Baltimore Orioles: Ranking The Likely Trade Candidates

The Baltimore Orioles are already listening to offers for Mychal Givens, but will he fetch a big return?

With The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal recently reporting that the Baltimore Orioles are fielding offers for Mychal Givens, we discussed the option briefly the other day, which you can find here. As I mentioned in the previous piece, many top contenders are seeing their bullpens repeatedly crumble and are in desperate need of some help.

Givens is 28, has multiple years of control, and is a solid set-up type arm in the bullpen. His numbers have been a bit skewed after Brandon Hyde‘s attempts to use Givens for multi-inning saves, but in one inning stints, Givens is effective.

The groundball rate is way up, the whiff rate is up, and he’s using more of his pitches more often (all very similar to Cashner). But he isn’t a dominant closer who is going to bring in the type of return a guy like Brad Hand brought in last season (Padres acquired Francisco Mejia, the top catching prospect in baseball for Hand and fellow reliever Adam Cimber).

Dan Szymborski of Fangraphs put out a piece in March discussing seven trades he would like to see. One of those trades involved sending Mychal Givens to the Boston Red Sox for Bryan Mata. Mata is considered a top 10 prospect in the Boston system and still just 20 years old. He’s repeating High-A ball after walking nearly 18% of hitters in 2018. Through five starts for the Salem Red Sox, Mata is striking out more than 23% of hitters and has slashed his walk rate to 6%.

A prospect of Mata’s profile with another lottery ticket or lower-level prospect would be a solid return for Givens. If bullpens continue to struggle across the league, maybe a team gets desperate and ponies up a bit more. I wouldn’t count it out.