn’t shown all that much in-game power. The same is true now, and then some. Still, he gets on base at a very high clip, with a .408 OBP in the hitter-friendly Pacific Coast League last year, bolstered by a 16 percent walk rate, without being passive.

Ford doesn’t square the ball up consistently enough for real power, making a lot of medium contact in Triple A but not enough hard contact to see 20 homers, and he continued to pop the ball up too often. The Mariners tried him briefly in the outfield in 2024 but only gave him eight games in left before giving up on the experiment, which wasn’t showing much promise.

The Nationals are in an entirely different situation: They don’t have the MVP runner-up behind the plate in the majors, and they don’t have a catching prospect above Double A, which is probably being generous to Nationals prospect Caleb Lomavita despite his rough year at the plate. They can try Ford at other positions, and they can consider whether to work with him on his swing to get to more consistent hard contact, although I know the Mariners worked on that, as well.

For Washington, this is a good reliever they’ll never miss for a player who has a career OBP in the minors of .405, coming to a club that had exactly one regular with an OBP over .325 last year. It’s a model trade for the Nats, one they should hope to repeat as often as possible.