North Shore Tavern Mound Visit: Examining the prospects in Frazier trade

With just days remaining before Major League Baseball’s July 30 trade deadline, the first domino in what should be a busy week for the Pirates has fallen.

On Sunday evening, they sent Adam Frazier and $1.4 million to the Padres for three minor-league players: Infielder/utilityman Tucupita Marcano, outfielder Jack Suwinski and right-hander Michell Miliano.

Of that trio, Marcano is easily the most established. The 21-year-old went from playing A-ball in 2019 to making the Padres’ opening day roster this season. He was ranked by MLB Pipeline as the Padres’ fifth-best prospect. Baseball America had him at No. 8 and FanGraphs at No. 9.

Marcano’s bat is his best tool, with his bat-to-ball skills being heavily praised. It’s hard to put too much stock into his MLB stats from his first taste in the majors considering how massive the leap in competition was, but he can compete in the box:

That’s from the Pirates’ and Padres’ first series at PNC Park in April. Mitch Keller went above the strike zone with mid-90s heat looking for a whiff. Marcano kept his hands in and shot it down the line in left for a double. It was a good piece of hitting by a rookie.

That was a highlight of an ugly first 50 plate appearances in the majors before he was optioned to the minors in June. He’s found his footing in Class AAA though, slashing a respectable .272/.367/.444 over 199 plate appearances. 

He has good body control in the box, allowing him to hit the ball to all fields, even if he doesn’t have a lot of pop. Before this year, he had homered just three times in his first three years of playing stateside. He has gone deep six times in Class AAA this year, so perhaps there is a little power there, but his slugging percentage is going to have to rely on doubles. He should leg out more than his fair share of those, too, getting a 60-grade running tool from FanGraphs and Baseball America. Good speed and a high-OBP profile could make him into a potential leadoff hitter.

Marcano is maybe more intriguing in the field. He’s listed as a shortstop, and I’m told he can stick there, but he’s really a utility player. This spring, San Diego manager Jayce Tinger said that Marcano “has got the ability to play seven different positions.” So besides pitching or catching, he could fill in just about anywhere, at least short-term. The Pirates obviously love versatile players, and there are some holes to be filled on this roster. Corner outfield, middle infield, there is playing time to be won, both this year and in the future. Marcano could potentially be a Ben Zobrist-type player who just finds his way into the lineup by bouncing around the diamond.

At the risk of oversimplifying, it looks like the Pirates traded Frazier for someone who could one day be… Frazier. A left-handed hitter who relies on his elite bat to ball skills to generate offense and can bounce around the diamond to get into the lineup more. The points in Marcano’s favor are he’s faster -- Baseball Savant put him in the 88th percentile in sprint speed while Frazier was in the 51st -- more defensively versatile and under team control through at least 2027. For Frazier, his main selling point is he’s more established and was having a career year. More on that in a bit.

Marcano is the headliner. Suwinski and Milano both have selling points, but notable drawbacks, too. They are definitely more wild cards rather than legitimate prospects at the moment, which is why neither is ranked in the Padres’ top 30.

Suwinski was an over-slot Day 3 selection in 2016 who didn’t do much over his first four years in professional ball. He’s finally broken out in Class AA, though, going deep 15 times with a .269/.398/.551 slash line over 267 plate appearances. 

His average exit velocity this season is 89.5 mph, which puts him at about the top 20% of hitters among prospects that FanGraphs tracks on their Board. If you’re looking for an MLB comparison, Gregory Polanco’s average exit velocity is 89.6 mph and Bryan Reynolds’ is 89.3 mph. So the power is coming from a reliable source, a short, compact stroke:

That swing is both the reason for his success and maybe what will cap his ceiling. It’s great for generating power, but it goes through the zone so quickly that he is prone to whiffs. As a result, he has struck out in 27.7% of his plate appearances. From what I’ve been told, those strikeouts aren’t because he expanded the zone or chased. He has a good feel for the zone, which is why he has also walked in one-sixth of his plate appearances. He just swings through the pitch too often.

As for his defense, Suwinski has played a little center, but he profiles better at the corners. Putting him up the middle for anything other than an emergency is asking for trouble. 

If all goes well, Suwinski is a three-true-outcome type hitter. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, and this type of player has definitely become more common over the past 10 years. But it is interesting to see the Pirates acquire someone who fits a mold that they had mostly stayed clear of in recent years. One guy is hardly a paradigm shift and it could be as simple as trying to maximize the return to complete the deal. It’s still a noticeable change of pace.

Miliano is the classic minor-league-reliever-with-control-troubles guy, but with those issues revved up to 11. He is as hard to hit as anyone you’ll find in Class A, striking out 59 over 30 innings pitched with a .160 opponent’s average against. The bad news is he can beat himself, walking 25 with three hit batters. 

He’s got some good stuff. He works with a four-seam fastball-curve mix, with the heater averaging 94 mph and the curve about 2,700 RPM of spin. In both cases, that’s a little above average, especially for a 21-year-old still in the lower levels of the minors. If he finds another gear and cuts down on the walks, then he could be a big bullpen arm.

The problem is, he’s been searching for that extra gear and velocity for years and it’s never really come. It’s still good stuff as is, and he’s still young enough that he could add a couple more ticks on the heater, but it looks like he’ll probably max out in the mid-90s. Improving his control is more important anyway. If he can do that with the velocity and spin he has now, he probably could slide into a middle relief role or be bullpen depth. That’s a really big “if,” though. There have been hundreds of pitchers in his shoes that flamed out in Class AA or AAA.

Watching video on Miliano, the big takeaway is he doesn’t do a good job repeating his mechanics, especially with his landing. Sometimes his momentum will make him take a big step to his left with his back leg. Sometimes it just lands to his left. Sometimes he lands taking more of a step towards home. You have to imagine that’s either the source or a major contributing factor for those walks.Which way is his body moving towards the plate?

This does need addressed, because he does have major league stuff:

That’s from Miliano’s most recent game on July 23. The Fort Wayne TinCups got the full Miliano experience that day, with him striking out three (including one on that GIF above on a breaking ball that was just too nasty for his catcher to handle) but walking two and allowing two runs. Perhaps it would have been a different type of outing if he got that first out, but this is a taste of what the Pirates are getting into.

Strictly looking at them as players, both Miliano and Suwinski are fine as lottery tickets, but there’s a catch. Both are Rule 5 eligible this year. Given the sheer abundance of prospects the club needs to protect from that draft -- Liover Peguero, Tahnaj Thomas, Travis Swaggerty, Mason Martin, Cody Bolton, Omar Cruz, Cal Mitchell, Canaan Smith-Njigba and Santiago Florez, to name a few -- it’s hard seeing them including either one of these players. 

Unless Suwinski or Miliano really shows something during the homestretch of the minor-league season or at the instructional camp, they’ll go unprotected. In which case, the Pirates run a serious risk of having one- or two-thirds of their trade return being taken away for nothing. The saving grace may be that a Class A reliever with control issues and a AA hitter who whiffs often could sneak through the draft. But that’s hardly a guarantee.

This past offseason, I wrote a Mound Visit exploring what Frazier’s trade value could be. I cast a wide net, not knowing how arbitration and the offseason were going to go. Even with Frazier turning in an All-Star campaign, this trade maybe cracked the bottom of that range I set, depending on how highly Marcano is rated by a given outlet or evaluator. After weeks of people making gradually more outlandish -- and frankly unobtainable -- trade packages, this is definitely less by comparison. This definitely isn’t two top 100 or 150 prospects, like which had been suggested by a national reporter at one point.

There are a couple reasons that most likely contributed to that. The first, and perhaps most influential, is Frazier wasn’t the only game in town. If a team needed a second baseman, Javier Baez and Eduardo Escobar were also on the market, and the Cubs and Diamondbacks were just as motivated to sell as the Pirates. Sure, they’re rentals, but that just means their acquisition price was lower. That extra year of Frazier wasn’t as big of a selling point as it would normally be. Once you factor in that there are only a handful of teams looking for a second baseman -- the Padres themselves will use Frazier as a utility player primarily -- and it was definitely a buyer’s market.

Plus, this may have been Frazier’s best year, but he is coming off a dud in 2020 where his value was saved by his defense. Yes, he is hitting now, but his exit velocity and hard hit rates ranked near the bottom of the league. The approach has been good, but he has a history of being a streaky hitter and needs to rely on those batted balls in play landing in for hits. Factor that in with his poor defense this year, and the Pirates were trading an unknown commodity. What Frazier were teams acquiring? His up-and-down history couldn’t be ignored.

With all that said, this trade could be similar to the Joe Musgrove deal last January. In that deal, the Pirates picked up a couple of younger pitchers who weren’t on anyone’s top 30 in righty Drake Fellows and lefty Omar Cruz. Cruz looks like a nice pickup, flashing good offspeed and breaking stuff with good feel on how to get whiffs, and Fellows is in Bradenton after dominating at the Pirates’ complex. The focus on that trade is on Hudson Head and David Bednar, but the two other pitchers they got in that deal could make an impact. And while Marcano is not a top 100 guy, he has upside.

This looks like a very on-brand Ben Cherington trade.Try to maximize the return by taking younger players with one (sometimes two) headliners and then a couple party favors to round out the package. Just about every trade he has made follows that template, and it has helped rebuild this farm system into one of the best in baseball. Consider that a devil’s advocate take for a return that looks fairly underwhelming at first and second glance.

The future will tell how successful this trade was, but it probably will come down to Marcano. If he hits, the Pirates lengthened out their lineup and future big-league roster. If he doesn’t, then Cherington probably will have squandered the last serious trade chip he inherited.