The Cleveland Guardians announced that they have traded Bradley Zimmer to the Toronto Blue Jays in exchange for pitcher Anthony Castro.
The move comes just hours after Cleveland abandoned its season opener for the Royals. A game in which rookie outfielder Steven Cowan made a pair of walks, recorded a hit, and generally looked like a major-league player. Now, I'm not saying that one game made them pull the trigger on the deal, but they've been seeing this sort of thing from Kwan all spring and throughout their careers. At least, let's hope this trade gives him consistent play time to move forward.
For Zimmer, the promise was always there—being one of the fastest players in baseball with lightning potential got him an extended stay in the majors—but strikeouts kept him from really sticking to the Guardians' outfield. Zimmer finished his Guardian career with a .225/.310/.347 slash and 19 home runs in 263 games. He had his best performance in Cleveland last year as he finished with 89 WRC+ in 99 games and tied his career high with eight home runs. But he also hit 35.1% of the time, which is no worse than his 33.3% career rate.
Clearly the bad outweighs the good in this scenario, and the Guardians don't believe he can cut well enough to make an impact, even when paired with Oscar Mercado in a platoon. goes.
The Guardians got 26-year-old right-handed reliever Anthony Castro in exchange for Zimmer. Castro has 25.2 Major-League innings with a 5.26 ERA and a 22% strike-to-walk ratio. Here's what FanGraph had to say about him on their list of top prospects when the Blue Jays claimed him an exemption from Detroit last season:
He has been on the first potential list because of his superb frame and modest but relevant hand strength (lots of 92-93). Their heaters have a natural cut; His slider lacks depth. The new organization might have been able to turn things around, but Detroit is really very good at pitch design and they couldn't.
Castro hasn't pitched enough in the majors to have a complete picture of his arsenal via Statcast, but in 2021 his four-seam fastball was ranked in the 93rd percentile for spin rate, something that the Guardians would be very fond of. Liked it He throws a similar mix of fastball (51.4%) and sliders (47.3%) with a very rare variation thrown in (1.1%).