Late-Night Trade! Cubs Pick Up Righty Reliever Tyson Miller in Deal with Mariners

[Matthew Trueblood]

Eight years after drafting him and three years after waiving him as an almost-spent pitching prospect who couldn't get over the hump, the Chicago Cubs are bringing back righty Tyson Miler to bolster their depleted bullpen.

Image courtesy of © Steven Bisig-USA TODAY Sports

It's a smallish move, given that Tyson Miller was designated for assignment by the Seattle Mariners just days ago, but the Cubs have scooped up an old friend with a new and very interesting trick in his bag. They'll hope to turn him into the next Yency Almonte, only with (perhaps) an even more intriguing outlier of a breaking ball. In exchange, the team gives up interesting but ultimately blocked infielder Jake Slaughter, who has been intermittently productive and powerful at the highest levels of the minors in recent seasons.

Trade news: The Chicago Cubs are acquiring right-handed reliever Tyson Miller from the Seattle Mariners for infielder Jake Slaughter, sources tell ESPN.

Miller was recently DFA’d and will join the Cubs in the big leagues. He has been good: 3.09 ERA, 12-to-1 K-to-BB in 11.2 IP.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) May 14, 2024

For Seattle, it's much-needed reinforcement for a positional corps struggling to support one of the league's best pitching staffs, even if Slaughter is only a fringe prospect at this stage of his career. For the Cubs, it's a healthy arm for a bullpen with far too many injured ones, and Miller comes with one of the truly bizarre sliders in all of baseball--a pitch that has allowed him to post strong numbers this year, but which couldn't save him from the axe with the deeper, healthier Mariners pitching staff.

You can think of Miller as a softer-tossing version of José Cuas or of Almonte, but he has better command than either, he creates just as crazy an angle for hitters as does Cuas, and his slider might be the most unusual pitch in the big leagues. It doesn't have any vertical depth--either relative to his fastball, or in absolute terms. In fact, it rises (or appears to rise) more than any other slider or sweeper in MLB, save those of submariners Adam Cimber and Tyler Rogers. Those guys' sliders go up because their fastballs go down. They throw their breaking stuff in the low- to mid-70s. Miller's is a fairly traditional slider, at over 80 miles per hour on average. It just keeps moving left, from his perspective, instead of sinking at all.

Cuas is just one example of many of the fact that the Cubs like pitchers who create difficulty for hitters because of their extreme release points. Miller is that kind of guy. He not only throws from a sidearm slot and gets way over to the third-base side of the rubber, the way Cuas does, but has exceptional release extension--over 7 feet, on average. That combination is exceedingly rare, and makes him an exceedingly uncomfortable at-bat, especially (but not exclusively) for right-handed batters.

Now, there's still value in throwing hard, and Miller really doesn't. He sits 89-92 with his four-seamer, although it does boast a very flat vertical approach angle (VAA) because of the low release point he achieves. He was fungible for Seattle for a reason, just as Cuas was for the woeful Royals last summer. Even so, Miller is more than a standard-issue DFA-and-trade guy. That's reflected in the stature of Slaughter, a more respectable depth piece than is usually exchanged when a team has given up leverage in negotiations by designating a player for assignment. The Cubs won some very small version of a bidding war here, and you can understand why.

It's nice that Miller will now get to continue his career where it began, when he was a fourth-round pick in the Cubs' thinned-out 2016 Draft class. He debuted for the team in 2020, before beginning a long tour of the fringes of big-league rosters the following June. Back then, he was throwing from a three-quarter arm slot, and he could not do this.

In fact, it's only this spring that Miller has really figured out how to make the ball swerve so evenly, without creating two-plane movement that might increase whiffs on swings but begets fewer of them. He's had a lot of success this young season, thanks to the change of breaking ball shape and stripping down his arsenal to its essentials.

Miller won't emerge as the team's relief ace. He's out of options, and could easily be on another 40-man roster before the end of the season. For now, though, he's a familiar (and yet new and tantalizing) brace for a failing structure. The Cubs needed a better version of Cuas to stabilize their middle-relief corps for at least a month or two. Miller looks up to that task, with some chance of being a half-step better than that tepid recommendation.

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[Seth Stohs]

I really like Slaughter as an under appreciated prospect. I think he's pretty solid as a utility type, but the Cubs have plenty of those and infielders who can play around the infield. Miller is at least intriguing, though we always have to temper the excitement a little bit when acquiring players who have been DFA'd.