MASN’s Roch Kubatko also reported that a Reds scout was recently watching Low-A Delmarva.
There are eight days to go until the trade deadline. The Orioles could probably use an upgrade to their starting rotation and bullpen to maximize their chances of postseason success. The question over these days is: Where will that help come from? MLB Network’s Jon Morosi offered one possibility over the weekend, tweeting that the Reds may be waving the white flag on 2024 and that the O’s are among teams interested in pitchers Nick Martinez and Frankie Montas.
Trade rumors fly around a lot and many of these are fueled by people who don’t actually have any idea what is going on. I’ve moved Morosi rumors far down on my own personal reliability list after his involvement in the “Shohei Ohtani is on a plane to Toronto right now” saga over the previous offseason, and if he was the only source for this, I’d write it off completely.
However, there’s also this small bit of corroboration from MASN’s Roch Kubatko: The longtime Orioles beat reporter said that the Reds had a scout watching the Orioles Low-A team in their series with Cleveland’s Low-A affiliate Lynchburg two weeks ago. That doesn’t mean a trade between these two teams is going to happen before the deadline. It could be a coincidental normal coverage assignment. The extra detail from a second reporter at least makes this rumor worth giving some more thought for me.
Montas, a 31-year-old righty who’s in his ninth big league season, is making $16 million this year and also has a $2 million buyout on a mutual option for $20 million for next year. This option will presumably be declined by whatever team has him at season’s end, because Montas isn’t doing very well this year. Through 18 games, he’s sitting on a 4.85 ERA and 1.360 WHIP, and since his strikeout and walk rates aren’t very good, it’s an even worse FIP of 5.03.
These are bad enough numbers that there is no excitement in the idea of trading for Montas. They are also bad enough numbers to fit into the mold of the kind of pitcher Mike Elias acquires during a season. Montas, like Jack Flaherty before him, is a player who had some stock value as a prospect and has mostly not put together big league results equal to that value. He was just good enough once – in Montas’s case, a strong half-season in 2019 and solid full season in 2021 – to tempt people into believing those days could return.
Martinez, 33, has mostly been used in relief by the Reds, though he started five games earlier in the season too. On the surface, his season ERA of 3.88 isn’t exciting, but that looks different if you only count his relief outings. Martinez has a 1.94 ERA across 49.1 innings of relief, and is holding batters to just a .194 average against him. There’s a lot more to hang your hat on for excitement there compared to last year’s pickup of Shintaro Fujinami.
This is another guy who’s not exactly on a cheap contract, as Martinez is making $14 million this season. He also holds a player option for 2025 at $12 million. It’s hard to say if he’d exercise that option or not. He’s done well as a reliever but I don’t know that he’s done well enough to attract multi-year deals that beat that number as an average annual value. Martinez is mostly not pitching in high-leverage eighth or ninth inning situations.
If, hypothetically, the Orioles were going to make a bigger splash of a trade for a starting pitcher and also acquire a less substantial reliever, something like “Martinez for a Low-A lottery ticket” is a deal that makes sense to me. Who counts as a lottery ticket and who would be painful to lose as the price for two months of a not-brand name reliever probably depends on your engagement with the Shorebirds roster.
More important to the matter are which guys the Reds view as worthwhile lottery tickets and which of these Mike Elias views as expendable in a deal of this nature.
That I think this rumor makes a kind of unexciting sense that tracks with past Elias deals doesn’t mean either part of it is going to happen. There are other pitchers on the market and other teams hunting for pitching that might improve their situations. I hope that the Orioles have higher aspirations over the next eight days, but if teams are asking too much for unambiguously better pitchers, they might go back to a familiar well.