MLB trade rumor grade: Zach Britton to Indians?

Over on Roster Resource, they’ve helpfully tallied up the needs of every contender. The Rays are looking for a setup man or a closer, the Red Sox were looking for a setup man, and the Royals were looking for all sorts of things that they’ve since acquired.

Here’s the entry under “team needs” for the Cleveland Indians:

None

They need their players to get healthy, but once they do ... yeah, it’s a pretty complete roster. The lineup is complete. The rotation is so complete, it has six pitchers in it. And we all know about the bullpen, which helped them come within a single game of winning the World Series. They don’t need to dump prospects to improve the team.

But, just hear me out on this one: What if they could take their super bullpen and make it a super-duper bullpen? Makes you think.

Makes you think, all right. Does this make any sense for the Indians or the Orioles? We’ll grade the rumor.

Nothing has changed since we wrote about the possibility of the Astros trading for Britton, so if you’re an Orioles partisan, this all still applies:

... the Orioles have a good track record of finding and/or making relievers. They correctly identified that Britton’s future was in the bullpen in the first place, and they’ve been successful at polishing rough gems like Mychal Givens or liberating underappreciated pitchers like Darren O’Day. I don’t know what a Richard Bleier is, but it apparently has a 1.60 ERA in 39 ⅓ innings.

Teams that can do this should absolutely, without question, look to deal relievers when they’re in a bit of a rough patch. The Orioles have allowed 549 runs and scored 469. That’s bad. I want you to picture the Orioles somehow making the postseason as the second wild card and setting up their ALCS rotation with Ubaldo Jimenez or Wade Miley in it. It would be more dadaist than sabermetric, and it’s not going to happen. If they contend next year, it’ll be because the rotation is shored up. They can worry about the bullpen then.

Britton would probably net them a bunch of prospects. He isn’t a free agent until after the 2018 season, after all. And while he’s been outstanding for them, the odds of him enjoying a multi-decade Trevor Hoffman career are low for everyone, not just him. The odds that a long-term deal into his 30s wouldn’t work out, so this is the zenith of his value.

They should trade him, assuming his stock hasn’t gone down too much, which it probably has not.

All right, here’s the situation: It’s the third inning of Game 5. Trevor Bauer is up to 80 pitches, and the Indians have a 4-3 lead.

Andrew Miller comes in and pitches the fourth and fifth innings.

Nick Goody throws the sixth inning.

Bryan Shaw throws the seventh.

Britton throws the eighth.

Cody Allen comes in for the ninth.

That seems unfair.

You don’t need to provide the Indians with a proof of concept about how it could work. They didn’t exactly invent the idea of riding their bullpen until it crumples, but they certainly popularized it last year. They did it last year because they had to, because two of their better pitchers, Danny Salazar and Carlos Carrasco, were hurt. So their rotation was basically Corey Kluber and Johnny Wholestaff, over and over again.

They had to do it last year. This year, they might do it by design. If Britton is right, and the rest of the Indians bullpen is as effective as they were last year, they’ll be the masters of shortening the game again. The over-under for total innings thrown by a starter in a Yankees-Indians ALDS would be about 10.5.

What the Indians might be thinking, though, is that they have a bullpen that threw an extra month last year and worked harder than any other bullpen in the game. They might get away with doing it a second year, but grinding them into a fine powder again seems risky. Here’s another superlative arm, relatively fresh, for your postseason needs.

That makes a lot of sense. But is it worth two or three of the Indians’ best prospects? That’s up to them, and I could understand the trepidation that comes with making a strength into a super-strength, when leaving it as a strength isn’t all that risky.

But you can see what the Indians are getting at. And it just might make a whole bunch of sense.

Yeah, it’s a solid B+. The Indians are scrumming with a few teams for Britton, and I could see them falling short because they don’t have the same kind of urgency. But it would make sense to deepen a deep bullpen. The postseason is a game of relievers now, and the Indians know that better than anyone.