Deal details: In a three-team deal, the St. Louis Cardinals acquire RHP Erick Fedde and OF Tommy Pham, the Los Angeles Dodgers acquire UT Tommy Edman, RHP Michael Kopech and RHP Oliver Gonzalez, and the Chicago White Sox acquire IF/OF Miguel Vargas, IF Alexander Albertus and 2B Jeral Perez.
I don’t know how the Cardinals managed to pull this off, but they get a very good and wildly underpaid starter in ($15 million total for 2024-25) plus a decent bench bat while giving up only a single prospect, a 17-year-old pitcher in the DSL named Oliver Gonzalez.
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Erick Fedde has been one of the best starters in the American League by any measure this year, ranking second by bWAR and 10th by fWAR, and he’s been durable and able to work relatively deep into games. He works with a four-pitch arsenal and keeps mixing up his pitches, with the cutter and sinker his most-used pitches by a small margin. The cutter is plus, and the sinker is probably a 55 (on the 20-80 scouting scale), helping him limit hard contact. He helps himself further by avoiding walks, with a 6.8 percent walk rate this year that’s well above the median for qualifying starters.
The Cardinals only have four regular starters, with Miles Mikolas below-average and Lance Lynn below replacement-level and potentially a free agent after the year, so getting Fedde helps them this year as they try to claim a wild-card spot while also setting them up well for 2025. They also re-acquire Tommy Pham, who plays the outfield.
Expect a different pitch-mix for Michael Kopech in LA. (Ken Blaze / USA Today)
The Dodgers did that thing they do where they insert themselves into someone else’s trade to get a player or two they covet and who, with the help of some Dodgers Devil Magic, will turn into a star in a year.
I can see why they might want Michael Kopech, who has one of the best fastballs in the game by velocity and shape, but uses it so heavily that hitters manage to get too much hard contact off of it. He’s gone to a harder slider/cutter this year, averaging 91.3 on the pitch, adding velocity at the cost of most of its tilt, and has ditched the curve and changeup. I’m going to bet we see a very different distribution of pitches from Kopech in LA, and perhaps something new in the arsenal next year or the restoration of one of his disused pitches.
The Dodgers also acquire Tommy Edman, who has been an elite defender at second base over the last few years, enough to more than mitigate his below-average offense (.258/.314/.392 since the start of 2020) and make him a solid regular who has had one season, 2023, where he’s produced at a much higher clip than that, worth 6.2 bWAR/5.4 fWAR. Given the Dodgers’ injury woes this year — and I should note that Edman is close to coming off the injured list, where he’s been all year with a wrist injury — and the lack of production from Gavin Lux at second, Edman’s an easy upgrade and could be worth as much as two wins over what they would otherwise get from internal options.
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The White Sox get a couple of potential everyday players in the trade, something they desperately need (along with, well, everything else).
Miguel Vargas has hit .239/.313/.423 in 80 PA so far this year, playing mostly out of position in left field, and he should be able to return to his natural position of third base, where he’s played just one game in his three stints in the majors. He’s disappointed as a hitter so far, with a league-average line and a lot of high flyouts where he’s getting under the ball too much while in search of harder contact quality. He has hit for three years in Triple A, with high contact rates and middling power, and I don’t see any reason to think he can’t do similarly in the majors — even though that’s less power than it seemed like he’d have when he was still prospect-eligible.
Jeral Perez just played in the Futures Game and has hit .264/.380/.420 in Low A as a 19-year-old, primarily playing second base in Rancho Cucamonga. He has a very good feel for the bat zone with a classic Dodgers launch angle-optimized swing that has produced 21 homers in 135 games since the start of 2023. He’s a patient hitter who doesn’t chase and takes plenty of walks, shedding the aggressiveness that plagued him last summer in Rancho. He’s a solid-average defender at second base and should be at least a regular, with a chance to be more if he starts to show more raw power as he ages, and could be ready in about three years.
The other player is a tier or more down in the system, although I think getting Vargas and Perez is enough of a return for Fedde and Kopech. Alexander Albertus is a 19-year-old Aruban infielder who mashed while repeating the Arizona Complex League but hasn’t done much at the plate in his 82 plate appearances in Low A, where he’s now on the injured list. He has excellent plate discipline and very good feel to hit, but with no power due to the way he hits, which doesn’t allow him to get much strength from his lower half. He’s a plus defender at third base, and even with his struggles in a small sample in Low A, he has kept his strikeout rate modest (18.3 percent) and his walk rate up (12.2 percent).
(Top photo of Fedde: Griffin Quinn / Getty Images)
