Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.
The final stretch of the season is now upon us, and it sure is going to be fun. The Orioles and Yankees are jockeying for the AL East title, with a first-round bye almost certainly going to the winner. The NL Wild Card is a beautiful mess, with four teams fighting for the three spots and two other clubs, the Cubs and Cardinals, still lurking in the distance. And the under-the-radar Tigers are roaring, trying to pull out a last-minute postseason berth after selling at the trade deadline.
Last month, when I wrote about the players who were added off the waiver wire, I mentioned that another batch of waiver claims would come at the end of August, after more teams fell out of contention. So now that we’re well into September, let’s take a look at some of the notable players who’ve switched teams over the last few weeks.
Royals Claim Pham and Grossman
Kansas City lost a huge piece of its offense when Vinnie Pasquantino went down with a broken thumb that will certainly sideline him for the rest of the regular season and likely longer. But if there’s any silver lining to that injury, it happened on August 29 instead of a few days later; the timing allowed for general manager J.J. Piccolo to quickly pivot and acquire two players for a potential playoff roster: Tommy Pham and Robbie Grossman.
Pham settled in as the Royals’ starting right fielder and leadoff batter while Hunter Renfroe was out hurt, and Pham has remained atop the lineup in the four games since Renfroe returned from the injured list, with the Royals moving him either to left field or DH on the days when Renfroe has started.
Grossman came to the Royals to do one thing and one thing only: Mash lefties. The switch-hitter has always been better from the right side (127 wRC+ against lefties for his career, compared to 93 against righties), but the splits have become even more stark recently. Since the start of 2022, Grossman has a horrible 61 wRC+ against right-handed pitching and a fabulous 152 wRC+ against lefties. As such, he’s a natural platoon partner for MJ Melendez in left field, and is quite useful coming off the bench against a tough southpaw.
Cubs Add Armstrong, Twins Take Tonkin
Relievers are like pizza: even the most middling can get the job done. Shawn Armstrong and Michael Tonkin are probably more useful than iffy pizza, but they’re not seismic additions either. Still, the pickings are slim this time of year, so it wasn’t surprising to see both claimed by teams looking to make the playoffs.
Armstrong’s season has taken a winding road. His performance was much worse with the Rays this year than it was last year, when he had a sterling 1.38 ERA, so Tampa Bay dealt him and his 5.40 ERA to the Cardinals on the day of the trade deadline for the disappointing Dylan Carlson. With St. Louis, Armstrong pitched to a much better 2.84 ERA across 11 appearances, but the Cardinals crumbled as he rebounded, and they decided to place him on waivers. Because the baseball gods have a sense of humor, he ended up on a team with roughly the same playoff odds as St. Louis. He’ll finish off his age-33 season with the Cubs before hitting free agency hoping to leverage his strong finish in the National League to a nice contract.
Armstrong has been well traveled this year, but it’s nothing compared to Tonkin’s 2024. He’s ping-ponged from (deep breath) the Mets, to the Twins, back to the Mets, to the Yankees, and now back to the Twins. His most extensive work came in pinstripes, with a 3.38 ERA in 56 innings. But since he was on the downswing (a 5.74 ERA from the beginning of July until the end of his Yankees tenure) and New York was welcoming back some injured arms, he hit the chopping block. He’s pitched in low-leverage situations during both his stints with Minnesota.
Need for Speed
Duke Ellis is a fun claim. The 80-grade speedster was plucked by the Yankees from the Mariners to potentially serve as a Terrance Gore-like pinch runner in the playoffs. The rookie has just five major league plate appearances between the White Sox and Yankees, but also five steals! He was caught just four times in his 55 attempts in the minors this season.
Non-Contenders Stake Their Claims
If there’s anything good about being a bad team at this time of year, it’s that you get first crack at players who are placed on waivers. This has led to some interesting players getting more extended looks with teams out of the playoff race:
• The Marlins have continued to reshape their roster despite their season-long struggles, claiming relievers Mike Baumann (I wrote about him a couple weeks ago), Lake Bachar, and Anthony Veneziano. Bachar’s a particularly cool story, a 29-year-old converted position player who struck out the side in his major league debut on Sunday.
• Dillon Tate isn’t a total draft bust — he made the majors after all — but you’d expect the fourth overall pick in the draft to amount to more than what Tate has thus far. The Blue Jays will be the latest team to make him a consistent and healthy contributor at the major league level, after the Rangers, Yankees, and Orioles all couldn’t. Tate wasn’t bad in his previous years of big league experience (all with Baltimore), posting a 3.97 ERA and 4.03 FIP across 179 innings from 2019-23, but he’s never struck many guys out. At age 30, he may be nothing more than a fungible middle reliever, but as I said about Amstrong and Tonkin, sometimes that is enough.
