11:46: The Yankees only cover $ 850K of Ottavino’s salary, tweets ESPN’s Buster Olney.
11:30: Fine sand tweets that the Red Sox ‘apparently’ take in Ottavino’s $ 8MM salary and a deferred bonus of $ 3MM to be paid out in 2022. In doing so, they will create a new prospect for storing purchases and exploit a potential. bounceback reliever (which could be a deadline for candidates if the Sox are out of division hunting). The Yankees will drop Ottavino’s $ 9MM luxury tax hit.
11:25 am: Right-handed Frank Duits – the Yankees’ fourth round from the draft 2018 – is on its way to the Red Sox in the agreement, Sherman tweets.
11:16: The Yankees traded legal trades Adam Ottavino to the Red Sox, reports Lindsey Adler of The Athletic (via Twitter). Joel Sherman of the New York Post add that the Yankees are sending Ottavino and a prospect to Boston. The Red Sox take most of Ottavino’s $ 8MM salary per Sherman, which will help the Yankees distance themselves from the $ 210MM luxury tax cut – a threshold they were almost at before agreeing to this exchange.
After acquisition Jameson Taillon of the Pirates and agrees to DJ LeMahieu and Corey Kluber, the Yankees found themselves with about one million dollars separating them from the tax threshold, according to Jason Martinez of Roster Resource. Shaking off most of Ottavino’s remaining salary will give the Yankees a significant breathing space if they want to round out their off-season deals. The Yankees were recently interviewed Brett Gardner‘s camp over a reunion, and the club may still be looking for affordable rotation depth, even after Kluber and Taillon were added. Both are expected to arrive in 2020 seasons, and the rest of the team’s rotation comes with similar concerns about the workload.
The trade between the two teams is the first in seven years and as Mark Feinsand of MLB.com point out, only the second trade that Brian Cashman, GM of Yankees, ever made with the best competitor of his organization.
While finances are the clear driving force in this trade, it is unlikely the Yankees would have made the move if Ottavino had not struggled through a dismal performance in the shortened season of last year. The 35-year-old appeared in 24 games but scored only 18 1/3 overs of the job, yielding a dozen runs on 20 shots and nine runs with 25 hits in that time. Ottavino’s 5.89 ERA was his highest since making his debut as a rookie at the Cardinals in 2010, although field-independent criteria were more positive about his work (3.52 FIP, 3.62 SIERA).
Control has never been a strong point for Ottavino, but he dropped his running rate from 13.8 percent in 2017-19 to 10.6 percent last year. It’s easy to name his ERA because of a sky-high .375 average on ball in play, but Ottavino’s fight appears to be more than a function of simple misfortune. Despite his improved control, the right-hander’s pass rate dropped slightly (31.5 percent to 29.4 percent), and Ottavino had a career-high rate (90.6 mph average pull-out speed; 50 percent hard hit rate).
More to come.