Dodgers Trade Proposal Lands $2.365 Million Reliever in Major Move

The Los Angeles Dodgers are sitting at 57-39 after recently snapping their worst losing streak since 2017.

With the trade deadline right around the corner, there are a lot of potential avenues that LA can head towards, but the one facet of the defending champions that desperately needs attention is the pitching roster.

More news: Dodgers Blockbuster Trade Proposal Lands Paul Skenes for Godfather Offer

The injury news and mishaps from Dodgers pitchers has sounded like a broken record this season, but a way to address this ahead of the second half of 2025 would be to create more depth by way of a trade.

Bleacher Report's Tim Kelly theorized a trade idea that would get a high-octane reliever into the bullpen, and is currently the best in baseball regarding opposing batters chasing his offerings outside the strike zone (among pitchers with at least 150 batters faced).

The would-be deal is for Minnesota Twins reliever Griffin Jax. His 4.02 ERA is quite high, but advanced analytics say that across his 43 appearances, he is much more of a threat.

More news: Dodgers' Clayton Kershaw Gets Honest About Impending Retirement

The league-leading chase-percentage of batters swinging outside the zone 41.6 percent of the time is one thing, but Jax is in the 99th percentile in both swing-and-miss percentage (40.5 percent) and strikeout percentage (38 percent).

Additionally, his fielding independent pitching (FIP) grading of 1.89 shows that his ERA doesn't tell the full story of Jax, given that an average FIP is around 4.20.

FIP takes into account outcomes that are solely pitcher-dependent, like strikeouts, walks, hit by pitches, and home runs allowed. The differences in FIP and ERA can mean that there are many times where Minnesota's defense (that is tied for the eighth-lowest fielding percentage in MLB) let him down, the sequencing of events, and sometimes, it can simply correlate to bad luck.

Kelly's prediction for Jax and his two remaining arbitration years on his contract is that the Dodgers would float No. 3 prospect Alex Freeland (No. 42 overall) and/or southpaw pitching prospect Jackson Ferris, the Dodgers' No. 4 prospect and MiLB's No. 69th-ranked prospect.

More news: Dodgers' Freddie Freeman Reveals 2024 Moment That Still Makes Him Go Numb

For more Dodgers news, visit Dodgers on SI.