Meet the Rays newest utility player, Yandy Diaz, who comes over from Cleveland in a three-way trade involving Jake Bauers.

In the waning hours of the 2018 Winter Meetings, the Tampa Bay Rays made another big trade, sending 1B Jake Bauers to Cleveland to for INF Yandy Diaz and a minor-league pitcher, RHP Cole Sulser, as part of a three-team deal also involving Seattle.

Long considered a top prospect for Tampa Bay, Bauers seemed to be a key part of the Rays’ core of young players. Yet his late-season struggles across August and September changed the calculus a bit.

Senior VP of Baseball Operations Chaim Bloom told Marc Topkin (Tampa Bay Times) they did not sour or give up in any way on Bauers, but felt Diaz — with the versatility to play first or third — was a better fit.

Obviously, giving up Jake in this deal is not easy to do, Bloom said. We love Jake and feel really strongly about him, too. That was just the price we needed to pay to get Yandy. We thought, all things considered, it was the right thing for us to do. It’s good for our roster going forward.

According to Bloom, the trade was about getting a player the Rays like … one who gives manager Kevin Cash additional roster flexibility.

I think it’s premature to say we know exactly where he’s going to play, Bloom said. We’ll have to see how things unfold from here. But the versatility he has does give us more options and more possible paths for our roster to go.

Diaz hits right-handed, has good contact skills and a developing power profile.

Diaz posted .797 OPS figures at both the Triple-A (426 plate appearances) and MLB (120 plate appearances) levels last season. In 299 overall big league plate appearances, Diaz slashed .283 BA/.361 OBP/.366 SLG and put up a 97 wRC+, with a  10.7% walk rate and 18.1% strikeout rate.

In addition to having huge biceps, Diaz hit the baseball hard more consistently than almost anyone, according to Statcast™.

Of 504 players over the last two seasons, Diaz ranks 19th with a 47.6% hard-hit rate, and 22nd in exit velocity at 92.1 mph. It bears mentioning, three of the top 26 players have been acquired by Tampa Bay in the last six months:

Diaz (19th), 47.6%
Tommy Pham (23rd), 46.6%
Mike Zunino (26th), 45.9%

However, Diaz hit just one home run in 265 at-bats and boasts just a .087 ISO. The question begs, why is that?

As it stands, Diaz has the eighth-lowest launch angle (4.4 degrees), resulting in the 25th-highest ground-ball rate. Bloom said the team is hopeful they can get him to elevate the ball.

We like him as is, Bloom said, but any time you get a guy who hits the ball really hard, there’s always an additional upside, to the extent they can drive the ball a little bit. Even if he doesn’t do that, we think he’s a very polished hitter.

As JT Morgan (DRaysBay) wrote, the answer might not be to drastically alter Diaz’s launch angle.

On average, Diaz was tied with Wilson Ramos in launch angle. And though they have posted very similar numbers, Ramos has a couple mph of exit velocity on balls in the air, whereas Diaz’s launch angle is just under Duffy’s 4.6.

… Diaz doesn’t need to go all out on launch angle. It’s more likely that he needs to get more line drives overall to improve his power output. He looks the part of a guy who should hit for quite a bit of power and the exit velocity readings mostly agree.

Sulser, 28, has yet to reach the big leagues, although he could factor into a deep Rays relief corps after throwing 105 innings of 3.51 ERA ball with 12.3 K/9 and 3.6 BB/9 at Triple-A over the past three seasons.

Noteworthiness

— No, thank you, Jake, it was a pleasure watching you become Rake Bauers!

— Per Topkin, Bloom said they “are still open to getting another hitter” and this isn’t the end of their offseason plans.

— I’d reckon it’s been a pretty, uhh … confusing 24 hours for the Rays front office.

— In the words of Danny Russell (DRaysBay), Charlie Frago at the Tampa Bay Times is reporting the stadium deal died in November of this year after key business leader Ron Christaldi attempted to broker a deal to finance the stadium with little transparency.

Then again…

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