Sliders: For the surging Rays, solid starters grow on fruitful trade trees

Welcome to Sliders, a weekly in-season MLB column that focuses on both the timely and timeless elements of baseball.
When a young pitcher joins the Tampa Bay Rays, he learns quickly that time is running out. If you think you're invincible, this is not the place for you.
'A lot of these guys don't realize that, in reality, they have about five years to be as good as they can be,' said Kyle Snyder, the Rays' longtime pitching coach. 'And it's something that I've shared with them, not to scare them, but it creates some sense of urgency. If you want to take advantage of your physical prime, it's right out in front of you.'
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No team understands timing like the Rays, baseball's hottest team for the last month. Since May 20, Tampa Bay is 20-8 and stands just 2 1/2 games behind the Yankees in the American League East entering the weekend.
There are several reasons for this: a stellar defense, MLB's best offense since mid-May, a home-heavy early schedule. But the most startling is that the team that pioneered the opener now leads the majors in starters' innings pitched. Brandon Lowe, the veteran second baseman, summed it up best last week.
'Our pitching staff is being very Rays pitching staff,' he said. 'They're fantastic for us.'
Very Rays pitching staff, as an adjective, could mean almost anything, as long as it's successful. That's what's so fun about following the Rays, a team with a borrowed stadium, an ownership in transition and a relentless discipline to grab those precious few years of a pitcher's prime – and move on.
'They can see guys in other organizations that they think are undervalued, they make those trades to get them, and then from there, they help you develop into a better version of yourself,' said starter Drew Rasmussen, who leads the rotation with a 2.61 ERA.
'And then, I would say every guy in here knows at the back end, when your time is done here, they'll probably flip you and get another couple arms. And they'll be talented arms, they'll help develop their skills and it just kind of continues to snowball from there.'
There isn't a snowball's chance in Pinellas County that the Rays will pay for a pitcher's decline phase. It just never happens. Consider how they obtained Rasmussen and Ryan Pepiot, whose ERA is 3.11 after beating Baltimore with eight strong innings on Monday. Both pitchers can trace their acquisitions to No. 1 overall picks from the Devil Rays era.
'The trade trees here are wild,' Lowe said, and here's how two of them look, in shorthand:
2003: Delmon Young drafted first overall.
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2007: Young traded to Minnesota Twins for Matt Garza.
2011: Garza traded to Chicago Cubs for Chris Archer.
2018: Archer traded to Pittsburgh Pirates for Tyler Glasnow.
2023: Glasnow traded to Los Angeles Dodgers for Pepiot.
2007: David Price drafted first overall.
2015: Price traded to Detroit Tigers for Willy Adames.
2021: Adames traded to Milwaukee Brewers for Rasmussen.
Several other useful players arrived in those deals, including starter Shane Baz, who was part of the Archer trade and is 6-3 with a 4.54 ERA for the Rays this season. But the Pepiot tree, in particular, is instructive for how durably fruitful it has been — especially the newest branch.
While Glasnow was a Game 1 World Series starter for the Rays, in 2020, he was often hurt and never topped 120 innings for Tampa Bay. His elite stuff attracted the Dodgers, who were willing to pay lavishly for it, despite the health risk.
Glasnow made the All-Star team last July, but was injured for the postseason and has been out since late April with shoulder trouble. Pepiot, meanwhile, made 26 starts last season (more than Glasnow ever has) and is now earning $774,600. Glasnow makes roughly 35 times more per season on his five-year, $136.5 million contract extension.
The genius of the Rays, though, is the way they go beyond such cold calculations to earn players' trust. In Pepiot's case, the bonds go both ways.
'Immediately after the trade, I was talking to Snyder for a couple of hours, and when we talked, he was like, 'I don't want to talk baseball with you for at least a couple weeks; I just want to get to know you as a person,'' said Pepiot, who lives in Scottsdale, Ariz. 'And then he's like, 'Hey, I'm flying out to Arizona, we're going to meet up.' And I was like, 'I'm coming to Florida; I want to get with the staff.' So I went to the Trop in the beginning of January and worked out there for a month and a half before spring training even started.'
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That kind of commitment impressed Snyder, who has since helped Pepiot add a cutter and curveball to his fastball/slider/changeup mix. Now, Pepiot uses that assortment to induce early contact, a mantra for a rotation in which no starter averages a strikeout per inning.
'That's kind of been a product of knowing how good the defense is and letting them work behind us,' Pepiot said. 'We all sacrifice some strikeouts for a more efficient inning to be able to go longer and deeper in the ballgame. We all talk about the same thing. It's like, 'OK, we might punch out four or five, but it's fine because we went seven and we had efficient, 15-pitch-or-less innings.'
Rays starters were averaging an MLB-low 15.3 pitches per inning through Wednesday. If they get ahead, 0-2 or 1-2, they'll try to induce the hitter to chase a third strike. Hitters, naturally, rarely let them get to that point.
'I think the opposition is recognizing that we're going to throw strikes,' manager Kevin Cash said, 'and more times than not, when you're throwing strikes with the type of stuff that our pitchers are featuring, you're going to get some outs.'
The Rays' pitching staff had allowed a .262 batting average on balls in play through Wednesday, second best in the majors behind the Texas Rangers, at .259. Their starters — Pepiot, Rasmussen, Baz, Zack Littell and Taj Bradley — have good enough stuff, in Cash's view, to handle the first inning on their own.
The team known for openers hasn't used one all season, but Cash has not sworn off the strategy. He's just playing to the strengths of his roster.
'I prefer whatever is going to give us the best chance to win games and do it consistently,' he said.
This year, that means reliable efficiency from a bargain rotation in its prime.
Here at Sliders, we're big fans of the high-quality start: at least seven innings with no more than two earned runs. It's the best single-game measure of durability and dominance, and it helps to be efficient.
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High-strikeout pitchers, then, don't often reach seven innings. But sinkerballers do, and the newest wizard of the sinker is José Soriano of the Los Angeles Angels.
After blanking the Yankees for seven innings on Monday, Soriano had five high-quality starts, more than nine teams — the A's, Blue Jays, Brewers, Dodgers, Marlins, Mets, Rays, Rockies and White Sox. Soriano throws his sinker more than any other qualified starter (51.1 percent of the time, according to Fangraphs), and throws it an average of 97 miles an hour, harder than every other starter except Paul Skenes and Tarik Skubal.

'He's been working on it for a while now, and he's kind of getting the feel of it and mastering it,' Angels shortstop Zach Neto said. 'It's just the way he throws it, man. It's from a weird angle, and it's not only me seeing it from out there, it's guys we play against, whenever they get on base, they're just saying the same thing: 'He's got it really moving today.' It's just a matter of how he can control it. When he throws in the zone, it doesn't really get hit.'
It doesn't get hit very far, anyway. Monday's start was Soriano's 10th in a row without allowing a home run, and opponents have gone deep just three times.
'I don't try to do much with the pitch and I think that's a big key for the success that I've been having with that pitch,' Soriano said through an interpreter. 'It's pretty much like with every other pitch — when you're trying to do too much, it's either a ball or not the spot that you want.'
Soriano, 26, grew up in the Dominican Republic idolizing Pedro Martinez and, as a teenager, Luis Severino. Like Severino, who is now with the A's, Soriano had Tommy John surgery in 2020. Unlike Severino, he had it again 16 months later.
'I was very frustrated at that moment,' Soriano said. 'I thought the world was coming down around me.'
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Soriano said his family helped him stay positive in his comeback, and one of his favorite pitchers helped, too.
'When I was injured, I got to talk to (Severino) and he helped me a lot,' Soriano said. 'He gave me a lot of good advice and that helped me to keep my head up.'
Soriano's second operation came while he was pitching in the Pittsburgh Pirates' farm system in 2021, after the team had taken him from the Angels in the Rule 5 draft. Needing a roster spot that November, the Pirates returned the injured righty to the Angels.
'At the end of the season they told me, 'Hey, sorry, we're trying to keep you here, but we need space on the roster,'' Soriano said. 'And then that's what they told me and everyone knows the results now.'
Soriano spent most of 2022 recovering and reached the majors as a reliever in 2023. He moved to the rotation last year and has a 3.44 ERA in 35 career starts.
His breakthrough came in 2023 when, then-bullpen coach Matt Wise and another staffer, changed his sinker grip. Soriano, who had been throwing across the two seams at their narrowest point, now uses a 'one-seam' sinker that produces an extraordinary combination of velocity and depth.
'Things going this fast just shouldn't drop that much,' Rob Friedman, the Pitching Ninja, gushed in a recent post, also noting Soriano's slider and knuckle-curve. 'Absolutely unfair stuff.'
With 86 1/3 innings, Soriano is poised to easily surpass his professional high of 113 from last season, when he was shut down in August with arm fatigue. The Angels will be careful as this summer goes on.
'We don't have to worry about it until we get past what he threw last year, and so far, he's breezing to that,' Angels manager Ron Washington said. 'So we might get 130, 140, 150 at the most out of him this year, and then next year we're going to want more. We ain't got to worry if he ever gets to 200 because they don't allow that. But he can get into the seventh inning almost every time out there. And if you take the ball 31 times into the seventh inning….'
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That would be well more than 200 innings, unrealistic for a pitcher with two Tommy John surgeries. But as long as he's healthy, Soriano is commanding attention.
'Sometimes I have good moments, and other times I don't,' he said. 'I always try to stay humble and keep on working hard to get good results.'
Last June in this space, we featured Allan Travers for a square that asked for a Tigers pitcher. Travers started one game for Detroit, in 1912, when the Tigers fielded a replacement team against the Philadelphia A's to protest a suspension of Ty Cobb. The 20-year-old Travers — a student at St. Joseph's University who became a priest — gave up 14 earned runs in eight innings for a 15.75 ERA.
It turns out that there's another starter in Tigers history who appeared in exactly one game with a 15.75 ERA: Beiker Graterol, a Venezuela native who fit a recent square for a foreign-born Detroit player.
Graterol drew a harrowing assignment for his only appearance. With other Tigers slowed by injuries, the team picked Graterol, 24, as a stopgap to face the defending champion New York Yankees in their 1999 home opener.
'We're definitely looking down the rifle barrel,' Tigers manager Larry Parrish told the Detroit Free Press, in a vividly candid assessment. 'We're asking a lot of the kid.'
They asked for too much. On a day best remembered for Yogi Berra's return to Yankee Stadium after a 14-year absence, the home team celebrated by pummeling Graterol in a 12-3 blowout. Tino Martinez hit a solo homer, Scott Brosius a two-run shot and Chili Davis a grand slam.
Berra predicted the slam in the broadcast booth, chuckling with delight as Davis rounded the bases:
'I'll do better next time,' the poor pitcher said later, but there was no next time. Graterol soon returned to the minors and is linked with a strikebreaking priest forever.
If you're reading this on a weekend in the Northeast, it's probably raining. Last weekend was the 14th in a row with rain in Boston, and it hasn't been much clearer in New York or Philadelphia.
Baseball players are experts at waiting out the rain, as the Arizona Diamondbacks and Chicago Cubs relievers demonstrated at Wrigley Field in 2018. The Diamondbacks won the talent show, if you can call it that — with bits that included Rubby De La Rosa rolling himself like a bowling ball, toppling Archie Bradley and Andrew Chafin in a 7-10 split.
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The well-traveled Chafin, now with the Washington Nationals, gives a convincing effort as a wobbly bowling pin. But a different part of the act stands out to him now.
'I literally roped our bullpen catcher and flipped him, dropped him on his back and hog-tied him,' Chafin said. 'He hit the ground with a thud and I was like, 'Oh, sorry.' I got a little carried away, because anytime you're working with cows, you've got to be a little aggressive.'
Was Chafin speaking from experience? Yep. Here's how our conversation went from there:
Chafin: 'My buddy called us one day and his cows got out. Their gate wasn't quite right or their fencing needed adjusted and we ended up wrangling like 25 to 30 head in the back of my Ranger. And after we got them all back in, one tried to jump back out and it got out! It was running in circles, trying to kick. So I literally just jumped on its neck, grabbed its head, and just folded it backwards onto the ground.'
Sliders: When was this?
Chafin: 'Oh, this is like five years ago.'
Sliders: 'Really? That's a valuable arm you've got there.'
Chafin: 'Well, I grabbed it with my right arm, kept my left arm further away. But you ever had to chase cows that got out?'
Sliders: 'No!'
Chafin: 'You don't want to do it. And it was also like 15 degrees out, I think, so it's even worse. Chasing cows in the cold is miserable for everybody.'
We'll take his word for it. Anyway, enjoy these bullpen frolics – and stay dry!
(Top photo of Ryan Pepiot:)

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