The Diamondbacks have swept the Cardinals out of the All-Star break, making a murky MLB Trade Deadline picture even more uncertain. Arizona stands as the potential belle of the ball when it comes to the deadline, with multiple high impact players on expiring contracts who represent exactly the profile of player poised catalyze a buyer’s postseason run. We’ve already covered two of those marquee names in Eugenio Suárez and Zac Gallen, but the D’Back who is likeliest to move might be Merrill Kelly.
2024 Statistics: 21 starts, 122 IP, 3.32 ERA (128 ERA+), 3.47 FIP, 3.57 xFIP, 24.2% percent K%, 7.6% percent BB%, 2.3 fWAR
2024 FanGraphs Depth Charts Rest of Season Projections: 12 starts, 69 IP, 3.87 ERA, 3.85 FIP, 21.9% K%, 7.3% BB%, 0.9 fWAR
Contract Status: Signed two-year, $18 million contract with Diamondbacks prior to 2022 season. Team picked up $7 million club option for 2025.
Right now, what the Yankees need when it comes to starting pitching is a dependable innings-eater. They need a guy who can take the ball every five days while other members of the staff get healthy, but also a guy you trust starting a postseason game if the returns of their injured starters don’t go according to plan. As nice as it would be to take a flyer on an underperforming starter with an ace-caliber ceiling — say, someone like Zac Gallen — it’s far more pressing that you get a reliable presence who gives the team a chance to win every start as the team tries to stack wins and reclaim first in the division.
That is why Gallen’s teammate Kelly might be the better of the two D’Backs starters to pursue. After four seasons in Korea, Kelly returned in 2019 and established himself as one of the better under-the-radar starters in the league. Among qualified starters since his return, only 15 have started more games and pitched more innings than him. He has a pair of three-win seasons under his belt in 2022 and 2023 and has made at least 30 starts three times and is on pace to do so again this year.
He’s also on pace for the best big league season of his career in his age-36 season. He currently sports the best FIP and xFIP of his life. He places among the top-30 qualified starters in pretty much every important category including starts, innings pitched, ERA, FIP, strikeout rate, walk rate, and home runs per nine. He’s never going to dominate the league leaderboards but he gives you a chance to win every time he takes the ball. He’s given up one or fewer runs in 10 of his 21 starts while holding opponents to four or fewer earned runs in all but one, which as it happens came when he gave up nine runs in 3.2 innings to the Yankees the first week of the season.
Several projection systems predict slight regression down the back stretch of the season with a slight reduction in strikeouts and uptick in walks and home runs leading to about a half-run increase in ERA and FIP. He’s been a mild beneficiary of good luck as a .251 BABIP and 40 point gap between wOBA and expected wOBA would indicate, so there’s some merit to their projections. However, it’s encouraging to see that his velocity and movement of all the pitches in his arsenal has remained stable relative to the last four seasons so there’s no worry of a sudden age-related drop off a cliff. In fact, it’s the diversity of that six-pitch mix that allows Kelly to remain effective despite throwing his fastball in the low-90s his whole career.
Kelly is owed just over $2 million on the $7 million club option Arizona picked up at the start of the year and becomes a free agent after the season. Between him and Gallen, Kelly is the better performing of the two Arizona starters on expiring contracts, though less than three months from his 37th birthday and with a limited ceiling, there is a cap on what the D’Backs could expect in return.
All of this makes Kelly about as slam dunk a third starter as you could ask for, which happens to be one of if not the biggest of the Yankees’ needs. The big question is whether Arizona will be sellers at the deadline. Sitting just 4.5 games out of the final NL wild card and clinging to a 20-percent chance to make the playoffs, the Diamondbacks have to weigh the odds of a postseason run against the opportunity cost of cashing in their four coveted players on expiring contracts. The Yankees and the rest of the league may not know until deadline day itself.
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