T10YL - 2014 MLB Trade Deadline, Part 4
Come for the two current LA Dodgers, stay for the unexpected felony conviction
The Names: St. Louis Cardinals receive: John Lackey, Corey Littrell, cash. Boston Red Sox receive: Allen Craig, Joe Kelly.
The Team Context: This trade paired the two combatants from the prior year’s World Series. The Red Sox won that battle, but were doing poorly enough in 2014 to trade away all their pitchers, as described in other installments of this series.
The Player Context: John Lackey burst onto the scene for the Anaheim Angels in 2002 and spent the next eight years in their rotation, leading the AL in ERA in his All-Star 2007 season. Lackey signed with the Red Sox in December of 2009 as one of the jewels of the free agent class, with initial reports emerging of a deal “in the range” of five years, $82.5 million. It took a couple of days for the agreement to be finalized at that exact figure, with reports emerging throughout the lull that the two parties were “working out the language of the contract, which will protect the Red Sox against a pre-existing medical condition.” A week later, Nick Cafardo reported that the contract included an atypical clause that would add a sixth season to the contract at league minimum salary if Lackey missed significant time with an elbow injury.
There’s a reason you don’t see contracts with clauses like this very often; playing at the league minimum salary is somewhat of an embarrassing situation for an established veteran. If a player is good enough to command more than $80 million in guaranteed money on the open market, he probably doesn’t want to accept a condition that would add insult to literal injury. If a team is so concerned about a player’s health that they insist on such a clause being included, they probably don’t want to give him $80 million, especially because a damaged elbow makes it hard to pitch well. Lackey proved this point on arrival in Boston, with a 4.40 ERA in 2010 that was his worst mark since 2004. It got even worse in 2011, as Lackey pitched to a 6.41 ERA while missing time to receive cortisone shots in his elbow. He was a center of controversy that season as one of the infamous Red Sox pitchers (along with Josh Beckett and Jon Lester) who was reported to enjoy beer and fried chicken in the clubhouse on days when he didn’t start. Unsurprisingly, Lackey required Tommy John surgery after the season and missed the entirety of 2012. This activated the league-minimum option for 2015, though that was something of an afterthought for a guy who would be four years removed from effectiveness by the time he returned to a mound.
As it turns out, pitching gets easier after you get your elbow fixed. Lackey was back to his old self in 2013 and made 29 starts for a championship Red Sox team. As he continued this performance through 2014, he became a fascinating figure for the trade market. Boston probably wasn’t going to end up with $82.5 million in aggregate value from John Lackey, but an acquiring team would only be responsible for the remaining portion of his 2014 salary (about $5 million) and a league-minimum salary in 2015 (about $500,000). But Lackey was 36 years old, had made more than $100 million in his career, and had already been a part of two World Series teams. Would he even bother coming back to play at that price tag? When asked about his likelihood of playing in the 2015 season by Alex Speier, Lackey was suitably noncommittal, saying “it’s definitely something I’ll have to think about at the end of the season, whether I want to keep going, whether… there will be a lot of things to consider.”
This trade was unique for deadline season in that the tearing-down Red Sox surrendered a prospect while the contending Cardinals traded two guys off their major league roster. Boston threw in Hi-A pitcher Corey Littrell, their prior year 5th-round pick who had been impressive in a short professional career thus far. In exchange, they received two members of the most recent Cardinals playoff roster.
Allen Craig was the more surprising inclusion after he seemed to emerge as one of baseball’s better hitters, ending up on MVP ballots in 2012 and 2013. Against the Red Sox in the 2013 World Series, Craig had slashed .375/.412/.438. But 2014 was a completely different story, with Craig’s offensive production completely drying up. Complicating matters further, the Cardinals had signed Craig to a long-term extension ahead of the 2013 season and were staring at $25 million guaranteed to a player who seemed more like a liability with each day.
Joe Kelly was an intriguing young starter on a roster synonymous with intriguing young starters. Kelly had been extremely effective in 2012 and 2013 while bouncing between the rotation and bullpen, even if there were reasons to be skeptical long-term. Kelly had a fiery fastball that didn’t strike many batters out and had stranded 82.4% of baserunners in 2013, a figure that is as fantastic as it is unsustainable. He also didn’t have much control, as notably demonstrated in Game 1 of the 2013 NLCS when he executed a hit on star Los Angeles shortstop Hanley Ramirez, breaking his ribs with a fastball and ruining any chance the Dodgers had to win the series. Finally, there were health concerns, most recently demonstrated by a hamstring injury that kept him out between April 16 and July 11 of 2014.
The Trade: As of July 24, the Red Sox were planning to engage with John Lackey on a contract extension, with team president Larry Lucchino saying “we’ll see what his frame of mind is with respect to longer-term contracts.” But on July 28, Ken Rosenthal reported that the Red Sox were being “hit hard” on Lackey as well as Jon Lester. A pitcher on such an affordable contract has a nearly endless market, and a flood of interested teams emerged by July 30, when the chances of a Lackey trade were reported as “very good.” On July 31, those odds were reported at a bizarrely precise “70 percent” likelihood. Fourteen minutes later, the Red Sox were close to a deal with an “NL team,” and nine minutes after that it was confirmed to be the Cardinals.
This trade had enough intriguing players going both directions that Fangraphs wrote posts focusing on each of the Red Sox and Cardinals. Mike Petriello wrote about the impact to the Cardinals rotation, concluding that the extra win or so that Lackey would provide over Kelly could be worth it for a team in a competitive division race. And, while Craig’s replacements in the outfield weren’t necessarily proven commodities, “the offense they get out of right field from here on out almost certainly can’t be less than it was before.” Meanwhile, Dave Cameron highlighted the Red Sox’s decision to target players who could help them in the near future. Cameron’s piece does a good job at synthesizing the key sentence: “Your opinion of this deal might very well hinge on what you think of Craig’s ability to bounce back and become something close to the player he was the last three years.”
The Results: That’s kind of the appeal of Trades Ten Years Later; if you don’t form an opinion on the Craig and Kelly for Lackey and Littrell swap until a decade after the fact, you have the benefit of certainty as to whether Allen Craig actually did have the ability to bounce back and become something close to the player he was from 2011-2013.
Allen Craig did not have that ability whatsoever, and actually played much worse in Boston than his poor performance from the first half of 2014. He managed to contribute -1.5 Wins Above (Below) Replacement in his time in Boston, which is impressively bad considering they only let him play 65 games. In May of 2015, Craig was outrighted from the 40-man roster and never returned to MLB. But as you may recall, the Cardinals had given Craig an extension that now seemed downright lucrative. In 2016 and 2017, Craig toiled in AAA and made $20 million for doing so.
Lackey made 10 starts for St. Louis after the trade deadline, seven of which were quite good, one of which was short, one of which was bad, and one of which was terrible. The Cardinals picked up his option for 2015 and, as a very moderate concession, threw in performance bonuses based on innings pitched. Lackey would earn $400,000 more when he hit 100 IP and an additional $400,000 for every 25 innings thereafter, capping out at $2 million in bonuses (and about $2.5 million in total pay) if he reached 200 innings.
Lackey threw 218 innings while pitching to a career-low 2.77 ERA for a total of $2.5 million in compensation. This was about $3 million less than Allen Craig made in 2015, which excludes the $20 million he made over the next two seasons. It would be nearly impossible for the other players involved in this trade to offset the absurd difference in value that the Cardinals derived by swapping Allen Craig’s contract for John Lackey’s.
The other players did their best; Corey Littrell did his part by never making it to MLB. Joe Kelly spent the next couple of years scuffling through the Red Sox rotation, but transitioned back to the bullpen for good in 2016. This was a much better fit, from both a performance and vibes perspective. Kelly helped to soften the blow of letting Lackey go when he helped the Red Sox win a World Series in 2018, his final year with the team.
The Aftermath: Originally, it was thought that a team trading for Lackey would prevent him from retiring in 2015 by negotiating a multi-year contract extension. But when the rubber met the road, it became clear that neither side had much incentive to do that. The Cardinals were reluctant to pre-pay a multi-year contract for a pitcher who would be 37 when an extension began, while Lackey was reluctant to take less than market value on what would be his last free agent contract. He spent the season dropping hints that he wanted to stay with the team, or at least somewhere in the NL, but the Cardinals let him reach free agency. This backfired when Lackey signed a two-year contract with the hated rival Chicago Cubs, particularly after the Cubs won the World Series in Lackey’s first year to give them their first in 108 years and Lackey his third.
That’s actually remarkable enough to call attention to. When Lackey entered MLB in 2002, the Angels had never won a World Series, the Red Sox hadn’t won since 1918, and the Cubs hadn’t won since 1908. Lackey managed to win a World Series with all three of those teams, but couldn’t win one while pitching for the historically successful St. Louis Cardinals.
At the end of the 2017 season, longtime teammate and fried chicken collaborator Jon Lester toasted Lackey by saying “tonight is probably his last regular-season start.” This was news to Lackey, who confirmed in November that he intended to pitch in 2018. But the only reported contract offer he received was a minor league deal from the Diamondbacks, which was not accepted, and Lester was proven correct in the long-run. John Lackey received one Hall of Fame vote in January 2023 and fell off the ballot.
Allen Craig’s final year in baseball was spent for the AAA El Paso Chihuahuas in 2018. He hit .293/.375/.480, which looks pretty good until you remember that he was a 33-year-old in the Pacific Coast League who couldn’t really play defense. Craig joined the Padres front office in the spring of 2019 and is still with the team, now in the capacity of “Special Assistant, Major League Staff & Baseball Operations.”
Meanwhile, Joe Kelly is still a major league pitcher. After contributing to heartbreaking Dodgers playoff exits in each of 2013 and 2018, the team signed him to a widely-panned contract ahead of the 2019 season for three years and $25 million. Kelly pitched poorly to start his tenure and seemed likely to spend his career as a team villain. But then, in 2020, Kelly had a series of moments that endeared him to Dodgers fans (it helps that he generally pitched better). He signed with the White Sox after his contract expired, but then went back to Los Angeles when the Dodgers reacquired him at the 2023 deadline. They declined an option on Kelly’s contract for 2024, but then brought him back as a free agent anyways. This is arguably his third stint with the Dodgers, from whom he’s made about $38 million and been worth 0.4 Wins Above Replacement.
The Names: Washington Nationals receive: Asdrubal Cabrera, cash. Cleveland Indians receive: Zach Walters.
The Team Context: The Nationals made a trade in February and otherwise were cruising towards the second NL East title in Washington National history. The Nationals had an inordinately deep lineup, with plus contributors at every position except for second base. Second base was primarily being manned by Danny Espinosa, who had regressed substantially after a promising start to his career. The nice part about having a bit of an offensive black hole on an otherwise talented lineup is that it makes your trade deadline upgrades really easy to figure out.
The Player Context: Asdrubal Cabrera signed with the Seattle Mariners in 2002, but had been in Cleveland’s system since he was traded there in 2006. He made his debut in 2007 as a utility middle infielder and eventually became a high-end starting shortstop, making All-Star teams in each of 2011 and 2012 as he began hitting for power. But before that, Cabrera had a career highlight playing second base when he became one of the fifteen MLB players to turn an unassisted triple play. After two consecutive singles to start the 5th inning, the Blue Jays attempted a double steal. Cabrera fielded the line drive for out one, tagged second base for out two, and then tagged a disappointed Marco Scutaro just past second base for out three.
Cabrera signed a two-year contract extension with Cleveland ahead of the 2012 season, keeping him with the club through 2014. While Cabrera was in the midst of the best stretch of his career, there were some concerns about locking him in at shortstop given that he was not good at fielding the position (notwithstanding the unassisted triple play). Before the year was over, Cabrera was actively in trade discussions, only remaining in Cleveland because no team was willing to meet the team’s asking price of “three-to-four prospects in exchange for their 27-year-old shortstop – preferably four.” In 2013, a separate reason to trade Cabrera began to emerge as exciting shortstop prospect Francisco Lindor began to break out in the minor leagues. That winter brought further trade talks and no extension talks between Cleveland and Cabrera.
On May 23, 2014, Jose Canseco tweeted (verbatim) “Mlb the nationals should be playing zach Walter’s every day the kid is a stud and the best player on there team.what’s going on,” followed two minutes later by “Mlb. Nationals zach Walter’s the next mvp and 40 40 tremendous talent he should be playing everyday.” Canseco entered the final tweet in this series two minutes after that, saying “Mlb. Nationals zach Walter's way more talent than trout and trout is the best player in the game.don't make me laugh.” Technically, there was an epilogue three minutes later when Canseco noted his consistently incorrect inclusion of an apostrophe in Zach Walters’ name and hammered home a “Mlb.Nationals keep an eye on zach walters.”
This was surely the highest praise ever heaped upon Zach Walters, a 9th round draft pick in 2010 who was ranked by Fangraphs as the Nationals’ #7 prospect entering 2014 and “project[ed] to have a similar ceiling” to Mike Morse. He performed well in a nine plate appearance cup of coffee in 2013 and was hitting at a league-average level in a larger sample in 2014 when he attracted the attention of Jose Canseco.
The Trade: I don’t explicitly credit this trade as an influence on Trades Ten Years Later, but it probably was subliminally. It typically takes a good amount of research to refresh my memory about trade discourse from ten years ago, but a tweet from Deadline Day 2014 immediately came to mind when I began writing about this trade. Brian Dulik snapped a picture of Asdrubal Cabrera sitting outside Cleveland’s clubhouse after news of the trade broke. Cabrera is in casual clothing, seated on a flatbed and hunched over on his phone. He is completely alone in the frame.
There were 19 trades on this day and this trade probably wasn’t among the ten most interesting from a neutral perspective. It was by far the most impactful for Asdrubal Cabrera, who suddenly found himself on the outside looking in of the only MLB team he had ever played for. Cabrera arguably had plenty of warning, with his name in trade talks for the past year and a half and a deadline clearly approaching, but that doesn’t mitigate the suddenness of the transition. One minute you’re in the home clubhouse with your teammates, the next minute you’re sitting outside figuring out how to start uprooting your life.
The comment “Sadrubal Cabrera” received 156 upvotes on Reddit.
The Results: On August 22, Jose Canseco tweeted “Glad Zach Walters from @Indians is hitting for more power. He will be something special soon.” August 22 was Walters’ third consecutive game going 1-for-4 with a solo home run as he hit the 6th, 7th, and 8th home runs of his career. This was arguably the highwater mark of “value” for Cleveland. Walters would finish his career with 10 home runs. Jose Canseco never tweeted about him again.
Cabrera continued to languish through 2014, with comparable offensive output in Washington to his disappointing season in Cleveland. Fortunately, Danny Espinosa had been so bad that this still made Cabrera a clear upgrade for the Nationals. Unfortunately, they were eliminated with a 4-game loss in the NLDS and Cabrera left the team after the season.
The Aftermath: Asdrubal Cabrera ended up playing 914 games in Cleveland and 908 games for the seven other MLB franchises where he spent time. His next stop was a one-year contract in Tampa Bay for 2015, where his hitting recovered enough for him to land a multi-year deal with the Mets. In New York, Cabrera fully entrenched himself as a plus-offensive, minus-defensive middle infielder, posting the best offensive numbers of his career until he was traded to Philadelphia at the 2018 deadline. Cabrera signed with the Rangers ahead of the 2019 season, hit poorly enough to be released, and then had his REAL midseason arrival with the Washington Nationals. Cabrera followed his .235/.318/.393 slash line in Texas with a .323/.404/.565 slash line in Washington as the Nationals won their only World Series in franchise history.
Cabrera re-signed with Washington for 2020, then closed his MLB career in 2021 with poor stints for the Arizona Diamondbacks and Cincinnati Reds that I seriously doubt anybody remembers (maybe the Reds tenure, which was memorable in that it was incredibly bad). His last baseball act of note came in a November 2022 game in the Venezuelan Winter League where Carlos Castro hit three home runs. As Castro rounded first base on his third home run, Cabrera extended his arm and charged at Castro with a running clothesline, sparking a massive brawl between the teams. In the words of Tiburones Report on Twitter, which I think you can get the gist of without speaking Spanish, “LO QUE HACE ASDRUBAL CABRERA ES DESTESTABLE. La sanción tiene que ser GIGANTE.” The punishment did end up being pretty gigante, with Cabrera receiving a 35-game suspension. This didn’t end his career, though; Cabrera has continued to play in the Venezuelan Winter League for the past few seasons, posting an atrocious .156/.270/.188 line in his most recent effort.
After Zach Walters fizzled out in 2015, Cleveland sent him and James Ramsey to Los Angeles for cash considerations on April 10, 2016, wiping out their 2014 trade deadline haul for Justin Masterson and Asdrubal Cabrera in one fell swoop. Between 2016 and 2018, Walters played for various minor league or independent teams, with his second stint on the American Association’s Kansas City T-Bones ending after the team traded him to the St. Paul Saints midway through the 2018 season. Wikipedia tells me there’s a citation needed for this claim and I have no idea where one would find that.
The Names: Houston Astros receive: Jake Marisnick, Francis Martes, Colin Moran, 2015 Competitive Balance Round A pick (Daz Cameron selected). Miami Marlins receive: Jarred Cosart, Enrique Hernandez, Austin Wates.
The Team Context: This one seems hard to parse, so let’s start with what’s easy.
The Astros were very bad. Terrible. Tanking so hard that they were drawing 0.0 television ratings. Laying the groundwork for one of the most insufferable sports dynasties of the present era. You get it.
The Marlins were also pretty bad, objectively, but not nearly as bad as the Astros. Given Miami’s recent context, which involved getting a publicly-funded stadium open for 2012, signing a bunch of expensive free agents, and then trading them all to field a godforsaken team in 2013, a team that hovered around .500 demanded some form of additions.
The Player Context: I immediately recognized six of the seven players in this trade, but it took until my fourth guess to correctly identify which guy was the headliner at the time of the transaction. That would be Jarred Cosart, a 38th-round pick out of suburban Houston’s Clear Creek High School in 2008. Cosart made his homecoming when the Phillies traded him to the Astros as part of the package for Hunter Pence in 2011. Cosart made his MLB debut in 2013 and was dominant if you didn’t look too closely, averaging 6 innings across his 10 starts and pitching to an ERA of 1.95. Somehow, Cosart did this while walking 35 batters and striking out just 33, causing steam to shoot from the ears of the staff at Fangraphs. Cosart’s ERA was up to 4.41 in 2014 even though the underlying numbers suggested he had actually been a much more effective pitcher.
The other departure from the Astros’ clubhouse was Enrique Hernandez, though he had only been in that clubhouse since July 1. Hernandez wasn’t much of a prospect in the minors, but had gotten 89 plate appearances in his first month as a major leaguer and made the most of them. He had a .284/.348/.420 slash line while playing centerfield and both middle infield positions. Austin Wates was also a centerfielder and was ready to go at AAA, though he had yet to debut in the majors. Wates had already set a new career-high for stolen bases in a season with 31 and was walking about as often as he struck out (it’s good when a hitter does it), two strengths that he hoped would outweigh his conspicuous inability to hit for power.
Miami only traded one player from their MLB roster, though he was also a centerfielder. Jake Marisnick was described as having “five-tool potential” in his most recent report from Fangraphs, which ranked him as the second-best prospect in the system. Of the five tools, Marisnick undoubtedly had the defense and speed figured out. The hitting-based tools were a bit more of an open question, with Marisnick showing a limited ability thus far to hit, slug, or draw a walk.
The Marlins were also sending away a 1st-round pick from 2013 and 2015. The 2015 pick was just a pick. The 2013 pick was Colin Moran, a third baseman who had been selected 6th overall and immediately started hitting like a professional. Moran probably wouldn’t develop enough power to be a superstar third baseman, but would almost certainly hit well enough to play the position acceptably in MLB. Today, Moran is associated with the bushy beard he sported in his later career, but apparently this was not yet on his face at the time of the trade:
The final prospect going back to Houston was Francis Martes, an 18-year-old pitcher who had appeared in 20 games as a professional. Unlike Marisnick and Moran, who were top-5 prospects in the Marlins system regardless of who you asked, Martes was relatively unheralded.
The Trade: About a month before this trade, the public learned about prior Jarred Cosart discussions between Houston and Miami. The Astros had an internal trade discussion database called Ground Control that included notes on player negotiations with different teams. Without explanation, notes from Ground Control were uploaded to the Internet, humiliating the Astros and providing unwanted insight into how the team valued the members of its roster.
Cosart had allegedly come up in discussions for Giancarlo Stanton the prior November. Then-GM Jeff Lunhow inquired with the Marlins about trading for Stanton and received a response that the only workable deal from Houston would include top prospects George Springer and Carlos Correa. Lunhow countered with an offer of Cosart and Delino DeShields, Jr. Both teams seem to have done well to reject those particular deals.
With a soft starting pitching trade market and freshly leaked notes that implicated the front office as offering Cosart in a trade, the Astros went ahead and made him available a few days before the deadline. The Marlins, freshly reminded that they had been offered Jarred Cosart, decided to pursue him. Unfortunately, the Ground Control leak was one month too soon for us to figure out how on earth a pursuit of Jarred Cosart morphed into a six-player and one-pick trade.
Marlins fans were generally happy with the trade, seeing Cosart as a clear upgrade to their pitching situation, Moran as an asset whose shine was fading throughout the season, and Marisnick as surplus to an already-talented outfield. Neutral fans couldn’t believe that Miami had given up such a steep outlay of talent for literally Jarred Cosart.
The Results: Again, I suspect this is going to be hard to parse, so we’ll start with the easy stuff. The Marlins finished the season 77-85, 11 games out of a playoff spot. Ground Control turned out to have been hacked by Cardinals front office employee Chris Correa, who used the password of former colleague and then-Astros employee Sig Mejdal in an attempt to investigate whether Mejdal had taken proprietary Cardinals information with him in leaving the team. The federal government estimated the damage to the Astros from the hack at $1.7 million, which seems inevitably somewhat made up, and Correa received a 46-month prison sentence generally on the basis of that number.
Now for the harder stuff. Cosart arrived in Miami with a “chip on his shoulder” and pitched to a 1.64 ERA in his first five starts for the team. It basically went downhill from there; the most exciting part of Cosart’s Miami tenure was an MLB investigation into his gambling activities that resulted in a fine for illegally betting on sports but a conclusion that Cosart had not bet on baseball. A vertigo diagnosis limited his effectiveness in 2015 and he was traded to San Diego at the 2016 deadline.
Jarred Cosart spent considerably more time in Miami than either of the other two players the Marlins received in the deal. Enrique Hernandez played just 18 games for the Marlins down the stretch, then was traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers that offseason. Austin Wates’ AAA stats declined after the trade and he toiled there through the end of his career in 2015.
Maybe it’s really only hard to parse on a player-by-player basis; the Marlins got so little from these players that it would be crazy to argue that they didn’t lose this trade.
For instance, it seems hilarious that Jake Marisnick was ever valued as a “five-tool player.” The only remotely good offensive season he had in Houston was in 2017, which we can choose to attribute entirely to the Astros’ cheating operation. But he was worth something like 10 Wins Above Replacement for the Astros simply by virtue of playing great defense and staying with the team through 2019. Hard to complain about that. On the other hand, Colin Moran’s career in Houston only lasted 16 games before he was traded ahead of the 2018 season. But he was one of the headliners in a trade that brought Gerrit Cole to Houston. Hard to complain about that, either.
The remaining two guys would seem to be more of gray areas, with each performing as sub-replacement players in their MLB careers. The draft pick in the trade was used to select Daz Cameron, the son of former star outfielder Mike. Except, wait a second, it doesn’t matter that Daz Cameron turned into somewhat of a bust, because the Astros traded him to Detroit in 2017 to bring in Justin Verlander. And that went pretty well.
For a while, it looked like Francis Martes was going to be the ultimate steal of this trade. Martes’ stuff took a step forward after the trade and he rapidly ascended prospect rankings to become a consensus top-25 prospect ahead of the 2017 season. Martes made his debut that summer and then things unraveled in particularly dramatic fashion. First, and most predictable, was 2018 Tommy John surgery that promised to keep Martes out for a substantial amount of time. Before he had returned, Martes received an 80 game suspension for using a performance-enhancing drug, limiting him to just 5.1 innings in 2019. Then, Martes received a 162-game suspension for a second PED offense. When he finally returned to pitching in 2021, Martes threw to a 11.66 ERA in thirteen appearances and then got released. So that’s a bad ending, but it’s about what would’ve been expected at the time Martes was traded, and at least Astros fans got to ride a fun roller coaster for a while.
Maybe this was easier to parse than I thought. Great trade for Houston, terrible for Miami.
The Aftermath: Jarred Cosart threw 61.1 innings for the Padres and never pitched again after the 2017 season. From 2018-2023, he worked as a freelance pitching instructor but he’s since become a business development specialist at companies that I’m pretty sure involve industrial cleaning of oil refining equipment. He’s wearing an Astros jersey in his LinkedIn photo, but doing so in a pretty casual way.
Austin Wates promptly began his coaching career, starting with the 14U Austin Horns baseball team (named after the city, not after him) from 2016-18 while also working for the Mariners as an area scout. In 2019, Wates joined the coaching staff at Kansas State University. He was elevated to his current position of Associate Head Coach after the 2023 season.
Enrique Hernandez stayed on the Dodgers through 2020, playing a bench/utility role effectively enough to become a fan favorite. He left to sign a three-year contract in Boston after the Dodgers won the World Series, then was traded back to Los Angeles at the 2023 trade deadline. He re-signed with the team for this season and has put up poor offensive numbers, but played everywhere except catcher. He’s also put up great pitching numbers in his two scoreless pitching appearances in 2024.
Daz Cameron failed to make an impact in his opportunities on Detroit’s MLB roster in each of 2020, 2021, and 2022. He was released after the season and spent his 2023 as a Norfolk Tide. In 2024, he signed a minor league contract with the Oakland Athletics and has split his time evenly between AAA and MLB, with 41 games in each at the time of writing. This is technically his best offensive season yet in MLB, though it still hasn’t been very good.
After a period of early-career stability in Houston, Marisnick became one of baseball’s most fungible players between 2020 and 2023. He played 16 games for the Mets, followed by 65 games for the Cubs, 34 games for the Padres, 31 games for the Pirates, nine games for the White Sox, 33 games for the Tigers, and four games for the Dodgers. Somewhere in that window, he spent time on the Gwinnett Stripers. Fortunately for Marisnick, his 2024 has been much more stable; unfortunately, it’s because he’s just been at AAA for the Angels the whole time. He’s heating up in August though, with 13 hits (eight for extra bases) in 13 games this month.
Colin Moran ended his MLB career (so far) after 1,692 plate appearances with -0.1 Wins Above Replacement and a perfectly league-average 100 OPS+. That feels cruelly accurate for Colin Moran, who spent his career embodying the concept of a generic Baseball Thirdbaseman. The most notable moment of Moran’s career came in a 2019 grudge match (sort of) against the Marlins. After a decade-long minor league career, Colin’s older brother Brian Moran was set to make his MLB debut for the Marlins. Colin had a great seat to watch his brother toss warmup pitches from the on-deck circle and he came up after Bryan Reynolds had grounded out to kick off Brian Moran’s MLB career. Brian got Colin to strike out looking on a full count pitch, thus earning permanent bragging rights. Colin spent 2024 playing for the High Point Rockers of the Atlantic League, but was released a week ago.
Speaking of releases, Chris Correa has been released from prison and is now the Senior Manager of Solutions Engineering at Code for America. According to his biography, he “is committed to transforming the way data and technology is used to support families and communities affected by the criminal legal system.”
