August 8, 2014
The Names: Chicago Cubs receive: Jacob Turner. Miami Marlins receive: Jose Arias, Tyler Bremer.
The Team Context: We all know about the infamous trade between the Marlins and Tigers. The Marlins sent an infielder and starting pitcher to Detroit, getting back a package of prospects that was highlighted by a pitching prospect selected in the top 10 of his draft. That pitching prospect had just debuted and was still regarded as one of the sport’s top prospects, but never quite became what they were expected to become. Meanwhile, the players that Miami traded away went on to reach new heights in Detroit.
Obviously I’m not talking about the 2007 trade of Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis for Andrew Miller and friends (we did talk about it last month). Dontrelle Willis was substantially better as a Marlin than he was as a Tiger and I said the “players” that were traded away reached new heights. And the Florida Marlins made that trade, not the Miami Marlins. Obviously.
I’m talking, of course, about the July 2012 trade of Anibal Sanchez and Omar Infante for Jacob Turner, Brian Flynn, and Rob Brantly. The Marlins had invested heavily in their 2012 team to herald in their new ballpark, it had gone quite poorly, and the arrival of Jacob Turner represented their first sign of capitulation. In the 2013 season, Infante posted the highest OPS of his career (with an OPS+ of 115 compared to a career mark of 87) and Sanchez led the American League in ERA as he finished fourth in Cy Young voting. Detroit must have loved trading with these guys.
Before we discuss what Turner had been up to, let’s clarify why the Cubs would want him. Chicago was exiting the final stages of its rebuilding process, which was being buttressed by effective pitchers plucked from the scrap heap. Jake Arrieta was going to receive Cy Young votes for the first time, and even the pitchers who didn’t rise to that height had still proven to be worthwhile trade chips. This was perhaps the pinnacle of hype for Cubs pitching coach Chris Bosio, seen as a miracle worker who could get the best out of previously ineffective arms.
The Player Context: Now that’s how we appropriately segue into Jacob Turner. Turner was the 9th overall pick in 2009 out of Westminster Christian Academy in the upscale St. Louis suburb of Town and Country. There’s an exhausting hierarchy of private schools in the St. Louis area and Westminster Christian isn’t one of the ones that I recognize as impressing the region’s elite, but maybe I’m failing to apply an appropriate baseball prism (maybe it’s a Catholic vs. Protestant thing, but nothing good comes of going into a St. Louis private high school rabbit hole). In addition to Turner, alumni of Westminster Christian who have gone on to be drafted by MLB teams include Tate Matheny (son of Mike) and Drew Benes (son of Andy). If Westminster Christian wasn’t always a baseball powerhouse, having a bunch of former Cardinals as team dads certainly got them there – the team set a Missouri record when they won their fourth consecutive state title in 2014.
Turner climbed through the minor leagues quickly, beginning his professional career at A-ball and pushing to Hi-A by the end of his first professional season. At age 19, he started the 2011 season in AA and was promoted from there to make his debut on July 30 – 25 months after being drafted and two months after turning 20. It didn’t necessarily go well in the big leagues, with Turner getting knocked around in his one July start and being sent to make his AAA debut before returning for two September starts, but just making it to MLB at such a young age is impressive in its own right.
The problem with your pitcher’s carrying tool being “youth” is that it’s inevitably temporary (with the possible exception of Daniel Ponce de Leon) (come on, that’s really funny). Turner started his 2012 season back in the minors after a slight delay due to shoulder problems and continued to carve through similarly-aged hitters upon his return, then got knocked around in three more MLB starts for the Tigers. Turner was traded to Miami one day after his sixth start in Detroit, made five more starts at AAA, then returned to the majors at the end of the season.
There’s a sense in which this was excellent early-career work from Turner and a more tangible sense in which this was very stupid from both organizations. When the Tigers tapped Turner for his premature MLB debut in July of 2011, they afforded him all the rights associated with MLB players under the Collective Bargaining Agreement. When they immediately sent him back to AAA, they made 2011 his first minor league option year. The rules of the minor league option system have changed somewhat since 2014, but the rule in effect at the time provided for three option years per player (this is still mostly the case, but they’ve actually carved out an exception where situations like Turner’s could result in an extra option year). Sending a major league player down to the minors even once burns the option year if they’re in the minors for more than 20 days.
So Turner’s first option year was essentially burned for vanity’s sake, with everyone clapping for the Tigers and their special little pitcher who could pitch in the big leagues as a 20 year old, even if the hitters tended to pulverize the baseballs he threw. 2012 became Turner’s second option year because he was still mostly a minor leaguer at age 21, throwing 111.2 innings across the minor leagues compared to 55 in the majors. When the Marlins made the decision to keep Turner at AAA to start the 2013 season, his third and final option year was set ablaze. He was promoted back to the MLB team a few days after his 22nd birthday and the Marlins had a strong incentive to keep him there for the long haul — they would no longer have the ability to send Turner back to the minors without subjecting him to waivers.
That seemed fine for a while. Through his first 75 innings in Miami, Turner had pitched to a 2.77 ERA that was wildly impressive for somebody his age. Of course, those who looked closely at his performance saw plenty of reasons for skepticism – Turner seemed to be benefiting from unsustainable luck, with a walk rate pretty close to his strikeout rate. The low conversion of baserunners into runs scored was juiced by career-best rates of stranding runners on base and preventing home runs on fly balls. Those aren’t really repeatable skills and things can get ugly if they turn around, as they started to towards the end of 2013. Turner was still able to close out the year with a 3.74 ERA that was quite an accomplishment as long as you didn’t look at any other numbers whatsoever.
The underlying statistics suggest that Turner was actually a better pitcher for the Marlins in 2014 than he had been in 2013. He bumped his strikeout percentage slightly while nearly halving his walk percentage, leading his FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching, scaled to ERA) to decline from 4.43 to 4.00. The improvement was even more pronounced by xFIP (expected FIP), where Turner improved from a 4.71 pitcher to a 3.90. Unfortunately for Turner, reality is not “fielding independent” and his actual ERA jumped from 3.74 to 5.97 thanks to a batting average on balls in play that went from a freakishly good .285 to a freakishly bad .368.
This would seem to be a natural time to send the 23-year-old Turner back to AAA to work on things in an environment with less pressure. That was no longer an option for Miami (pun intended as revenge for not laughing at my brilliant Ponce de Leon joke). On August 5, the Marlins designated Turner for assignment to give his roster spot to former trademate Brian Flynn.
We’ll briefly discuss the two pitching prospects who went back to Miami. Tyler Bremer was born and raised in Berkeley, but must have absolutely hated it there because he was drafted from Baylor University in the 27th round of the 2012 draft. Bremer is the only person known to have inhabited each of the ideologically distinct worlds of Berkeley High School and Baylor University (don’t fact check that). Bremer transitioned to the bullpen as soon as he was drafted and was moving up the ladder slowly, having just reached Hi-A as a 24-year-old. Jose Arias was signed out of the Dominican Republic and took longer to be shifted to the bullpen, but had spent all of his time there in the 2014 season. He had pitched to a 1.77 ERA at A-ball as a 23-year-old to start the year.
The Trade: Despite his poor start to 2014, it was something of a shock to see Turner placed on waivers so early in his career. This was not so long ago that observers were ignorant to the fact that Turner had actually pitched better than in his effective 2013 season. “One wonders whether Miami perhaps already has its eye on some sort of trade with a high-waiver priority club,” said Jeff Todd at MLBTradeRumors, before pointing out that Chicago would have the second-highest waiver priority after the Colorado Rockies. The professionals weren’t the only ones to make this connection; the top Reddit comment on the post about Turner’s DFA is from user “cubswinagain,” who wrote “DO IT THEO!” in reference to team architect Theo Epstein.
When the Cubs claimed Turner off waivers on August 6, Todd criticized the Rockies for failing to claim Turner (which he described as a “mystifying decision”) and the Marlins for failing to trade Turner prior to the waiver deadline. “Had the team decided to part with him just a week ago, it would have had a much stronger position from which to craft a trade,” Todd explained, correctly. When the trade was finalized on August 8, nobody really acknowledged the presence of Tyler Bremer and Jose Arias on the other side of the trade, only noting that the Cubs had “bought low” and that “neither pitcher ranked among the Cubs’ top 30 prospects entering the season.”
Both Bremer and Arias were older than Turner at the time of this trade, which I have to imagine is one of the only times that’s been true of the nominal prospects traded for an out-of-options major leaguer.
The Results: Neither of the pitchers the Marlins received made it to MLB, though Bremer came much closer. Arias’s time in the Marlins organization consisted of 13.1 innings for the Greensboro Grasshoppers in 2014 and 11.0 more innings for the Grasshoppers in 2015 before he was released on May 9. Bremer’s tenure was more successful, with appearances on the All-Star teams of the Florida State League (Hi-A) in 2015 and the Southern League (AA) in 2016. Of course, part of that was probably because he was way older than the other players at that level — it’s a little less cool to be tearing up Hi-A as a 25-year-old. In 2017, a now 27-year-old Bremer threw five final innings for the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp before he was released on May 1.
But it’s not like the Marlins missed much with Jacob Turner. His ERA ballooned to 6.49 in the 34.2 innings he threw for the Cubs in 2014. The Cubs exercised a $1 million option to keep him under control for 2015 (a weird provision that was a byproduct of draftees still being allowed to negotiate MLB deals in 2009), but an elbow injury prevented him from making any big league appearances that year. After the 2015 season, the Cubs put Turner on waivers and he was claimed by the White Sox. “In hindsight, the series of transactions [that brought Turner to Chicago] was largely inconsequential,” Steve Adams at MLBTradeRumors concluded, correctly.
The Aftermath: Tyler Bremer had pitched for so long in the minors that there wasn’t much appeal left in the independent leagues. He did join the Texas AirHogs for the rest of the 2017 season and worked out of the rotation for the first time since college, making 13 starts for the AirHogs while also launching his coaching career as a player-coach. After concluding his playing days, Bremer became a coach at Northland Christian High School, the University of St. Thomas, and then joined the staff of Houston Christian University in 2021, where he worked under head coach Lance Berkman (this guy must have hated Berkeley High School). It looks like Berkman and Bremer both left the school after the 2024 season.
Jose Arias seems to have taken a lengthy hiatus from pitching after being cut by the Grasshoppers, though he may have been playing somewhere that Baseball-Reference doesn’t have stats for. He re-emerged in the 2022-23 Nicaraguan Winter League, pitching for Gigantes de Rivas, then pitched for Tigres de Cartagena in the 2023-24 Colombian Winter League. He did not pitch well for either team, though he was substantially worse for Tigres de Cartagena. Maybe he just needs to pitch on seven years’ rest.
Meanwhile, Jacob Turner was still young enough for teams to spend time trying to salvage him. Turner was outrighted off the White Sox 40-man roster in 2016, pitching in just 24.2 MLB innings compared to 107.0 AAA innings. His experience with the Nationals in 2017 was similar if slightly less skewed, with his MLB innings up to 39.0 and his AAA innings down to 65.2. Turner was ineffective at both the MLB and AAA levels across those two seasons and was now working more often as a reliever.
The results weren’t much better in 2018 (and the MLB results were substantially worse), but at least things were more poetic. Turner signed a minor league contract with the Marlins and he made the team’s opening day bullpen. After he allowed 10 earned runs in his first four appearances, the Marlins decided that was quite enough of that and designated him for assignment on April 8. He pitched at AAA for about two months until he was released from the organization on June 4. Three days later, the homecoming was complete as Turner signed a minor-league deal with the Tigers. After about two months in AAA, Turner was promoted to Detroit to pitch as a Tiger for the first time since 2012. On August 7, he got the start in Anaheim against the Los Angeles Angels. The first eight batters Turner faced went single, single, home run (by Shohei Ohtani), reached on error, single, single, walk (with bases loaded), then single. Turner got the next three batters out (though another run scored in that time) to end his career on something of a high note, getting Justin Upton to strike out swinging. This was the last batter Turner would face in MLB, ending his Detroit reunion with six hits and five earned runs in one inning of work.
Turner pitched for one more season as a member of the Kia Tigers in Korea (Tigers of all stripes love this guy) before hanging up the cleats. He was still just 28 years old at the time of his retirement. Today, Turner works as a financial advisor as the founder of Moment Private Wealth, specializing in working with professional athletes. He’s active on Twitter at @TheJacobTurner and was recently named one of Investopedia’s Top 100 Financial Advisors – maybe less exciting than being named a top 100 prospect, but certainly more sustainable.
Miscellaneous: Jacob Turner found out about his trade from Detroit to Miami on Twitter (there’s other good stuff in this live chat from 2023).