PTBNL to future ace? How the Mariners acquired Matt Brash for next to nothing

Publish date: 2024-06-08

On Tuesday in Chicago, White Sox manager Tony La Russa was asked about the kid across the way; Mariners rookie pitcher Matt Brash, who gave La Russa’s team fits for much of the afternoon in his big-league debut.

“He’s got a great future,” said La Russa, who in his 35th season as a manager and with three World Series titles would probably know.

This was pretty heady praise for Brash, a 23-year-old Canadian who began last season with High-A Everett but has since skyrocketed through the Mariners’ system thanks to his steely competitiveness and a devastating mix of pitches.

Brash’s impressive spring earned him a spot in the Mariners’ rotation, and his outing against a lineup devoid of many easy outs Tuesday — six strikeouts, two runs allowed over 5 1/3 innings — seems to portend a bright future while leaving many to ponder the same question.

Where the hell did Matt Brash come from?

The answer is, on the surface, easy enough to answer. But underneath, well, that’s where Brash’s story (and acquisition) gets interesting.

Brash was officially the player to be named later from an Aug. 31, 2020, trade deadline deal with the San Diego Padres — a trade that saw the Mariners send reliever Taylor Williams to the pitching-starved Padres, who were making a push for the postseason.

The Padres eventually got there, but, unbeknownst to them, lost a valuable future asset in Brash, although at the time that wasn’t readily apparent to the Padres or even the Mariners.

Today, though? That’s a far different story.

“I think we have taught Matt Brash, we have helped educate him on how to best use his weapons and our pitching strategists have done a very good job accentuating what he does,” said Mariners president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto. “But that jump he took … I wish we could take credit for that. He did that.”

This is how the Mariners stole Matt Brash from the Padres.

First, Brash’s journey. Undrafted out of high school in Kingston, Ontario, he was 5-foot-11 and “maybe 150 pounds,” he told The Athletic last week in Minneapolis.

“I’ve always been super skinny,” Brash admitted. “Then when I left college, I was probably 165 pounds. But now … I’m like 181, 185 pounds.”

Brash, who is now close to 6-foot-2, went to Niagara (N.Y.) University, where he posted ERAs of 2.79 and 5.14 going into his junior season in 2019. He wasn’t just growing, but he was adding velocity. His breaking ball moved, unlike his peers. Still, he was very raw.

“I got bigger. I got stronger, and my pitch shapes began to get better,” he said.

Brash had a breakout spring in 2019, as he posted a 2.43 ERA over 85 1/3 innings with 121 strikeouts. Longtime Canadian scout Murray Zuk, who was with the Padres, saw Brash at Niagara. He wrote up a favorable report on him. Brash was projectable, had a fast arm and a lean body. Brash’s competitive demeanor and his breaking ball also stood out to the Padres.

There might be something here, it stood to reason. Maybe Brash would be a two-pitch reliever? Or maybe he could remain a starter? He was, though, intriguing enough to the Padres that they invited him to Petco Park for a workout about 10 days before the draft. They saw a pitcher with two real weapons — a fastball that popped and an advanced feel for spinning the baseball.

In short, Brash gave the Padres something to potentially dream on.

And so in the fourth round of the 2019 draft, San Diego picked Brash. This skinny, unproven kid with a fast arm and an absolute hardened resolve to get better was officially a Padre.

Brash threw one inning for the club’s entry in the Arizona Rookie league after the draft and headed to Low-A Fort Wayne, where he struck out eight over 5 1/3 innings in five outings before telling the staff his arm felt sore. Just fatigue, not uncommon coming off a spring where Brash logged a heavy college workload. The Padres, out of caution, shut him down for the rest of the summer.

Brash’s last work for Fort Wayne was a clean inning on July 7 against the Great Lakes Loons. Little did he — or anyone else — know this would be his final appearance in the Padres’ organization.

When the pandemic hit in 2020 and the minor league season was canceled, Brash — like so many others who didn’t attend an alternate site — had nowhere to go. Brash returned to Canada, uncertain of what would happen next.

“I had a good time over there,” Brash said of his first professional summer with the Padres. “Everyone was really nice to me. I just felt like I never got a chance (because of the pandemic) to show them what I could do.”

Matt Brash in 2019. (Zachary Lucy / Four Seam Images via AP)

The Mariners and Padres, forever linked by the spring training complex they share in Arizona, were heading in opposite directions during the 2020 season.

The Mariners were still in the growing phase of the ambitious rebuild project they tackled following the 2018 season. They were still adding to the roster, to their farm system, and were using 2020 to look at many of the young players — first baseman Evan White, shortstop J.P. Crawford and center fielder Kyle Lewis, among others — they hoped would be a part of their future.

The Padres, after several lean seasons, had fortified their roster with some big-ticket players, like Manny Machado and Fernando Tatis Jr., with the hope of ending a postseason drought that stretched back to 2006. But as the truncated 2020 season rolled on, their bullpen was a mess. Closer Kirby Yates went on the injured list on Aug. 15 with bone chips in his elbow. He eventually needed season-ending arthroscopic surgery.

Then on Aug. 21, another key piece to San Diego’s bullpen, Drew Pomeranz, landed on the IL with shoulder tightness. So general manager A.J. Preller went to work on the roster, trading for reliever Trevor Rosenthal, who was with the Royals, on Aug. 29. A day later, Preller was back at it again, completing a mega-deal with Dipoto.

The Padres acquired catcher Austin Nola and relievers Dan Altavilla and Austin Adams from the Mariners for a package that included relief pitcher Andrés Muñoz (sidelined at the time after having Tommy John surgery), outfielder Taylor Trammell, infielder Ty France and also catcher Luis Torrens. The deal looked to favor the Mariners (and still does, thanks to France’s emergence and Muñoz’s upside).

But the Padres were going for it and knew they couldn’t get there if they didn’t address their glaring bullpen deficiencies. And Seattle got what it wanted — young, controllable players who could be part of the bright future Dipoto envisioned.

“The bigger deal, that discussion, as most do, captured a lot of names before we ultimately arrived at the deal. And I would say, Nola, France and Torrens were the only three players part of the initial discussion who were part of the final trade,” Dipoto said.

“Ultimately it led to Taylor Trammell and Andrés Muñoz being involved on our side for a couple of relievers. And as we worked through those names, Taylor Williams was one of the Padres’ pitchers of interest. Ultimately, we did the deal we did and we held on to Taylor Williams.”

But not for long. With about 30 minutes left before the trade deadline, Dipoto’s phone rang. It was Preller, again.

“What would you need from us for Taylor Williams,” Dipoto recalled of his call with Preller. “We didn’t have a whole lot of time to work with. We started pounding through our information. You’re at the stage there where even reviewing medical information in 30 minutes is going to be hard. We knew it was probably a long shot, but we started surfing through what we thought were fair matches.”

Realizing that he had to move fast, Dipoto tapped into the club’s senior director of baseball analytics Jesse Smith and director of baseball analytics Joel Firman for some help. Dipoto had run a few names by Preller, but none were “natural fits.” Firman, working remotely at the time because of the pandemic, suggested a pitcher the club knew little about but one whose data looked intriguing.

That pitcher was Matt Brash.

“It was a unique case in terms of just how little data we had on (Brash), but how strong the profile was in that small sample,” Firman said. “In a lot of cases, we’re looking at thousands of pitches that a pitcher has thrown and using all of that data to project their future performance. In this case, Brash had only thrown five innings as a professional and we only had 71 pitches of data.”

In lieu of a big sample size of data, Firman instead attempted to “quickly summarize how positive the indicators were in that small sample.” Firman jotted down some notes — remember, the Mariners were working with minutes to spare here.

“Early returns in a small sample were awesome,” Firman’s notes read. “Velocity, breaking ball action and fastball quality all looked extremely strong in the short sample that we have.”

That was enough for Dipoto.

“Based on the data we had coming back from TrackMan, it was like, ‘Hey, this guy looks really interesting.’ We had one positive report from when he was at Niagara,” Dipoto said. “We talked it out, ‘What do you think?’ It’s worth a shot.”

With just 10 minutes until the trade deadline, Dipoto phoned Preller and asked about Brash.

“A.J said, ‘hold on,'” Dipoto said. “He checked with his people and said they’d do it. We didn’t have the medicals, but we were willing to roll the dice and Taylor was pitching healthy at the time. We didn’t know a lot about where Brash was, other than he wasn’t pitching in a minor-league season for obvious reasons (pandemic).

“And honestly, it probably wasn’t much more information than the Padres probably had (on Brash).”

There was no alternate camp for Brash to attend during the pandemic because that was aimed more at players who could help the Padres at some point in 2020. That wasn’t Brash, not by a long shot. So he spent the spring and summer of 2020 at home in Kingston.

Brash spent time with some trainers in Toronto, although the bulk of his work came in his hometown. He started to put on pounds. He lifted weights. He got stronger, and his body began to fill out. When he first heard of the trade — he was officially “named later” on Sept. 17, 2020 — Brash knew it was time to ramp those workouts up.

“I needed to gain some weight to help me get to the next level,” he said. “I was working out really hard because I knew I had to get in shape … it was like, ‘I’ve got to come in and prove myself. Nothing is going to be given to me, this is a fresh team and I want to show them what I got.’”

Officially a Mariner, Brash showed up in Arizona that fall for the team’s development camp. He played catch and eventually graduated to a handful of bullpen sessions in Peoria. His stuff began to pop. The work he put in back home was paying off. His stuff felt and looked different.

Matt Brash, 96mph Fastball and 84mph Slider, Overlay. 😲 pic.twitter.com/aObgWbrLxi

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) April 12, 2022

“We can work with this,” Dipoto recalled after seeing Brash in person for the first time. “This kid is both a hard worker and he has a natural ability to spin the ball. The first time we saw him throw, it was like, ‘Holy cow. There’s some live stuff here.’”

The Mariners got Brash in front of the team’s pitching group, which included big-league bullpen coach Trent Blank, minor league pitching coordinator Max Weiner and Ari Ronick, who is now the club’s coordinator of pitching strategy and rehabilitation.

“The Mariners showed me some stuff to make my pitches better and the things I needed to do to get better,” Brash said. “It was a learning curve for me, because in college and with the Padres, I didn’t really hear any of that stuff … I just went out and did my own things and just competed.

“But when you get all that information with all your stuff, I feel like it helps you get to the next level. The Mariners were very upfront with me: These are the things you need to do to pitch at a high level … pitch shapes, getting into the right zones. It was stuff I never really knew before. While I trusted it and believed in it, it took me a while. Then I saw that this stuff really works.”

Brash took his pitching program home to Kingston after that fall camp in Arizona, and he continued to work out. And much like how he had opened eyes in the fall of 2020, Brash did so again when he arrived in Peoria in the spring of 2021. He was sitting — yes, sitting — 97-98 mph and routinely was touching 100 mph.

One afternoon that spring, Andy McKay, the Mariners director of player development, walked into Dipoto’s office in Peoria, looking like he had something important to tell his boss.

“Andy said, ‘You need to come see Matt Brash … I think we have something here that’s different than maybe we expected,’” Dipoto recalled.

Brash buzzed through the Mariners’ system a year ago, first posting a 2.55 ERA in 10 games (nine starts) in High A before the club realized he needed a bigger challenge. In 10 starts with Double-A Arkansas, he was even better — posting a 2.13 ERA, striking out over 13 batters per nine innings.

“Last year was a blast,” Brash said.

The Mariners were so impressed that they promoted Brash to the big leagues for the final week of the regular season.

Brash didn’t make it into a game, but manager Scott Servais promised him in spring that he would actually get in a game this season. Now, it might be hard to get him out of the team’s starting rotation.

In spring training, video clips of Brash’s stuff, in particular his slider, were passed around from scout to scout. There might not have been a bigger buzz in Arizona this spring with those in the industry than Brash.

“With Matt, it’s not just the slider, it’s the curveball and the fastball rise at the top (of the strike zone). Even his changeup has crazy rotation,” Dipoto said. “His physical stuff is unequivocally good.”

Funny how baseball works, right? Organizations spend all this time and allocate all these resources into scouting and analytics, and once in a while a guy like Brash pops and one team benefits from it.

“We thought we were getting a guy who threw 92-94 mph with really good spin on the breaking ball,” Dipoto said. “We ended up getting a guy who throws considerably harder than that, and it’s not just good spin on the breaking ball, it’s phenomenal spin. And you know, that was done mostly by Matt Brash.

“We’re just the ones benefitting from it.”

As for Williams, now 30, he threw one inning for the Padres in 2020. He was designated for assignment by the team last September, signed with the Marlins and again was designated that month. He currently has a 16.88 ERA pitching for Triple-A Sacramento, the Giants’ affiliate.

In all fairness to the Padres, they were the ones who identified Brash, had the guts to take him in the fourth round when other teams would not have. In many ways, this was and still is a win for the Padres’ amateur scouting group.

But as the saying goes, “you’ve got to give to get.” The Padres needed a reliever and were willing to deal away Brash at the trade deadline.

“Being traded to the Mariners is the best thing that could have happened for me, both opportunity-wise and development-wise,” Brash said.

The Mariners feel the same way, smitten by not only at how Brash has turned out, but certainly hopeful for what he could eventually become.

“If if we had any notion on the day we acquired him that we were acquiring a guy with what we think are four-plus to elite-level pitches who is going to shoot through our system in one year and show up in the big leagues … I’d be lying to you. We didn’t think that. And I’m certain that the Padres didn’t think that, either,” Dipoto said.

(Photo: Nuccio DiNuzzo / MLB Photos via Getty Images)

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PTBNL to future ace? How the Mariners acquired Matt Brash for next to nothing