Teams Must Learn to Never Trade With the Rays
The Tampa Bay Rays have consistently found a way to come out on top in trades they've made over the past decade. Teams need to learn to run far away when the Rays ask for any of their players in trade talks.
A running joke around Major League Baseball is that if the Tampa Bay Rays approach you about the availability of any of your players in trade talks, you need to hang up the phone immediately. As the trades continue to roll in and the fleeces pile up, it’s getting real easy to see how this gag came to be.
Armed with one of the very best player development units in the league, the Rays have repeatedly turned big league assets into multi-player packages of future stars in the making.
Just see this past year’s trade deadline as a prime example.
The Rays traded away Jason Adam, Aaron Civale, Randy Arozarena, Isaac Paredes, Phil Maton, and Zach Eflin and turned this group into 14 prospects and a pair of players to be named later. The vast majority of the prospects they acquired promptly found their way onto the organization’s top 30 list per MLB Pipeline (stay tuned for Just Baseball’s top Rays prospects piece coming later this week).
Rays 2025 Roster: How It Was Made
Using FanGraphs’ RosterResource to look at the current Rays roster, here’s a look at how each of the players on the 40-man were acquired:
- 40-man status: FULL
- Homegrown: 7
- Free agent signings: 4
- Amateur free agency: 2
- Trade acquisitions: 23
- Waivers: 4
When put this way, the results are pretty jarring. Going even further, the projected 26-man roster features 15 players that were brought aboard via trade, including the entire bench.
So we know that the Rays are forever going to be a team that trades, trades, trades. What we haven’t touched on is how they fare in said moves. Buckle up, folks, because there’s a lot to sift through here, with the vast majority of it proving that opposing teams would be better off hanging up the phone and holding on to the players Tampa Bay covets.
Rays Recent Trade History: Position Players
Dating back to 2015, the Rays have had 19 position players come up to the plate 1,000 or more times for them. Of that bunch, Taylor Walls, Yandy Diaz, Brandon Lowe, Josh Lowe, and Wander Franco are still employed by the team. Of the remaining 14, only Kevin Kiermaier (free agent) and Harold Ramirez (released) weren’t traded away.
What’s wild about this is the fact that the Rays are always able to turn good players into difference-makers down the line. Here’s a look at some of the more notable deals revolving around the 12 players with 1,000 or more PA in the last 10 years.
- Brad Miller was traded to the Brewers for Ji-man Choi (both are on our list), who became a productive regular for the Rays across a five-year stint in Tampa Bay.
- Manuel Margot was traded to the Dodgers (with Tyler Glasnow) in a deal that netted the Rays Ryan Pepiot and Jonny DeLuca, both of whom are expected to be key contributors on the 2025 club.
- Willy Adames was traded to the Brewers (with Trevor Richards) in exchange for Drew Rasmussen and J.P. Feyereisen. The former remains a vital piece in the Rays’ starting rotation while the latter dominated out of their bullpen for a two-year stretch and just recently signed a minors deal with the Arizona Diamondbacks.
- In another move that involves two players from our list, Austin Meadows was moved to the Tigers for Isaac Paredes. Paredes, of course, was traded to the Cubs this past season for a major haul that includes Christopher Morel and Hunter Bigge, who are both on the Rays’ 40-man roster. Ty Johnson was the third piece involved and is currently the club’s No. 21 prospect per MLB Pipeline.
- Moving Randy Arozarena to the Mariners netted the Rays outfielder Aidan Smith (No. 6) and Brody Hopkins (No. 8), who are both far off from the big leagues but highly-touted prospects.
This shows that the Rays are amongst the best in the business at turning players who are either about to become too expensive or about to hit free agency into useful, young talent.
We see how they’ve done trading away players, but their current roster is full of position players who the club looks like geniuses for acquiring. Look no further than two of their top-three hitters in the projected 2025 lineup: Yandy Diaz and Junior Caminero. Coincidentally, both players were acquired from Cleveland (Diaz, 2018; Caminero, 2021).
Of all the teams out there who need to avoid the Rays in trade talks, it feels like the Guardians are near or at the top of the list.
Diaz has been a central figure of the Rays’ lineup ever since he came aboard ahead of the 2019 season. He won the AL batting title in 2023 while putting up 5.0 fWAR and earning a sixth-place finish in the MVP voting.
Then there’s Caminero, who’s got more potential than nearly any other young hitter in the game. We’ve only seen 50 games of him at the big-league level, but that .307 average and .921 OPS through his minor league career tells a pretty clear story of what we can expect from him in the very near future.
Rays Recent Trade History: Pitchers
In a similar exercise to the one we did with hitters, let’s turn our attention towards the most oft-used pitchers on the Rays over the past 10 years. Only 13 pitchers have thrown 250 or more innings for the Rays (which feels like a very low number), with two of them currently occupying roster spots on the team.
That leaves us with 11 more arms. Of that group, only a few of them were actually traded away, but each of them were moved in deals that are amongst the very biggest in Rays franchise history.
Here’s the list of the most notable pitchers who fit our criteria that were traded away:
- Chris Archer
- Blake Snell
- Tyler Glasnow
- Zach Eflin
These are all examples of pitchers the Rays knew they were not going to be able to afford, so they traded them before either A.) having to pay them too much or B.) they left via unrestricted free agency.
Glasnow and Archer both have the unique distinction of being involved in two of the most franchise-altering trades in the Rays’ franchise history.
Of course, Archer’s trade is the one with the most notoriety. He was moved to the Pirates in exchange for Glasnow, Meadows and Shane Baz (who was the PTBNL). Glasnow was eventually involved in the TBR-LAD deal we touched on before, alongside Margot.
Eflin was also moved at this past year’s deadline, netting the Rays three prospects from the division rival Orioles. None of them have surfaced in the big leagues yet, but Jackson Baumeister (No. 14) and Matthew Etzel (No. 27) both remain on the organization’s top prospects list per MLB Pipeline.
Snell’s trade to the Padres is one of the few that didn’t work out for the Rays. They acquired Luis Patino, Blake Hunt, Cole Wilcox, and Francisco Mejia from San Diego, with none of them becoming long-term pieces. Meanwhile, Snell went on to win the second Cy Young Award of his career.
So many of the biggest trades the Rays have made involving pitchers have wound up working out in their favor. Looking at the 2025 roster, half of the six-man starting rotation was brought aboard via trade while three of the team’s top relief weapons, including closer Pete Fairbanks, are former trade acquisitions as well.
Don’t forget about the most recent move, the one where the Rays sent Jeffrey Springs to the A’s for a haul, either. This past offseason, the Rays turned Springs and reliever Jacob Lopez into Joe Boyle, Will Simpson, Jacob Watters, and a draft pick. Boyle will fight for a spot on the club’s Opening Day roster while Simpson cracked MLB’s top 30 in the final spot.
Proving the Lesser Moves Are Just as Important
For those that made it this far, thank you for sifting through the wall of names and transactions. The overarching point here is that if the Rays are ever eyeing a player your team feels isn’t worth much in a trade, it’s best to run the other direction.
So frequently have the Rays gone for cheap, unproven players with upside that only they seem to have an eye for. Not only are they constantly making these moves, but they’re also coming out on top in nearly every deal they make.
Diaz, Caminero, Morel, DeLuca, Pepiot, Baz, and Rasmussen were all acquired in high-profile trades that took up the front page of national headlines everywhere. But what about some of the lesser-known names?
Fairbanks was acquired in 2019 for fallen prospect Nick Solak. The move hardly moved the needle much for anybody at the time, but the former has been Tampa Bay’s primary closer for the past few years and the latter hasn’t cracked the big leagues in two years.
Garrett Cleavinger, who has a 3.38 ERA, 3.65 FIP, 118 ERA+, and nearly 11 K/9 through three years on the Rays, was acquired from the Dodgers in exchange for German Tapia, who’s still only 21 years old but was released after an abysmal showing in the Dodgers’ system.
Then there’s Manuel Rodriguez, whom the Rays acquired from the Cubs (alongside Adrian Sampson) for Josh Roberson, who’s closing in on his 29th birthday and has yet to make his big league debut.
The point here is that the Rays have excelled in trades of both large and small scales. Most of the high-profile deals have ended up working out in their favor, but they’ve also done an outstanding job at making some of the smaller lesser-known trades into ones that carry their team the most.
Don’t sleep on Eric Orze, who the Rays acquired from the New York Mets for Jose Siri earlier this offseason, either. The 27-year-old is a two-time cancer survivor and has looked tough as nails for the Rays through five spring outings. He’s punched out nine batters while walking two and allowing just one run on a pair of hits through his first five innings. He’s not on the club’s 40-man roster, but he’s put his name on the map as yet another trade acquisition that looks promising.
What’s the Secret Sauce?
Obviously, things aren’t quite as simple here as “the Rays are good at trading, never deal with them.” The reason things work out so well for them is that their player development staff is second to none in baseball.
Being able to identify talent that other teams can’t is something the Rays have excelled at for years. Low budget? Yes. Small market? You better believe it. Yet, the Rays find a way to do a lot with a little.
Don’t forget that in 2023, 3/5 of the Rays’ rotation was out of commission after undergoing long-term surgeries and the staff, basically completely composed of fill-ins, still finished in the top-five in ERA that season.
So much of this has to do with Kyle Snyder, who’s the club’s big-league pitching coach. He took on this role in 2018 and the Rays have finished 6th (2018), 3rd (2019), 3rd again (2020), 4th (2021), 4th again (2022), 6th (2023), and 9th (2024) in staff ERA since then. Year in and year out, the pitching staff is utterly ridiculous on this Rays club.
The Rays also have done an overall great job of finding players without solid roles in other organizations and putting them in the proper positions to succeed. Whether it’s perfectly executed platoon roles, newfound versatility (from both hitters and pitchers), or tinkering with a pitcher’s mechanics, there’s an ever-growing list of radical changes they decide to make that work out exactly as intended.
Isaac Paredes topped out at 15 home runs (2018 as a 19-year-old) in the Tigers system and had a more contact-oriented profile before coming over to the Rays. Yandy Diaz and Randy Arozarena were both the victims of roster crunches on their own respective teams. Zack Littell became an out-of-nowhere starting-pitching phenom after previously being a “just okay” reliever. Richie Palacios and Pete Fairbanks were acquired for next to nothing from their original clubs.
The list goes on and on (and on and on). It seems that every trade the Rays make is well thought out and designed to perfectly fill a need they have. Being a small-market team puts so much additional pressure on the front office to make every. single. trade. work out in their favor, but they manage to pull it off just about 9 out of every 10 times.
Tip of the Cap to the Teams Who Out-Ray the Rays
You can make any team sound impressive by only touching on the times they were victorious over the years. To be clear, the Rays are one of the best teams at uncovering diamonds in the rough, but that doesn’t mean they’re perfect when it comes to wheeling and dealing in the trade department.
Over the years, there are a few deals that come to mind – even if they’re few and far between – that the Rays did not get to toss into the “win” column.
The Snell deal is easily the biggest example of this, as he went on to win his second Cy Young Award on the Padres while the Rays got a package that saw two players make the big leagues for them: Mejia, who posted 2.3 bWAR across three seasons, and Patino, who was at -0.6 across three seasons. Hunt is out of the system while Wilcox still hasn’t advanced past Triple-A.
Another one that’s still playing out is the deal where the Rays sent Cristopher Sanchez to the Phillies in exchange for Curtis Mead. Sanchez made the All-Star Game last year and has a 3.36 ERA and 123 ERA+ across 49 starts in the last two seasons. He’s a clear example of one the Rays got wrong.
Meanwhile, Mead has yet to capitalize on the prospect hype he’s had on his gradual ascent up the Rays’ minor league ladder. The fact that he’s 19-for-33 (.576) with a 1.338 OPS (!!) in 12 spring games this year may suggest the best is yet to come for him, but the loss of Sanchez isn’t an easy one to swallow.
Somehow, someway, the Padres find themselves here twice. Not only did they fleece the Rays in the Snell trade (in basically every sense of the word), but they also did so back in 2019 when they landed Tommy Pham and Jake Cronenworth from Tampa Bay in exchange for Xavier Edwards (who’s currently on his way to stardom with the Marlins), Hunter Renfroe and Esteban Quiroz.
None of the players the Rays got amounted to anything while on the Rays. Cronenworth on the other hand has a pair of All-Star Game appearances under his belt and 13.3 total bWAR since breaking into the league in 2020. It’s impressive enough that the Padres pulled this off once, but twice?! No way.
Closing Thoughts
Over the years, the Tampa Bay Rays have found a way to come out on top of trades they make like their life has depended on it. Sure, they’re not always perfect (nothing ever is), but the organization and its decision-makers deserve a tip of the cap for consistently finding ways to do a lot with what can at times appear to be a little on the surface.
Some of the very best players on the 2025 roster were at one point trade acquisitions. When you look at what it cost the Rays to land multiple star-caliber players on their current team, it makes the fleece jobs they’ve been able to pull off all the more impressive.
Written by
Eric Treuden (troy-din) has covered baseball for years for multiple different outlets including FanSided, Yardbarker, and Wisconsin Sports Heroics. He recently was the editor for Jays…